Letter from America: Terrorism in Norway

If Australia is the ‘land down under,’ then surely Norway is the ‘land up above’ with the sun never completely descending beneath the horizon in areas north of the Arctic Circle during the summer months of May-July (and hence the more common name ‘Land of the Midnight Sun’).

Norway has a history of active pacifism that while being anti-war has never meant being apolitical. During the World Wars (WW) I and II, the country maintained a neutral stance. And yet, during the WW I it suffered heavy losses to its shipping, and was occupied for five years by the Third Reich during the WW II. In 1949, partly due to its failure to maintain its traditional policy of neutrality in the war, Norway became a founding member of the NATO and the UN.

It is this activism in international affairs, which catapulted Norway to take a leading role in hosting the Oslo Accords (1993) towards resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Accords affirmed a Palestinian right of self-government within those areas through the creation of a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority. Palestinian rule was to last for a five-year interim period during which "permanent status negotiations" would commence - no later than May 1996 - in order to reach a final agreement.

The aim of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations was to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority, an elected Council, for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and 338, an integral part of the whole peace process. As we all know by now, Israel, through a series of terrorist and criminal activities (namely, the massacre of praying Palestinians in Masjid Ibrahimi in Hebron by a Zionist terrorist Baruch Goldstein, criminal blockades and the illegal settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories), sabotaged the true intent and purpose of the Accords. It was this implosion of hatred of the ‘other’ people which ultimately led to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, a signatory to the peace Accords, by another Zionist terrorist.

In recent months, while the Obama Administration of the USA has been trying to blackmail the Palestinian people, threatening to Veto their cause in the UN, Norway and its progressive leadership have been reclaiming its global leadership by endorsing their "perfectly legitimate" aspirations to live as a free nation. "We will consider very carefully the proposed text that's to be put forward by the Palestinians in the coming weeks," said Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas beside him at a press conference. Stoere however left little doubt about his inclination. "I don't think that any Palestinians or anybody around the world are in doubt that Norway supports Palestinians' right to statehood," he said. He and Abbas signed a document upgrading the Palestinian Authority's representative in Norway to ambassadorial rank, as several other European nations have done.

It is probably this aspiring moral leadership role in the global arena, which triggered the latest carnage what was to become Norway’s worst calamity in the post WW II era. On Friday July 22, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year old son of a Norwegian diplomat, planted a car bomb at a ¬government building in Oslo, which killed eight, before driving to the island of Utoya, northwest of the capital, to shoot another 69 people dead and injure countless more at a Labour Party youth camp. The victims were all Norwegians including children of the immigrants. Breivik was later arrested by the Norwegian police, and confessed to the mass slaughter.

Published reports, including Breivik’s own Internet postings, show that he was a fundamentalist Christian-Zionist zealot who had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam, and was poisoned by the hateful blogs of pro-Israeli, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim provocateurs in Europe and America. In his 1500-page manifesto he wrote that he acquired some 8,000 e-mail addresses of “cultural conservatives” not just across Europe but North America, Australia, South Africa, Armenia, Israel, and India – ensuring scrutiny of anti-Muslim groups far beyond Europe.

Breivik’s primary goal was to remove Muslims from Europe. But his manifesto calls for a military cooperation with Jewish groups in Israel, Buddhists in China, and Hindu nationalist groups in India to contain Islam. He referenced India dozens of times. He lists the websites of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the NVO (National Volunteers’ Organisation), the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) as resources for further information about his bigotry. He included a five-page paper written by a man named Shrinandan Vyas -- a Hindutvadi extremist provocateur dedicated to distorting history and seeding anti-Muslim hatred (and, thus, providing the intellectual basis for the BJP’s politics of hatred and bigotry), who had falsely accused Muslims of committing genocide in the Hindu Kush. [As I have shown some years ago, the name Hindu Kush predates the emergence of Muslims into the territory.] He applauds Hindu groups who “do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control.” "It is essential that the European and Indian resistance movements learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible. Our goals are more or less identical," he wrote.

Breivik frequently posted his comments in several Norwegian internet sites, including the blog document.no, which is run by Hans Rustad, an extremist pro-Zionist Jew who warns against ‘Islamisation’ of Europe by Muslims. [As noted elsewhere by Gilad Atzmon, Islamophobes like Hans Rustad and Harry Place of the UK won’t criticize the Jewish Lobbies, the Lord Levy’s or the Russian Oligarchs’ disastrous impact on ‘Western culture’ or on ‘democratic values’ any time soon.] Breivik has said that the Dutch Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, the third-largest in the Netherlands and an informal member of the ruling coalition, is the only “true” conservative party in Europe. He also wrote approvingly of Stop Islamization of Europe and Pamela Geller, leader of its sister organization in the USA, who has been a leading figure in efforts to block the so-called World Trade Center mosque.

It is also obvious that Breivik did not operate in the vacuum and had a support group. His manifesto says he is among 12 “knights” fighting within a dozen regions in Europe and the US, but not India. His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch website, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among websites. Pamela Geller runs Atlas Shrugs. The Gates of Vienna is a blog that owes its name to the siege of Vienna in 1683 by Muslims who, the blog says in its head note, “seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe.” This was echoed in the title Breivik chose for his manifesto: “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” He chose that year, the 400th anniversary of the siege, as the target for the triumph of Christian forces in the European civil war he called for to drive out Islamic influence.

How real was that ‘threat’ from Muslims in Breivik’s native country? Norway has a population of 4.92 million of which nearly 4.04 million (82 %) are ethnic Norwegians, a figure that has steadily decreased since the late 20th century. Of the remaining 18 % population, 600,922 (12.2%) are either immigrants or Norwegians born to immigrant parents, and 282,082 (5.7%) have at least one ethnic Norwegian parent (including foreign born). Of this non-Norwegian immigrant community 48% is from other European countries (namely, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Russia and Lithuania). The Asians (including Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Turks), Africans, and others (Americas and Oceania) comprise only 4.26%, 1.5% and 0.62%, respectively, of the total population. The Muslim population is estimated to be 100,000, or roughly 2% of the total population, or 11% of the non-Norwegian community living in Norway. It is simply absurd to believe that such a meager number, mostly engaged in low-paying jobs in Norway, would destroy the Norwegian culture in what has been wrongly dubbed in 2009 as ‘stealth Islamization’ by Siv Jensen, the leader of the Progressive Party.

To understand Breivik’s terrorism, we must, thus, look into the selection of his targets. Much like the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an anti-government militant, he targeted government buildings in Oslo. He also targeted a youth camp that had held "BOIKOTT ISRAEL" sign. Why? It is not difficult to connect the dots here. To understand his ideology of hatred that enticed him to terrorism, we have to look into his manifesto that provides ample of citations from anti-Muslim bloggers.

- Asian Tribune -