By Arsalan Iftikhar
July 25, 2011
The Norwegian suspect in the worst attack in Norway since World War II has acknowledged carrying out the attacks and claims to have worked with two other cells, according to CNN. He defended the attacks as necessary to combat the “colonization” of Norway by Muslims, Judge Kim Heger said in Oslo on Monday.
Police have identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a suspected right-wing Christian extremist who appears to have written a 1,500-page manifesto ranting against Muslims and laying out meticulous plans to prepare for the attacks without being detected.
Anders Behring Beivik
According to The New York Times, the man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small anti-Muslim group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber. His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.
Similarly, William Saletan wrote on Slate.com that anti-Islamist blogger Pamela Geller pounced on news of a massacre in Oslo right away.
“Jihad in Norway?” she asked.
Soon thereafter, she posted a second item—”You cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring jihad”—and linked to a previous one: “Norway: ALL Rapes In Past 5 Years Committed By Muslims.” As the Oslo body count grew, she piled on: “if I hear another television or radio reporter refer to muhammad as ‘theProphet Muhammad,’ I think I am going to puke. He’s not your prophet, assclowns.”
“Then things went horribly wrong…It turned out that the suspected terrorist in Norway wasn’t a Muslim…He hated Muslims…And he admired Pamela Geller.”
According to news reports, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik described himself as a righteous crusader on a mission to save European “Christendom” from a tide of Islam. He wrote that Modern Warfare 2 was ideal for target practice and training. The man accused of killing at least 93 people in Norway described the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as “part of my training-simulation” in his 1500-page manifesto published online just before the massacre.
Even so, according to Media Matters for America, FOX News Channel basically discussed the Norway terrorist attacks as “what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists,” then somehow managed to transition into a segment on the Park51 community center with this: “In the meantime, in New York City, the Muslims who want to build the mosque at Ground Zero scored a huge legal victory.”
As rightfully noted by a Boston Globe editorial: “Yet, for most of the day Friday, and for some radio and websites throughout Saturday, the need for fast analysis led many to assume that this was the work of Islamic terrorists. The rush to judgment is similar to what occurred after the Oklahoma City bombings, when Middle Eastern-looking men were blamed for the attack that turned out to have been masterminded by Timothy McVeigh.”
“How’s that again? Are the only terrorists in the world Muslim?” noted Richard Silverstein. “If so, what do we call a right-wing nationalist capable of planting major bombs and mowing down scores of people for the sake of the greater glory of his cause? If even a liberal newspaper like the Times can’t call this guy a terrorist, what does that say about the mindset of the western world?”
Back here in America, we have also been witnessing a recent rise in right-wing extremist violence on our own shores. Last year, John Patrick Bedell, a 36-year-old man from California, walked up to two security guards outside the Pentagon Metro station in suburban Washington and started shooting. He was then shot and killed. According to The Christian Science Monitor, Bedell appeared “to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent anti-government feelings” and also battled mental illness before his shooting rampage.
Earlier last year, another white anti-government extremist named Joseph Stack flew his small airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, killing two people and injuring 13 others. According to media reports, Stack had left behind a disjointed suicide letter in which he expressed his hatred of our American government and outlined grievances with the IRS, chillingly stating that “violence not only is the answer; it is the only answer.”
Both the Pentagon Metro and IRS attacks come at a time of “explosive growth in [domestic] extremist-group activism across the United States,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Getting back to the Oslo terrorist attacks, as right-wing commentators initially salivated over the prospect of another case of ‘Islamist terrorism’, it was also interesting to note their virtual radio silence when it was learned that the actual terrorist was a right-wing Aryan-looking Nordic blond-haired Christian extremist dude sporting a Lacoste polo shirt. Since many right-wing commentators regularly use the specter of terrorist acts to call for ‘racial profiling’ of those populations that share the same demographic features as suspected terrorists, the million-dollar-question to these right-wingers should now become:
“Should We Profile Norwegians Now?”
If the answer to the aforementioned question is a ‘no’, then the clear message that we will be sending to the rest of the world is that the word “terrorism” shall simply be reserved for those people with olive skin and Muslim-sounding last names; and shall not be used for Nordic blonde-haired mass murderers who commit the same terrorist crimes; only with the luxury of having blue eyes and lighter-colored skin.
Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and global managing editor for The Crescent Post in Washington DC.
