More than 1,000 Muslims formed a human shield around an Oslo synagogue on February 21, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark the previous weekend.
Organized by a group of young Muslims from Norway who called the event a “ring of peace,” the demonstrators chanted: “No to anti-Semitism” and “No to Islamophobia.”
Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the protest organizers, told the crowd that “humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that.”
The event was organized after Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue during an event to promote free speech in Copenhagen.
Norway’s Jewish community is one of Europe’s smallest, numbering about 1,000.
Norway Muslim population has been growing steadily through immigration and is now thought to number about 200,000 in the country of 5.2 million people.
Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP