The head of a state-funded university in Norway said on Tuesday he had no plans to discipline a professor who last month called the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023, massacres “the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century.”
Following an uproar this week over comments made on April 21 by Professor Bassam Hussein of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Rector Tor Grande told broadcaster NRK that Hussein’s views do not represent NTNU, the country’s largest university.
He added, however, that “freedom of expression is strong in Norway, and it gives Hussein, like other citizens, the freedom to express his opinions, as long as they are within the broad framework of Norwegian law.”
Asked by NRK whether there would be “consequences” for Hussein, Grande replied that the university has no written rules governing how employees express themselves. He added that it would have been “natural” for Hussein to clarify to the Socialist Forum in Trondheim that his remarks were made in his “personal” capacity.
JNS contacted the Norwegian Ministry of Education and NTNU, which receives most of its funding from the state, for comment on how they view the content of Hussein’s remarks during the lecture. Neither responded in time for publication.
Eytan Halon, the chargé d’affaires at the Israeli embassy in Oslo, wrote a letter to Grande urging him to act. “As rector of Norway’s largest university, and as chair of Universities Norway and the Nordic University Association, I urge you to take action to protect your students from the dissemination of support for terror and its glorification by senior members of faculty,” Halon wrote in the letter, which he also posted on X on Tuesday.
“When rhetoric can quickly turn into action, I believe that university leadership must also show zero tolerance and take immediate disciplinary action when it comes to the support and glorification of terror,” Halon added.
Ervin Kohn, head of the National Cooperation Council for the Jewish Congregation in Oslo and Trondheim, told NRK: “I expect the rector of NTNU to go public and distance himself from this statement.”
Hussein told the Adresseavisen newspaper on Monday, “I do not consider Oct. 7 a victory or triumph, especially not in light of the many victims that day and in the time afterward. The loss of civilian life is deeply tragic, without any semblance of beauty. It should never be romanticized.”
He added: “I think there has been excessive attention paid to the use of an adjective.”
