The Associated Press reports.
Category Archives: Norway
The Breivik diagnosis: ideology wrapped in a straitjacket
Tad Tietze, co-editor of the recently-published collection of essays On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe, has posted an excellent piece in response to the news that two court-appointed psychiatrists have found Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to be legally insane and unfit to stand trial.
See also Simon Baron-Cohen, “Anders Breivik: cold and calculating, yes – but insane?”, Guardian, 2 December 2011
Cf. Bob Lambert, “Was Anders Breivik a psychotic spree killer or a calculating terrorist?”, RUSI, 29 July 2011
Oslo: Muslim students denied high school prayer slot
High school student Ibrahim El Kadi asked if he could pray while at school. “No,” said his principal.
He asked for a quiet prayer area “for all religions” and was quoted the Education Ministry’s official line. “No one has the legal right to religious practice during working hours, neither employees nor students.”
The denial compelled El Kadi and some 40 other students in “multicultural” Ulsrud High School to protest in mock prayer outside the school’s library. Now they pray in the bitter cold of a nearby parking lot.
Breivik appears in court, claims to be military commander in far-right resistance movement
Norwegian anti-immigration militant Anders Behring Breivik spoke in open court for the first time on Monday and admitted killing 77 people in attacks in July, but he denied any guilt, saying he was a military commander in a far-right resistance movement.
Wearing a black suit, white shirt and silvery tie, a tense Breivik sat with his eyes mostly downcast and occasionally bit his lip in a packed hearing to extend his custody before trial.
At one point Breivik attempted to address survivors of Norway’s biggest modern-day massacre, but the judge cut him off.
“I am a military commander in the Norwegian resistance movement and Knights Templar Norway,” Breivik told the court.
It was the 32-year-old’s first public utterance since he planted a car bomb on July 22 that killed eight people at an Oslo government building, then went on to shoot dead 69 more, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party summer camp on the island of Utoeya.
“I acknowledge the acts, but I do not plead guilty,” Breivik said, adding that he rejected the jurisdiction of the court because it “supports multiculturalism.”
On Utøya: new collection of essays analysing Breivik’s terrorist attack
In a challenging new book, a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the left, and its impending destruction through immigration.
Breivik’s beliefs – expressed at length in a manifesto, ‘2083’ – were part of a huge volume of right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman – so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the far Right racist and Islamophobic social and political conditions in which it emerged.
Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is – a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far Right organising.
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze, with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O’Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow and the editors.
More details here. Tad Tietze’s essay “Depoliticising Utøya: Anders Breivik as ‘madman'” can be read here.
CoE chief: Anti-Muslim feeling on rise in Europe
The Council of Europe’s secretary general says the anti-Muslim beliefs of confessed Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik are shared by more Europeans than most people would like to believe.
Thorbjoern Jagland told the AP in an interview Wednesday that only a “very small minority” of like-minded individuals would act on those beliefs as Breivik did. But Jagland said he’s very concerned that xenophobic attitudes – especially toward Muslims – are getting worse in Europe.
Breivik has confessed to killing 77 people in a bomb attack and shooting spree in Norway last July. But he denies criminal guilt, saying he’s in a state of war and believes the massacre was necessary to save Norway and Europe from being overrun by Muslim immigrants.
Norway: police want to interview Alan Lake over Breivik killings
Reuters reports:
Police in Oslo say they want to interview Alan Lake, whom they believe is a key figure in Britain’s anti-Islamist English Defence League EDL, to find out if he may have been an ideological source of inspiration to Breivik.
“Alan Lake is an obvious person we would like to speak to,” Oslo police prosecutor Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby told Reuters. He added: “At this point in the investigation there is no indication that anyone knew about his (Breivik’s) plans.”
The English Defence League said in an email to Reuters that Lake had “absolutely nothing to do with the EDL”. Lake could not be reached for comment but has previously denied being a senior member of the EDL.
The claim that Lake has “absolutely nothing to do with the EDL” is disingenuous to say the least. The EDL leaders only dissociated themselves from Lake in the aftermath of the Oslo killings when his earlier rantings about executing political opponents became public knowledge. But even then they had to admit that Lake played “a role in the EDL during its early formation”.
Paul Ray, who was himself interviewed by the Norwegian police, has suggested that Lake was Breivik’s mentor, but without offering anything other than circumstantial evidence.
Anders Breivik’s ‘spider web of hate’ includes Melanie Phillips
Over at Comment is Free Andrew Brown introduces a Linkfluence map based on a list of the websites to which Anders Breivik’s manifesto provides links and the sites to which they link in turn. Maybe I’m just a technophobic old fart, but I’m not convinced that this adds much to our understanding of the ideological inspiration behind Breivik’s terrorist acts.
Brown’s own interpretation of the data is hardly flawless either. He states that it is particularly “unfair to blame Melanie Phillips” for Breivik’s crimes, adding: “Although she was cited by Breivik at length for an article claiming that the British elite had deliberately encouraged immigration in order to break down traditional society and she has written that ‘Bat Ye’or’s scholarship is awesome and her analysis is as persuasive as it is terrifying’, she has also argued, with nearly equal ferocity, against the ‘counter-jihad’ belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.”
But Phillips’s definition of a “moderate Muslim” is highly restrictive to say the least. The one prominent Muslim she has a good word for is Irshad Manji, whom Phillips applauds for “her passionate defence of Israel and her attack on the lies told about it by the Arab world”. And that’s how you get to qualify as a “moderate Muslim” as far as Mad Mel is concerned. Show the slightest hostility towards Israel and you’re an extremist. She even accused Ed Husain, of all people, of having “adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that are driving Muslims to mass murder” after he criticised the British government for failing to condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. This position may not be quite identical to “the ‘counter-jihad’ belief that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim”, but the difference is clearly marginal.
And while nobody is accusing Phillips of supporting Breivik’s terrorist attacks, the reality is that it was her inflammatory rhetoric, along with that of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, which helped fill him with the hatred that led to those attacks. Just try reading through Phillips’s Daily Mail article that Breivik reproduced in full in his manifesto. According to Phillips, the then Labour government had “engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage”, having “secretly plotted to flood the country with immigrants to change its very character and identity”, in “an act of unalloyed treachery to the entire nation”. This is the language of the far right, given legitimacy through its appearance in a mainstream newspaper under the by-line of a well-known journalist.
Paraphrasing Phillips’s own attack on Ed Husain, you can only conclude that her Daily Mail article adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that drove Breivik to mass murder.
IRR briefing paper on the Oslo massacre
The Institute of Race Relations has published a briefing paper by Liz Fekete, Breivik, the conspiracy theory and the Oslo massacre. The paper includes:
• An analysis of the various elements in the Islamic conspiracy theory that Breivik drew on, its discursive frameworks, its key shapers and followers. Here certain intellectual currents within neoconservativism and cultural conservatism, and concepts such as clash of civilisations, Islamofascism, new anti-Semitism and Eurabia, are examined. While these may not support the notion of a deliberate conspiracy to Islamicise Europe, they are often used by conspiracy theorists to underline the righteousness of their beliefs and actions.
• An appendix of ‘Responses to the Oslo massacre’ from official statements to ripostes from counter-jihadists, extreme-right politicians and neoconservative political commentators.
• Detailed documentation of anti-Muslim violence and related provocations throughout Europe in 2010 and 2011 including desecrations of mosques and Islamic cemeteries; petrol bombs and other attacks on mosques and worshippers; physical attacks and extreme-right campaigns.
Norway: terror and Islamophobia in the mirror
There’s an informative article at Open Democracy by Sindre Bangstad, who examines the atmosphere of Islamophobia in Norway that provided the context for Anders Breivik’s terrorist attacks. He concludes:
Anders Behring Breivik is trying to fight the course of history, but to no avail. Multicultural Norway is here to stay. Period. Several of the young people who survived the Utøya massacre have reported that they were saved by young party comrades with a Muslim minority background. Among the dead, Muslims and non-Muslims were united in their sacrifice. The testimonials of the survivors might very well contribute to the creation of a Norway in which the conspiratorial fantasies of Anders Behring Breivik and other Norwegian racists and Islamophobes will become marginalized in time. Anders Behring Breivik wanted to instigate war. His ideas will be crushed by our humanity and solidarity and our unflinching commitment not to forget the sacrifice of the many murdered in cold blood on a rainy day in Oslo and at Utøya on 22/7/2011