Emailing Breitbart About the Ring of Peace in Oslo
As you probably got from the tenor of my tweets, I was intensely dismayed reading your reporting on the ring of peace in Oslo today.
Where I’m coming from: I was there, so were roughly a hundred representatives of the media, members of Parliament and ministers of government, Jews, Muslims and ethnic Norwegians. The whole seance was also live-streamed nationally at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation website, as well as that of several other major news outlets. So when I say your piece is more or less one long factual error, I speak both from personal experience and extensive reporting done by the Norwegian and international media.
Lets enumerate your errors.
According to a local eyewitness, only about 20 or so Muslims formed the “ring of peace” around the Oslo synagogue.
First off, no, the ring itself was made up of somewhat more than twenty. But more to the point: there were many, many more muslims in attendance. Your whole piece was clearly trying to convey the sense that this was not a mass event, that Muslims were not engaged by this event. This is not true. Some muslims were in the front line, the «ring of peace», most were scattered throughout the crowd. The scene was in my estimation, from my vantage point at the top of the street, overlooking the rest of the assembly, that there was a roughly 40/60 % ethnic Norwegians to non-ethnic Norwegian spread. Based on my own estimation of about 1.800 or more people there (I suspect the police count of 1.300 may be a bit low, but I could be wrong), that puts the number of Muslims in the several hundred. So either your «local eyewitness» is grossly distorting the facts, or you are not reporting them clearly. When you claim this as a «hoax» you are generating images of malicious intent rather than of the minor mixup in the reporting this is. And of all the reporting done on this meeting, while factually shoddy, yours was clearly the furthest from the truth, so I wouldn’t be throwing around accusations of hoaxery.
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