The Norwegian Connection
Part Four: Conclusions

Mads Gilbert, the Norwegian doctor who appears as the supervisor of the obviously staged resuscitation efforts in a Gaza hospital depicted in the CNN and UK Channel 4 videos of January 2008, has practiced medicine in Troms, Norway, at least since 1995.

In light of Troms’s small size (fewer than 65,000 inhabitants) and geographic isolation, it is reasonable to suspect that the members of its pro-Palestinian activist community might know each other and communicate frequently. The government-funded group Vennskap Troms-Gaza (“Friendship Troms-Gaza,” or “FTG”) is a prominent entity in that community.

Mads Gilbert has had at least three contacts with FTG. In 2006, he called the mayor of Gaza to help arrange an internet project for which FTG was planning to seek government funding, and Gilbert reported on this communication while attending an FTG board meeting on October 30, 2006.

FTG’s involvement in Palestinian filmmaking began as early as 2004. In 2006, they brought Palestinian filmmakers to Troms for a film festival, including Rashid Mashharawi and Ahmed Mashharawi. They also brought Ahmed Mashharawi back to Troms in June 2007, when he presented a film that he made in collaboration with his brother Ashraf Mashharawi, the man who made the videos presented by CNN and UK Channel 4 in January 2009.

By October 26, 2007, FTG indicated its plans to, at some point in the future, spend $20,000 on the production of a new film in Gaza. It was established at the board meeting of September 9, 2008, that the producer of this film was to be Ahsraf Mashharawi.

Mahsharawi did not complete his film by the end of 2008, nor is it clear that he had even begun the film by that time. Therefore, FTG planned to pay him to produce his film in 2009. An FTG board member, Christiane Kolberg, planned to travel to Gaza on October 26, 2008, for purposes including meeting personally with Ahmed Mashharawi to discuss FTG’s collaboration with him on the making of a film. Kolberg was unable to travel to Gaza as planned. However, Mads Gilbert was in Gaza at that time. Therefore, Gilbert filled Kolberg’s anticipated role in reporting on recent developments in Gaza at a public meeting that FTG held in Troms on November 26, 2008.

There is no specific indication that Gilbert also performed the other task that Kolberg had intended to perform on FTG’s behalf in Gaza, namely meeting personally with Ashraf Mashharawi to discuss the film that he was to make with FTG’s funding. It is possible that he might have done so. In any case, in light of the ongoing relationship between the FTG and Ashraf Mashharawi that had existed for some time before January 2009, it is very likely that Gilbert and Mashharawi knew of each other before that time, and that Gilbert knew of Mashharawi’s intention to make a film in 2009 with the financial backing of FTG, a group with which Gilbert had had contact over several years.

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