The blood was not even dry from the July 22 coordinated bomb blast and shooting rampage in Oslo that left at least 94 dead before Britain's The Telegraph [2] was asking in a headline, "Oslo explosion: Is al-Qaeda behind this?" Among their specious arguments was that jihadis are still miffed over the Danish cartoon affair [3] and are too dumb to tell one Scandinavian country from another (perhaps in the same manner that Muslim-hating thugs in America beat up Sikhs [4]). The screed remains live on The Telegraph's website despite the fact that the accused perpetrator, one Anders Behring Breivik, appears to be a homegrown right-wing extremist in the style of Timothy McVeigh [5]—except, this being Europe in 2011, with a special Islamophobic twist...
AlJazeera [6] informs us:
The blond-haired Behring Breivik described himself on his Facebook page as "conservative", "Christian", and interested in hunting and computer games like World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2, reports say...
The suspect was reportedly also a member of a Swedish neo-Nazi internet forum, a group monitoring far-right activity said on Saturday.
Nordisk [7], a 22,000-member web forum founded in 2007, describes itself as a portal on the theme of "the Nordic identity, culture and traditions."
In comments from 2009-2010 to other people's articles on another website, Document [8], which calls itself critical of Islam, Breivik criticised European policies of trying to accommodate the cultures of different ethnic groups.
"When did multi-culturalism cease to be an ideology designed to deconstruct European culture, traditions, identity and nation-states?" said one his entries, posted on February 2, 2010.
Breivik wrote he was a backer of the "Vienna School of Thought", which was against multi-culturalism and the spread of Islam.
Breivik also expressed his support for Geert Wilders [9], but the Dutch xenophobic politician of course disavowed him. The seemingly enigmatic reference to the "Vienna School of Thought" (huh?) may be particularly instructive. A blogger on Democratic Underground [10] astutely notes that this could be a reference to the Gates of Vienna blog [11], "named after the time when Turkish forces got as far as the Gates of Vienna before being defeated." We have noted before that right-wing Islamphobes have a special fixation [12] on this historical circumstance, because the Austrian breaking of the Ottoman siege came on... Sept. 11, 1683!
The Gates of Vienna blog has run a rather disingenuous piece entitled "What Do We Know? [13]," bashing the "MSM" for having identified Breivik as "one of us." They are still harping on the jihadist thesis [14], even linking to a New York Times story which they say "quotes the Islamist group taking responsibility." But if you go to the actual New York Times story [15], it names a "lone political extremist... later identified as Anders Behring Breivik and characterized by officials as a right-wing extremist..." The only reference to jihadists comes toward the end:
Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.
And these Gates of Vienna jerks accuse the "MSM" of distortions? The Financial Times [16] adds:
Police said the suspect was of Norwegian origin and appeared to have a history of far-right and "Christian fundamentalist" views, as officials all but ruled out involvement by Islamic extremists.
Now why would somebody supposedly concerned with the integrity and survival of European "nation-states" blow up administrative buildings of his own government and shoot up a summer camp run by the ruling (center-left) Labor Party? That has to do with the muddled pseudo-revolutionary posture of early-stage fascism, a phenomenon we have explored at length [17].
See our last posts on Norway [18], Europe's Islamophobic backlash [19] and the global rise of the radical right [20].
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