Emergency workers outside the bombed out building in Oslo, Norway, which houses the Prime Minister's office. Photo credit: Alejandro Decap
As Norway struggles to come to terms with the sheer horror of the Oslo bombing and Utoya island shootings, which killed 93 people, concerns are growing that Norway’s social democratic values are under attack and that the far right is on the rise across Europe.
Anti-Islamic Christian Anders Behring Breivik has admitted carrying out the attacks which he has described as “gruesome but necessary.” He makes his first appearance in court today and is expected to attempt to explain the attacks on the grounds that ‘indigenous Europeans’ have betrayed their heritage by not opposing Muslim immigration into Europe. Commentators are divided as to whether to interpret the attacks as the crazy acts of one mad loner or indicative of deeper societal problems.
- Breivik’s manifesto. Channel 4 News selected chilling extracts from “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence,” Breivik’s 1,500-page violent anti-Islamic manifesto which he published on Friday, just hours before he went on the rampage. In September 2010, he wrote: “I have now sent an application for a Ruger Mini 14 semi-automatic rifle (5.56). It is the most ‘army like’ rifle allowed in Norway. On the application form I stated: ‘hunting deer.’ It would have been tempting to just write the truth; ‘executing category A and B cultural Marxists/multiculturalist traitors’ just to see their reaction.”
Breivik’s manifesto promotes using “terror as a method for waking up the masses” to the danger posed by Islam.
- Patently mad narcissistic sicko. Writing at The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson insisted that Breivik “is patently mad” and lamented that “for the days and weeks ahead we can expect exhaustive psychoanalysis of this dreary and supercilious 32-year-old sicko.” Johnson hoped that his manifesto will not be poured over in great detail as he considered the terror attacks to be driven more by the Breivik’s feelings of alienation than by his commitment to a far-right ideology: “It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill …Breivik may have constructed a portentous 1,500 page manifesto, but like so many others of his type he was essentially a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed. We should spend less time thinking about him, and much more on the victims and their families.”
- Frustration at the edges. “While we must be careful not to take his logic at face value, he also must not be ignored. The diabolical coherence of his arguments needs to be studied in order that we are able to refute it and understand why modern, democratic societies – including those, like Norway, which are admired around the world – too often miss the frustrations that gnaw at their edges, and in turn fail to stop those frustrations erupting into violence,” insisted Martin Sandbu at The Financial Times. Sandbu suggested that the “strong element of conformism” to Nordic social democratic values may have contributed to Breivik’s frustrations: “A certain vision of social harmony has come at the price of partially stifling legitimate dissent, together with the illegitimate kind.”
- Radical Islam is destroying Europe “It came as stunning news that Norway had been attacked by a blond, blue-eyed, anti-Islamic terrorist,” noted While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within author Bruce Bawer at The Wall Street Journal. “It should not have been: Several of us who have written about the rise of Islam in Europe have warned that the failure of mainstream political leaders to responsibly address the attendant challenges would result in the emergence of extremists like Breivik.” Bawer argued that Europe is in “serious trouble” due to Islamization: “Millions of European Muslims live in rigidly patriarchal families in rapidly growing enclaves where women are second-class citizens, and where non-Muslims dare not venture. Surveys show that an unsettling percentage of Muslims inEurope reject Western values, despise the countries they live in, support the execution of homosexuals, and want to replace democracy with Shariah law.” Bawer lamented that “now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism,” speaking “negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith … will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach.”
Breivik was not taking out people randomly, insisted Bawer: “He considered the Labor Party,Norway’s dominant party since World War II, responsible for policies that are leading to the Islamization of Europe – and thus guilty of treason.”
- Paradise will not be lost. Writing at The Times (£), Åsne Seierstad promised “our Norwegian paradise will not be lost … At the petrol station down the road, or from the neighbour with whom I have hardly ever exchanged a word, the message is the same: We will not let terror change us.” With this in mind, Seierstad praised Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s response to the terror attacks: “Where George Bush said of the terrorists of 9/11 that Americans would ‘hunt ’em down,’ our Prime Minister declared: ‘We will meet this attack with more democracy, more openness.’ Because it is not just the Government or our political system that is under attack, it is our way of thinking, our innocent, trustful openness. There is one way to lose against such an attack — to stop trusting each other, letting suspicion move in where trust used to live.”
