Sunday 16 August 2009

Norway: Socialist Anette Trettebergstuen and the non-existent “Israeli newspaper”

"The post questions how Trettebergstuen, a secular, female homosexual, can single out for criticism the one state in the Middle East which is the most tolerant of secular, female homosexuals like herself."

Source: Norway, Israel and the Jews

Imagine that an Israeli politician reads an Israeli blog and gets the impression that she is being persecuted by a Norwegian newspaper. Imagine that the Israeli politician proceeds to alert Israel of this erroneous conclusion through social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Now picture how Norwegians, watching all of this, would react. Would they not be amused? Would they not perhaps suggest that the Israeli politician was being just a tad paranoid about the "persecuted by Norwegians" thing, and would not such a suggestion be legitimate? Oh yes. Yet it is exactly this which has happened, except the other way around.

Yesterday Labor parlamentarian Annette Trettebergstuen read this post [Secular, gay politician boycotts Jerusalem gay pride], here on NIJ. The post questions how Trettebergstuen, a secular, female homosexual, can single out for criticism the one state in the Middle East which is the most tolerant of secular, female homosexuals like herself. Unfortunately Trettebergstuen’s interpretation of the post led her to conclude that some "Israeli newspaper" was slamming her for her sexual preferences. Subsequently the politician proceeded to post her thoughts on the matter on Twitter, whereupon this site immediately published a post alerting to the facts of the matter. By then, in a flurry of social networking, Trettebergstuen had already moved on to Facebook where she repeated her mistaken suspicion of being targeted by "an Israeli newspaper".

Below we see how Trettebergstuen and someone claiming to be Mads Larsen, author of the novel "Pornopung" (Shaved male genitalia) joke about the imagined "Israeli newspaper".


If this site inadvertently led Trettebergstuen to believe that she was being written about by a Israeli newspaper – our sincere apologies. If however Trettebergstuen just jumped at the opportunity of accusing Israel of something nasty, or just was not concentrating very well while she read – then the apology is for her to make. We do need to maintain certain standards here. After all, Trettebergstuen is a member of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committe (see textbox beneath photograph).

Related:
"Norwegian journalists keep close tabs on Norwegian politicians. From time to time Norwegian journalists also visit this site. Yet no newspaper has picked up on Annette Trettebergstuen’s made-up story about the "Israeli newspaper". Hopefully, one will do so tomorrow.
The reason this story is important is that it serves as an illustration of how easy it is to make erroneous allegations against Israel. Bad news about Israel is believable because Israel itself is bad. And how do we know that Israel is bad? Well, because we read bad news about Israel all the time. And why do we read so much bad news about Israel? Well obviously, it’s because Israel is just so dreadfully bad. And how do we know that Israel is so bad?"
"This site has no problems with homosexuality. To the contrary, this site applauds homosexuality. Regions with a high proportion of gays prosper. Regions with low tolerance levels of homosexuality tend to fail. Besides, no homosexual ever threw a molotov cocktail at us. This site has a problem with those segments of society which attribute the origin of all their troubles to someone else, in this case Israel, just because it is convenient and the zeitgeist allows for it. A society at perfect health just does not behave like this.
Annette, we are not slamming your sexuality. We are bemoaning the state of the Norwegian Middle East debate and how people are conditioned to react. And we are not an Israeli newspaper, we’re a Norwegian blog."

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