It is striking to observe how Norwegian media and politicians have managed to turn Donald Trump into the universal scapegoat for everything that is wrong on this planet.
Regardless of whether it concerns adverse weather, economic fluctuations or war in distant regions, the Norwegian journalistic establishment sits ready with its finger pointed at Washington. It has gone so far that one has entirely lost the ability to see the real dark forces that are ravaging the world.
While column metres upon column metres are written about Trump’s latest outbursts on social media, the Iranian clerical regime (presteveldet) in Tehran is allowed to continue its deadly activities almost entirely without opposition from Western moralists. We constantly hear the hollow argument that “Iran has never started a war”, as though that should serve as some form of exoneration for having spent the past forty years financing and arming terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. Neither Hamas, Hizbollah nor the Houthis in Yemen would have been able to spread so much death and devastation without the enormous flows of money and weapons supplied by the mullahs.
This is proxy warfare in its most cynical form, yet in Oslo one prefers to avert one’s gaze so long as one can simultaneously spend one’s time criticising an American president.
It is a disgrace that those who shout the loudest about human rights at home are the very same who are most silent when it comes to the suffering of the Iranian people. We are speaking of a regime that executes its own citizens with alarming frequency, and that holds women in a medieval iron grip. Nevertheless, we see Norwegian politicians almost queuing up to defend nuclear agreements and to maintain dialogue with a government that despises everything Western democracy stands for.
They have grown weary of Trump’s direct language, yet appear to have no difficulty ignoring the sound of gallows creaking in Tehran.
This obsession with Trump has become a soporific for a unified Norwegian media chorus that has ceased to practise genuine journalism. It is far easier to join the international chorus of outrage than actually to shed light on the existential threat posed by a potentially nuclear-armed Iran. We see that ideology overrides facts when Norwegian editorial offices are to decide what is dangerous. Norwegian media ought truly to be ashamed of their own cowardice, for by placing all blame on Trump, they in practice function as useful idiots for the world’s worst investor in terrorism.
When shall we see a Norwegian politician who dares to state plainly that the threat from Iran must be removed, not only for our own security, but for the millions of Iranians who thirst for freedom? So long as one is more concerned with hating Trump than with combating evil, one has in reality abdicated as a moral compass.
Reality, after all, does not care what Dagbladet or VG think about American politics, but it will sooner or later demand an answer as to why we allowed the mullahs free rein while we argued about trivialities.