Norway: Progress party want curfew for kids in Oslo central

[mogster]

The picture shows youth herded together in a garage after a demo in Oslo saturday. It went violent, much due to police hard methods. The kids had to stay in the garage for several hours, was subjected to sexist jokes from the police and was not allowed to go to the bathroom, so they had to relieve themselves on the garage floor.


Today the rightwing Progress party, who rules Oslo with an iron fist together with the conservatives, suggests a prohibiton against kids in Oslo central.

Spokesman Jan Arild Ellingsen from the Progress party says minor kids should be curfewed from Oslo central.

This demo and the reaction has so many layers. Norway had two doctors in Gaza, Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who did a heroic job in the makeshift operation theatres in Gaza. They also are very Red, if you know what I mean ;-) The neoconservative Norwegian press does not like their reporting from Gaza, so their political views has been used against them, stripping them of much credibility as first hand witnesses. Reporting from Gaza and the conflict has been relatively fair if you count the stories posted, but pictorial wise it has not. Most frontpages has been dominated by pictures of Hamas people with weapons in hand, rockets and so on. Kids and civilians in distress has been held back from the front pages and will only appear if you choose to read an article.

So, what happened amounts to this:

1. War breaks out, media is seemingly on the side of the civilians in the conflict (and not only from Gaza, also from Israel).
2. Fosse/Gilbert starts their reporting from palestinian hospitals
3. Reporting peaks, with enormous graphical expression of Hamas-pictures
4. Demos are arranged in Oslo and several other cities, they go down relatively peacefully
5. Progress party leader Siv Jensen, who unilaterally supports Israel, recieves almost all press attention Friday and Saturday when she says she will speak for Israel. I counted more than 60 articles in little more than 30 hrs on how she SUPPORTED ISRAEL to be as BRUTAL as possible
6. Her demo is met with a counter demo which turns violent. Oslo now looks just like Gaza in point 3, media wise. Police cracks down on the counter-demo, hard.
7. A new demo is arranged by pro-palestinian groups and the Norw. Palestine committee
8. It goes down peacefully and many thousands are participating in a march. In parallell, a new violent demo occurs which of course takes all the attention from the peaceful one
9. That demo had a lot of kids marching at the front to make it peaceful - which the media frames as 'using their kids as human shields', of course with help from the police, which grabbed the kids before they could be hurt by new year rockets fired into the marching kid crowd, from masked men in civilian attire
10. That demo develops into a regular street battle, where shop windows are broken, especially targeting McDonalds, supposedly after a rumour has arisen from an SMS message - originating in Sweden - that McDonalds would donate all their money from Saturday sales to 'defend Israel'
11. People shouting 'find and kill all Jews' were reportedly marching at the front of the demo, also beating up people randomly
12. Day after, underage kids (13 to 15) are interviewed, saying they don't hate Jews and did not know who the people up front was
13. Day after that again (today), it is revealed that the same underage kids had to spend several hours herded together in a garage at the Oslo police station
14. And now the Progress party spokesman, known to be not very immigration friendly, has made it known that curfew might be enforced. For kids, that is

Is it the battle for the hearts and minds of the Norwegians we see?
Why aren't the newspapers more interested in finding the leaders of the demo? After all, shouting 'find and kill all Jews' is a very controversial statement in Norway, yet once the words were said and reported, the media had no more interest in the people uttering them. The police might, I hope, but I don't have any high hopes. The neoconzie internet pundits scoffed at me when suggesting that this is intolerable, and that crowd defend Israel no matter what on every other topic. Why are they not--and let's leave the propaganda part out of it--not interested in finding those people out of pure decency? It should be safe to live in Norway, whether you are Jewish or Muslim, or anybody else for that matter. Did they get away or what? Contemporary history, as recorded in media, will tell you nothing.
The Progress party instead focuses on the kids, and want to deny them the right to participate in demos (this is echoed by the Oslo police) by enforcing curfew.
I have developed a hard skin to broken shop windows and destroyed property. Make a better society and kids will behave better, that's my stand point. So call it an investment in your own skin protection if you call for police restraint in dealing with crowds. If you don't want Oslo to look like Gaza, of course. But it is altogether a different matter when you start to beat up civilians and threaten minorities, and the kids are being led by somebody adult, wearing masks.

One can only hope that protestors will focus on being civil and keep a lot of material for filming avalable, so they can have their own takes on what happened. And also to try to find out who does the provocation by filming the action from a distance, as all cameras carried by demonstrators are confiscated by police as evidence.
What happened to peace, folks? Peace, Obama and winning? Here we were (in Norway, at least, where the anti-gay pastors are as distant as is the inquisition), having fun, Obama had won and despite the financial crisis the future looked definitely brighter. Then boom goes Gaza, and we're back in 2006.

It all smells of dirty, dirty politics.

Oh, media bias:
Bush, from today:


Obama, from an unrelated story about Google:


Am I hypersensitive here, or does the outgoing preznit with the track record he has, get a little more positive tilt than Obama, although that burger looked tasty? :P

That picture makes me hungry. For burger and change.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. I don't know how many American cites have a curfew, but Austin, Texas does

It's a liberal city (the capital) in the middle of Republican Texas.

10:43 AM CDT on Thursday, June 19, 2008

KVUE News

The Austin City Council Wednesday unanimously approved a citywide curfew for kids, in effect from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The restrictions apply to children 17 and younger, not accompanied by an adult -- changes the police department hopes will prevent juvenile crime.

"The most important thing is this, especially with kids running around at night. We want to keep kids safe, and in school, because they are our future," said Art Acevedo, Austin police chief.

Curfews had previously existed, but with various restrictions throughout the city.

http://www.kvue.com/news/local/stories/061908kvuecurfew-cb.1b257b68.html