Electronic Intifada has a report on Anders Behring Breivik's (why do assassins always get three names?) self-penned manifesto which is online at NRK, Norway's public broadcaster, and has been put through a Google translator. In it, he portrays himself as a "martyr" and "resistance fighter" against a "Marxist-Islamist alliance" that would take over Europe if not stopped. He hoped his actions would inspire "thousands" to follow in his path and unleash "terror" attacks on mosques, especially during Muslim holy days. He called followers of the Labor Party "traitors" for their alleged support of "multiculturalism and Islamization." He also produced a charming little accompanying video, entitled "A European Declaration of Independence":
We especially love that Charles Martel is cited among his heroes—the founder of the Carolingian dynasty who famously defeated the Moors at the 732 Battle of Tours. We have noted before the unseemly Charles Martel fetish among Europe's contemporary Islamophobes. Nostalgia for the Dark Ages, just what we need. He also favorably invokes the Knights Templars—the Muslim-massacring extremist Crusader order that notoriously turned al-Aqsa mosque into their military headquarters during their occupation of Jerusalem. Even better.

A not-so-paradoxical unity of opposites. Like the Unabomber, Anders Behring Breivik really seems to have put a lot of effort into his lengthy manifesto, which is now online, "2083: A European Declaration of Independence." Here is a telling quote:

Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of a threat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists.

But this obsession with "Cultural Marxism" indicates that Breivik buys into a conspiracy theory with (at least) anti-Semitic roots. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a watchdog on the far right, told Crooks and Liars blog:

Based on online posts apparently by Anders Behring Breivik circulated in Norway, the alleged terrorist opposed multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants in Norway. Breivik championed opposition to "Cultural Marxism," a right-wing antisemitic concept developed primarily by William Lind of the US-based Free Congress Foundation, but also the Lyndon LaRouche network.

...The idea is that a small group of Marxist Jews who formed the Frankfurt School set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories. A key "Cultural Marxist" guru William Lind spoke at a Holocaust Denial conference, and worked at Free Congress Fdn. which sponsored a former Nazi collaborator, the late Laszlo Pasztor. See Bill Berkowitz article on Cultural Marxism for Intelligence Report at SPLC website.

Berlet is not off-base here because (amazingly) Breivik's manifesto actually mentions the Frankfurt School by name, as well some of its leading lights such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. And here's some of what Berkowitz wrote for the Southern Poverty Law Center:

At the core of the far right's concept of cultural Marxism are the Jews. Lind made this plain in June 2002, when he gave a speech on the subject to a Washington Holocaust denial conference hosted by the anti-Semitic journal, Barnes Review.

Although he told his audience that his Free Congress Foundation was "not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred," he went on to lay out just who the cultural conspirators were: "These guys," he explained, "were all Jewish."

[...]

Not everyone who uses the cultural Marxism construct sees Jews in general at the center of the plot. But a 1998 book by California State University-Long Beach evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald — one of just two witnesses to testify on behalf of Holocaust denier David Irving in a famous 2000 libel trial — makes plain that Jews in general are implicated in what is seen as an attack on the West.

In The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Social Movements, MacDonald says that while all Jews are not guilty, the movements he attacks are indeed "Jewishly motivated."

In a chapter devoted to the Frankfurt School, MacDonald suggests that Jews criticize non-Jews' desire to form "cohesive, nationalistic, corporate gentile groups based on conformity to group norms" — with Frankfurt School principals painting this desire as a psychopathology — while they hypocritically pursue cohesiveness in their own group.

To which Berlet adds:

The trope of Cultural Marxism combines this view of political economy with a narrow view of Christian superiority and an ethnocentric White Nationalism. In both sectors--Christian superiority and ethnocentric White Nationalism--there is a great fear of Muslim immigration.

Further evidence that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are genetically linked phenomena. If only more Jews (and Muslims) would realize this.

See our last post on the paradoxical politics of anti-Semitism.