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…there are plenty of new Trojan horses. One of them is a hijab-wearing young woman named Sumaya Jirde Ali. Born in 1997, she came to Norway from Somalia at age six. Two years ago, she stepped onto the national stage with an opinion piece in Aftenposten. She had just been in London, and was impressed by the “diversity” on display there. By contrast, she charged, Norway is way behind. “During the last few decades Norway has become more multicultural,” she wrote. “Why is it that in 2016, there aren’t more non-ethnic Norwegians in advertisements, movies, magazines, and in government agencies?” She maintained that “for integration to work, it must go both ways. It’s not enough for immigrants to adapt.”Read the rest here.
No, there was nothing new about it. By 2016, her argument was an embarrassing cliché, a platitude. But in 21st century Norway, the cultural elite eats this sort of thing up, at least if it’s under the byline of a teenage girl in a hijab. If Sumaya had written a piece about how grateful she was to have been brought up in a free and prosperous Norway rather than in her native Somalia, would Aftenposten even have published it? No, too sappy. And anti-African! What if she’d submitted an article critical of female genital mutilation in her community? Or honor killing? No, that’s old hat. But her familiar whining about insufficient Muslim visibility in today’s Norway was right up their alley.Sumaya wrote more pieces. Last year came an item headlined “Muslim on your premises? Never.” Complaining that her devotion to Islam is too often associated in Norway “with something negative,” she wanted readers to know that “I am not your socially constructed phenomenon. I am myself.” She insisted that her wearing of a hijab has nothing to do with obedience, that she is “not obliged to follow or like all the rules/norms of my own religion,” and that the Koran teaches all this. Which led one to wonder: does she really believe this, or is she consciously trying to present infidel Norway with a picture of Islam that makes this totalitarian religion look like Episcopalianism?Whatever the case may be, Sumaya has been handsomely rewarded for her slight, shallow, and (frankly) semi-literate writings. Last year the local newspaper in her home city, Bodø, named her “Bodø Resident of the Year,” calling her “an incredibly important voice for very many young women.” In January of this year she won the Zola Prize, presented annually to “people who openly and fearlessly have uncovered or opposed threats to human value, democracy, and the rule of law in Norway.” Jury foreman Karl Eldar Evang compared her to James Baldwin, while noting that another commentator had likened her to the 1950s actor James Dean. Since there is no conceivable comparison between Sumaya and James Dean, presumably this was simply one idiot’s way of saying that Sumaya is cool.The awards kept coming. A month after Sumaya picked up the Zola Prize, the Oslo weekly Natt & Dag named her “Voice of the Year.” In an interview, she told Natt & Dag that if she were the prime minister of Norway her first action would be to cut out government support to Human Rights Service — a small Oslo think tank that has carried out important research on such subjects as forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor killings in the Muslim community. Upon being awarded the Natt & Dag prize at a public ceremony, Sumaya shouted “Fuck Listhaug!” The reference was to Sylvi Listhaug, the popular ex-integration minister who, among other politically incorrect statements, had expressed concern that the Swedish phenomenon of “no-go zones” would spread to Norway. This was not the first time Sumaya had publicly used the four-letter English-language word: she had previously tweeted “Fuck diplomatic debate: Fuck the police.”Last month, Morgenbladet, a political and cultural weekly along the lines of the New York Review of Books, made Sumaya a regular columnist….
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