Norway's royal family celebrates Constitution
Norway's royal family celebrates ConstitutionReuters

Anti-Semitism in Norway reached new depths this week when a high school student literally fire branded a Jewish student with a red-hot coin that was grilled at school barbecue. Even worse for the Jewish community was the reaction from the school – silence.

The incident occurred Monday and was first reported by the “Med Israel for Fred (Miff - With Israel for Peace)" website in Norway. The victim previously had been the target of anti-Semitic harassment at the Oslo school.

The only response to the fire branding at the barbecue was by a teacher, who told the Norwegian-born attacker, “You’re mad.” Despite the gravity of the fire branding and a photograph taken on a cell phone that showed the burns on the neck of the victim, the school did not contact the mother after the incident.

The unidentified boy’s father is Israeli and has returned to Israel because of the atmosphere of hatred of Jews in Norway. The mother said that after constant harassment of her son two years ago, the school did not intervene.

“I see this avoidance as a dangerous development among both ethnic Norwegian and immigrant groups. And that nobody, neither teachers nor principals, intervene in this matter,” she told the country's NRK broadcasting system in 2010.

She said students freely uttered death threats and used expressions such as “Jewish pigs” and “Jewish Satan”.

She said her son lives in fear, avoids Muslim and native Norwegian children, and has to hide his Jewish identity and the fact that his father is Israeli. His mother is worried what will happen when he begins high school.

“I think very often about how it was during the war, when even persons with only one Jewish grandparent were apprehended,” she was quoted as saying by the Miff website.