It’s a very important question. Take Norway for example. There is only one big city in Norway, and that is Oslo with 700,000 people. One third are from parts of the world other than Norway and it is the only city that is like that. And people in Oslo are not afraid of diversity. In our recent elections, they voted for the Labour Party, the socialist left, the Green Party. But people in the countryside, people who live in places where they have almost no diversity and don’t see people from other parts of the world, are afraid. I tried to find out: “what is this?” What happened to these small communities? [...]
We saw when we had the refugee crisis, how small villages in Norway who set up refugee camps reacted when they started closing down because there were no more refugees. Many of them started saying, “Give us back the refugees!” Because they had become friends with the refugees! If you don’t meet a man or woman from Syria, you may be afraid of the hijab, or of the men. But if you meet them, maybe in another village, then you can start a dialogue. [...]
I think that they must be. But maybe we are not good enough on that front. You were talking about Breivik. When I talked to him about those things and asked him, “Why do you hate people of a different skin colour from yourself?”, he has lots of answers. But I can see from an old photo when Breivik was in his second year at school that he was together with a boy who was totally black. I asked him,” Did you like him?” He said, “Yes, of course, he was my best friend!” “How can you become best friends with this guy?” Breivik said, “He’s not like the rest of them!” And when I talked to the young Nazis, they said the same thing. ”I hate them, but he’s not like that”, because they know him. So it is very important, as we said, that when we have big festivals, it must be a festival for everybody! And as I was saying earlier today, our diversity campaigns must not be narrow – they must be much wider, not just concentrating on students or on certain people in certain departments – and that it is the ways we meet that are most important.
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