Norway was apparently the first modern nation to make stunning of domestic animals compulsory, outlawing the method for production of Kosher meat.
[6] On January 7, 2004, the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen printed an editorial cartoon that depicted a Haredi Jew rewriting the Ten Commandments to include "thou shall murder".
[8][9] On 17 September 2006, the Oslo synagogue was attacked with an automatic weapon,[10] only days after it was publicised that the building was an intended target for the Algerian terror group GSPC that had been plotting a bombing campaign in the Norwegian capital.
The Oslo city court judge could not find sufficient evidence that the shots fired at the synagogue amounted to a terrorist act.
[13] Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld, chairman of the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said that "Norway is the most anti-Semitic country in Scandinavia."
Former Prime Minister Kåre Willoch responded to the accusations at the symposium by arguing that allegations of antisemitism is a "traditional deflection tactic aimed at diverting attention from the real problem, which is Israel's well-documented and incontestable abuse of Palestinians.
"[17] In December 2008, the Norwegian author and journalist Mona Levin [no] claimed Kåre Willoch made an allegedly racist statement when his response to the question whether the United States was likely to change their Middle East policy was: "It doesn’t look too good, because he has chosen a Chief of Staff who is a Jew, and, as we know, many American voters look much more to the Bible than to the reality of our days – and with a meaninglessly mistaken interpretation of the Bible."
Even before and during World War II, when anti-Semitic prejudices were strong, public policies were discriminatory, and the Nazified State Police efficiently confiscated Jewish property and deported Jews on that despicable slave ship SS Donau - even then, Norway had not seen anti-Jewish outbursts of this scale.
But, they add, there are rare incidents of tension over their Jewishness, usually with children being teased in school or with Muslim immigrants bringing their politics into their day-to-day meetings with Jews.
One Jewish father also told that his child after school had been taken by a Muslim mob (though managed to escape), reportedly "to be taken out to the forest and hanged because he was a Jew".
[27][28] Norwegian Education Minister Kristin Halvorsen referred to the antisemitism reported in this study as being "completely unacceptable."
In April 2011, it appointed an independent external investigation by Middle East expert Cecilie Hellestveit of the International Law and Policy Unit into complaints made by the Israeli embassy in Norway that the Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) had been biased.
[34] In May 2012, the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities published a report based on a survey on antisemitism in the Norwegian population.
The OSCE also appealed to Norway to abolish a ban on Jewish ritual slaughter, which was in place since 1929, as an "important symbolic gesture.
"[37] In an interview with Dagsavisen in January 2013, Nehmat Ali Shah, the imam at Norway's largest mosque—the Central Jamaat-e Ahl-e Sunnat mosque—and mosque chairman Ghulam Sarwar claimed that the existing hostility between Muslims and Christians is caused by Jewish influence.
Dagsavisen reported that the two men claimed that "the fear Jews instilled in others explained fraught Muslim-Jewish relations as well as the Holocaust" and that "Jewish influence caused Norwegians to have a negative view of Islam."
This project was initiated by a group of young Muslims, as a respond to the latest terror attacks against Jewish centers in Europe.
[45][46] In March 2019, Attorney General Tor Aksel Busch ruled that the phrase "fuck Jews" could be understood as criticism of Israel, and using it was not criminal.
State attorney Trude Antonsen agreed to the case being dropped and commented that while the statement was offending and untrue it is still outside criminal law and not punitive.
In July 2019, a cartoon produced and posted on Facebook by the state broadcaster NRK was widely panned for antisemitism.
[57] In August 2022, media said that police were forced to reopen a case (that had been laid to rest), against an imam in Norway that in 2019 wrote on Facebook that "Hitler spared a few Jews so that the world can come to know how evil this [Jewish] nation is and why it is necessary to kill them"; the statement was made by one that at the time, "was the imam" at the Minhaj-ul-Quran mosque in Drammen, Norway.