"Kill Muslims" and "Norway is for Norwegians" were some of the graffiti messages that Ibrahim Salem (30) saw on house walls and entrances last week. Throughout the weekend several blocks on Welhavens street in the center of Oslo were painted over with graffiti. The messages were clearly racist. Foreign names on buzzers and postboxes were written over and painted with swastikas.
The area residents had gotten used to such racist hate messages, according to Ibrahim. He says that this has happened 20 times in the six years he's lived there. He asks to clean the walls, and the graffiti reappears after several weeks.
He in the past he was content with getting it cleaned up, but this time he's scared of the messages calling for murder. In the past they wrote things like 'go home', he says, but now come they come directly with threats. He says his 8 year old son was very scared when he read it. He doesn't dare be here anymore, so Ibrahim sent him to his mother who lives elsewhere in Oslo. Many of the children living in the area were also really scared.
Ibrahim reported the graffiti but feels he doesn't get much understanding from the police. The doors in several blocks are not hard to open. He says they don't sleep well at night, what if they come back and burn down the house?
Dagbladet hadn't managed to contact the police.
Elsewhere in Norway, recently some people tried to reproduce one of the Muhammad caricatures on the walls of a shopping center in Sandnes. It's the first time this has happened in the neighborhood, according to the center's manager Cato Helmersen. He hadn't seen the actual graffiti. He says graffiti is something that happens from time to time. There are different types, but they paint over it.
Source: Dagbladet (Norwegian), with pictures
