You don't need a journalism degree to know that "Dog Bites Man" is not news. "Man Bites Dog" – now that's news!
What we have here may be a huge, disappointing, empty nothing. On the other hand, it's possible we have one of the happiest "Man Bites Dog" stories in recent history.
There's a little white synagogue in a pleasant residential district of Oslo, Norway's capital. I happen to know that synagogue quite well. Whenever I'm in Norway on the Sabbath I like to attend services there. The last time I was there, maybe five years ago, there was something new: security! As in other European countries, there's a large, growing and active Muslim population in all three Scandinavian countries, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The security at this little synagogue was deep, thick, layered and professional. It was disturbing to think that, after surviving World War II and the Nazi occupation of Norway, the Jews had to worry about being attacked at prayer.
A pleasant shock engulfed me when the news told of young Muslims organizing a "ring of peace" to offer symbolic protection for the Jewish worshipers in Oslo. After the murder of four Jews in a kosher market in Paris and two Jews shot dead in Norway's neighbor, Denmark, and with Jew-hatred mushrooming and steamrolling into Jew-killing, all of a sudden here comes a young Muslim leader, Hajrah Arshad, talking about love for the Jews and protection for them and saying such preposterously encouraging things as, "We have many more peace-mongers than warmongers."
It gets better. The rabbi marched to the front of his synagogue at the end of his Sabbath service to welcome and salute the Muslims who gathered there to exemplify and emphasize the very opposite of what's been going on. Michael Melchior, rabbi of that little synagogue in Norway (and also the chief rabbi of Norway) is the grandson of the Danish Rabbi Marcus Melchior, who took to his pulpit in Nazi-occupied Denmark on the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, in 1943, and told his congregation they had intel from a "good Nazi" that all the Jews of Denmark were going to be rounded up and shipped to German concentration camps that very night. He instructed his congregation to go home immediately and get ready for "soldiers" in the anti-Nazi Danish Resistance to take every Jew they could manage to alert to a staging area on the Danish coast, where courageous Danish fisherman – non-Jewish – were standing by to spirit the Jews of Denmark across the narrow waterway to neutral Sweden and safety. The score that fateful night was Gestapo and death camps: 600; Sweden and safety: 6,000!
It gets still better. Rabbi Michael Melchior sang the end-of-Sabbath song to the assembled Muslims in front of the synagogue. The Muslims admiringly said they'd never heard that song before. Good feeling was skyrocketing off the walls, headed for the heavens! When Jews hungry for good news hear a little, it's a threat to our equilibrium and common sense. We have here an interesting cauldron of who-knows-what. It costs nothing for young Muslims to form a "ring of peace" in front of a Norwegian synagogue in order to score 6 million Google hits and achieve a cheap PR victory for Islam. A huge majority of readers, far more cynical than I am, will want me dis-fellowshiped without a very long trial. Excitement caused by "rings of peace" is dangerous to serious dialogue, and I can hear the judge banning me from conservative endeavors for several lifetimes!
I must apologize if my throbbing engines of hope separate us. While it costs nothing for Muslims to stage a phony "We Love Jews" charade, it also costs us nothing to keep watching to see what, if anything, develops. There's already been a much larger "peace" and "protection for Jews" rally in Norway's neighboring Sweden. Will it spread? Will the young Muslim organizers of this "Love the Jews" rally be punished by their elder imams? Or will they be emulated and rewarded? Will anything have changed globally a week from now? What if I want to give it eight days?
Hope is a dangerous chemical to play with. Even worse, however, is the abnegation of hope. On Oct. 22, 1956, almost every Hungarian went to bed convinced he was the only anti-Communist left alive in Hungary. Twenty-four hours later came the student march on Parliament for greater personal and national freedom, and the shooting into the march by the AVO (Communist secret police), killing an infant whose father then held his mortally wounded child aloft in the crowd – and that next night there were almost no more Communists left in Hungary!
We're forgetting a few things here, like Islam's trashing of every other religion; the punishment for leaving Islam is death; where are the Muslim "rings of peace" around those jihadis are crucifying, beheading and burning alive? Where is the Muslim "Martin Luther," spearheading a stem-to-stern Reformation of the Islamic religion?
A population can turn around in an hour. Why is it too optimistic to suppose Muslim youth might prefer the freedom and prosperity of a democracy like Norway to the seventh century ways of their elders?
Forgive me for bludgeoning you with hope on such scant evidence.
You may now tune me out.
But I'm going to stay tuned.
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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