Excerpt:
"If you hate Norway so much," read the email in my inbox the other day, "why don't you go back to America? Why don't you go back to the Midwest or the Southern states where you can live with your beloved Tea Party friends?"
The email was in Norwegian, and the sender had a Norwegian name. This is far from the first such e-mail I have received in my thirteen years in Norway. A few years back, in a piece for the New York Times about the Norwegian economy, I made what I thought was a harmless remark in passing about the matpakke, the wrapped-up homemade sandwich that many workers in Norway, including high-ranking executives, chow down at their desks at lunchtime because it's just too expensive here (Oslo is the world's priciest city) for most people to go out for even a modest lunch. After that article, I got several hundred outraged text messages, e-mails, and phone calls asking me why I was living in Norway if I hated its beloved traditions so much and ordering me to go back to America. I even got a couple of death threats.
The reason for this latest wave of unfriendly e-mails, however, is my new e-book, The New Quislings, in which I examine the aftermath of the dozens of murders committed on July 22 by an insane young Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. Breivik, most of whose victims were members of the youth division of Norway's Labor Party, explained that he was motivated by a hostility toward Norway's multicultural immigration and integration policies, which are largely the work of the Labor Party and which are turning Norway, like much of the rest of Europe, into an increasingly Islamic state.