What happened
More than 150,000 Norwegians rallied in Oslo this week to mourn the 76 people killed in back-to-back attacks by a far-right extremist. Anders Behring Breivik, 32, began his rampage last Friday afternoon, setting off a car bomb outside government buildings in downtown Oslo, killing eight. As emergency personnel rushed to the scene, the blond-haired, blue-eyed bomber made his way north to the island of Utoya, where hundreds of youths were attending a summer camp organized by the ruling Labor Party. Dressed as a policeman, Breivik asked children and adults to gather round him. He opened fire on the crowd with an automatic machine gun, and for the next hour methodically hunted his victims down, killing some as they tried to swim away from the island. “He was so cold and concentrated,” said survivor Adrian Pracon, 21. By the time police arrived on Utoya, 68 people, including many teens, were dead. Breivik surrendered without resistance.
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What the editorials said
Right-wing American bloggers aren’t to blame for this outrage, said the Los Angeles Times. But the Norway attacks should cause some “introspection among Muslim-bashers.” For years, the bigots behind sites like Jihad Watch have blamed “all Muslims for the actions of a minority of violent jihadists.” Now that some commentators are accusing these hate-mongers of aiding and abetting Breivik, they’re finally getting a taste “of what they’ve been dishing out for years.”
“The left-wing punditocracy” should be ashamed, said the Boston Herald. They’ve rejoiced in the fact that some conservative bloggers were mentioned in Breivik’s writings, as if that puts those writers on a par with a mass murderer. We need to examine the dangers posed by extreme Islamophobes. But right now we should focus on joining Norway in mourning, not using their dead as “fodder for the latest blame-game.”
What the columnists said
“Could an anti-Muslim bigot commit a large-scale terrorist attack in the U.S.?” asked Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. “Absolutely.” What makes a Breivik-style attack possible is that terrorism usually results “from the intersection between militant ideology and mentally vulnerable people.” And Islamophobia is now as common on the political Right as the militia-style, anti-government rhetoric of the 1990s that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. So when Newt Gingrich makes doomsday predictions about his grandchildren growing up in an America “dominated by radical Islamists,” we should be aware that “somewhere out there,” someone like Breivik is listening.
Don’t blow this neo-Nazi threat out of proportion, said Benny Avni in the New York Post. For starters, right-wing extremists generally operate in isolation, while Islamist terrorists have a network of combat-ready cells everywhere from Afghanistan to America. And let’s be clear that this was the work of a solitary madman, said Mark Steyn in National Review. I’ve been “fitted out for a supporting role” in Breivik’s slaughter, because he quoted my work on the threat of Islamism. But he also cited Mark Twain, Gandhi, and philosophers John Locke and Edmund Burke. And when a fanatic uses Locke and Burke as a justification for slaying teenagers, “he is lost in his own psychoses.”
Breivik isn’t mad, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. He’s “extremely sane.” Read his manifesto and you’ll realize that his murderous rampage was just an extreme and violent extension of the far Right’s revulsion at Muslims, feminism, and multiculturalism. “He did what he did, knowing it was evil, because of a passionate commitment to a political cause,” which he’d fused with a parody of Christianity and a paranoid hatred of Islam. “If you think that contains no lessons for the United States, you might want to open your eyes a little more widely.”
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