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'Strip mosques of subsidies': Progress MP

The Local Norway
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'Strip mosques of subsidies': Progress MP
Oslo's Jamaat Ahle Sunnat mosque where preaching could soon come under Progress Party scrutiny.

A senior politician in the Norwegian government’s second party has proposed stripping mosques of government subsidies and closing the Koran schools attached to them if they are shown to preach “classical Shariah law”.

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Writing on the website of Norway’s NRK, Per Sandberg, vice-chairman of Norway’s anti-immigrant Progress Party, called for an “ideological mapping” of the country’s mosques to single out those which promote an unacceptable version of Islam.
 
He also proposed banning Muslim prayer in schools, stopping schoolgirls from wearing the veil, and sending government ideologists to preach in mosques. 
 
In his article he dismissed Islam’s claims to be “a religion of peace”, saying terrorists could draw on “a plethora of verses in the Quran that support the killing of Jews and other ‘infidels’”. 
 
Rune Berglund Steen, head of the Norwegian Centre against Racism dismissed Sandberg’s eight-point plan as a form of “bullying”. 
 
“Rhetoric like this is likely to incite extremists on both wings,” he said. 
 
But Norway’s justice minister, Anders Anundsen, also from the Progress Party, said he would consider adding some of Sandberg’s proposals to Norway’s anti-radicalization policy. 
 
“We have a policy that is dynamic and can be updated as needed. We will make ongoing assessments, partly based on the input we get,” he said. 
 
Sandberg, one of the most outspoken anti-Islamic voices in the Progress Party, was sidelined by party leader Siv Jensen after the party entered government for the first time in 2013, but has been increasingly vocal, coming close to alienating the Christian Democrats, one of the coalition’s two supporting parties. 
 
In his article he argued that politicians had to recognize that the violence carried out by extreme Islamists was central to the religion, describing Mohammed as a “warrior judge”. 
 
“When a believing Christian commits terror, one can neither hail Jesus or quote verses from the New Testament,” he argued. “Jesus was killed by his enemies; Mohammad killed his enemies.”
 

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