It is hard to know what Sylvi Listhaug’s long-standing political adviser Hårek Hansen was thinking of when he set about vulgar, drunken mumbling of stupidities about Pakistanis in front of a pack of journalists at a bar in Oslo just before the Progress Party’s national conference.

Perhaps the alcohol intake had been so great that he had no appreciable inhibitions left, but should a person of his rank not be a little more careful about what he does? Someone who is in the inner circle of someone who is so close to the pinnacle of power must know that it is teeming with people who dream of pushing one over the Tarpeian Rock.

Harry Truman is said once to have said that “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”. That maxim probably also fits quite well for most of the power elite in Oslo, including journalists in the largest media.

The difference between the present and the Tostrupkjelleren’s heyday is that the code of honour which consisted in not using statements made when plastered and in confidence is gone. One must, as it were, take into account that everyone one encounters is a hyena.

Perhaps Hansen had exposed a little too much of himself. As part of “Facebook-Høgre”, he has seldom hesitated to come out hard, often with pointed formulations. And on his own wall he has also never concealed that he likes a drink. If someone had been so infamous as to analyse the cast of characters in the Progress Party elite in search of weak points to exploit, the road would have been short to Hansen. Not a scalp on the level of Per Sandberg, Per Willy Amundsen or Bård Hoksrud, but in necessity even the Progress Party’s enemies eat flies.

The person who reads Hansen in the best possible meaning may, however, agree that the Pakistani diaspora in Norway has not been a blessing for the country.

It is difficult to see it in any other way than that they tricked their way into the country. The taxi fraud that was exposed in Oslo a quarter of a century ago bore witness to a culture of corruption that was almost endemic among Pakistanis in the capital. Pakistanis in Oslo have otherwise had a culture of marriage migration and marriage within their own group which indicates that earlier and later generations have to a large extent colonised a little piece of Norway together.

And Pakistanis are high on the list of groups that receive relatively much more in benefits than they pay in taxes, which means that the larger the Pakistani diaspora is, the greater the net burden on Norwegian public finances. It is, of course, beyond all bounds stupid that Hansen uses a word such as “minus variants”, but it is a much greater problem that no members of the Storting in Norway dare to speak about facts such as those I mention here.

– Western Europe is going to hell, Hansen said that unfortunate evening. And it had to do with immigration. But Donald Trump has said exactly the same: – Your countries are going to hell. Many Western Europeans, including Norwegians, also see this. It would have been liberating if the Progress Party could have acquired some balls and a little backbone to see Europe’s decline for what it is.

Instead, one keeps unpleasant truths bottled up until they come out accompanied by curses and bile after a handful of units of alcohol or two.

While the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and several other Western European countries have gained politicians and parties that dare to grapple with the most difficult issues, Norway lags far behind.

This cowardice is going to cost Norwegians their freedom. And it is the same cowardice that means immigrants from the Islamic belt are not rolled in tar and feathers when they say or do something scandalous.

Let us imagine that a Norwegian had said that 22 July 2011 was the most beautiful thing that had happened in Norway in this century. We may safely assume that this would be tantamount to the civil death of the person concerned?

Enter professor at NTNU Bassam Hussein from Gaza.

Bassam Hussein. Still image from video: Sosialistisk Forum Trondheim / YouTube.

According to Hussein, 7 October 2023 is the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century. Have any major media or public figures given him a severe dressing-down? No, indeed. It is, namely, the case that Norwegian public life has submitted to Islam and made Muslims in public life almost untouchable.

There is no doubt that Hussein ought to have been deported back to Gaza, but today he is presumably a Norwegian citizen and cannot be expelled. And the wimps in PST have already apologised to Hussein once before.

So if your name is Hussein, you are a professor and you praise terror against Jews while stone-cold sober giving a public lecture that is filmed and distributed online, then you are a respectable citizen, and you have ironclad guarantees that no one touches you – least of all the wimps who are your colleagues at NTNU.

But if your name is Hansen, you are a political adviser in the Progress Party, and you drunkenly mumble something stupid about Pakistanis, you are cast out into the cold. Thus in Norwegian public life Norwegians are second-class citizens, while immigrants from Muslim countries are the new nobility. Slightly below them we have representatives of the far Left, who have already submitted and are therefore not treated as mercilessly as conservatives.

Aslam Ahsan is no fool. He understands that the moment must be exploited, so he has therefore reported Hansen for hate speech. But he is a little too overconfident when he highlights Pakistanis as a “well-integrated group”.

So well integrated are they that more than 80 per cent of those who marry do so with a person of the same country background. We need not go into detail about how many of the women work, or how over-represented the young men are in the crime statistics.

Vebjørn Selbekk and Aslam Ahsan after a programme on TV 2 in 2006. Photo: Lise Åserud / NTB.

Ahsan himself otherwise has a poor understanding of the culture of free expression in Norway. When Vebjørn Selbekk got into severe trouble after publishing facsimiles of Jyllands-Posten’s caricatures of Muhammad in his capacity as editor of Magazinet, Ahsan believed that he had asked for what came. Selbekk was threatened with death, and his family had to go into hiding.

Fast-forward twenty years, and we have an Islamist at the former Menighetsfakultetet making a refined attempt to write the Koran into the West’s literary heritage. Whoever does not see the writing on the wall now is blind.

But it is this development that the Norwegian power elite not only welcomes, but actively facilitates. And there is little doubt that it will, to the best of its ability, use the Hansen case to weaken, castrate and render harmless the Progress Party. This is the best opportunity for a long time, not as good as the charge against Listhaug after the post on social media which stated that the Labour Party believes terrorists’ legal security is more important than the security of the realm, but still.

It will therefore be a difficult balancing act for the Progress Party now. If they prostrate themselves too much in order to be able to sit in government with the socialist right-wing party, some of the voters will think that they are as useless as all the others.