Yes, bring on the Pakistani, Moroccan, and Turkish flags – to name some of the nations most heavily represented in Oslo's immigrant ranks. Why not? After all, many immigrant families in Oslo already send money to these lands, fetch spouses from them, build second homes in them. Many ship their kids to madrassas there so they can ‘learn Islamic values’ (and unlearn Norwegian ones). And Norway's government and media give every bit of it a big thumbs-up. So why not foreign flags, too? And so what if the flags most likely to pop up in an "inclusive" parade are those of countries where mobs torched Norwegian flags during the cartoon crisis – in some cases with the tacit approval of those countries' governments?

For all the rage over the Immigrant Forum's proposal, the main fact went virtually unspoken – namely, that this was all just one more encounter with soft jihad. Simply by making its proposal, the Immigrant Forum had moved the bar, shifted the terms of debate, nudged Norway a step closer to the day when the whole May 17 display will be ruled insensitive, racist, fascistic, destructive of multicultural values.