UPDATE: 3:06 PM , July 27, 2011
The Oslo Massacre should be seen as a warning to America that right wing Hate Speech against Muslims and liberalism may soon have violent consequences in America - and such violent terrorists attacks by Christian Supremacists will be downplayed by the Mainstream Media which has bought into this anti-Muslim extremism as if it were a rational response to Islam and liberalism. (GORD)
"The American public psyche has undergone a subtle but profound metamorphosis since 2001, moving from initial rage at the 9/11 mass murder to fear of another devastating attack by Muslim extremists to, most recently, a more generalized fear of Islam itself. That evolution from specific concerns to general stereotyping is the customary track of racism and xenophobia — and in Muslims, those inclined to bigotry may have found their perfect bogeyman.
Muslims are predominantly non-white. They practice an unfamiliar religion with unusual rituals. They are a small population in this land with a largely inconspicuous history here. They are regarded by many as a military enemy of the United States. They are perceived as a threat to the American social and cultural fabric. They have few ideological allies outside their own number. Never before has an American minority group had all of these factors arrayed against them."
Note to conservatives: Anders Breivik is a Christian
BY ALEX PAREENE at Salon.com
Christian Jihadists Timothy McVeigh And Anders Behring
Breivik
Question of the day: Has Islamophobia and Religious
Intolerance become the norm in Mainstream America???
Democracy Now! Amy Goodmann
Over 100,000 Norwegians gather for a memorial to victims of Christian Terrorist attacks .
They gathered in unity to defend their governments liberal and democratic values and that they refuse to change their systen to suit the values of those who are anti-pluralism, anti-Multiculturalism and anti-liberal Democratic values.
Meanwhile US media ignores story once it was it was known the Terrorists were not Muslims and were in fact Christian White Supremacists.
Glenn Greenwald Western Media's Hypocrisy and Racism
Interview begins at approximately the 34 minute mark til the end of clip.
Norway's official response one of defiance against the anti-liberal democracy ideology of these Racist Christian extremists who's pernicious ideology has gone mainstream in the USA and elsewhere in the West.
" Norway PM: 'We Must – and Will – Meet Terror with More Democracy, Not Less' Resilient and peaceful Norwegians won't allow attack to change their way of life" by y Adam Lee-Potter
Norway is in shock, but its 4.9 million people are a rugged, resilient race who will recover from this terrible attack on their shores, its leaders have vowed. Sunday Mirror /UK via Common Dreams, july 24, 2011
Robert Steinback at Southern Poverty Law Center (USA) takes on the often ignored issue of the outspoken hate mongering Islamophobes who have become part of the Mainstream Media especially in America.
The Massacre in Oslo is a direct result of the hate mongering not just of a few fanatical extremists but also by the Mainstream Media which often gives these extremists Islamophobes a soap box from which to spout their Wacko Conspiracy theories about the connection between Islamic Jihadists and Liberal democratic notions such as tolerance, pluralism, multiculturalism and religious freedom.
The Islamophobes include bloggers and writers and faux scholars and political pundits and politicians such as Sara Palin, Pastor John Hagee, Pam Geller, Robert Spencer,Laura Ingraham, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Malkin,Ann Coulter, Michael Savage , Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Fox News , Washington Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal etc..
So as we can see the peddlers of this Hate Mongering have moved into the Mainstream Media in America and are treated not as loony racists but as having a reasonable view based upon actual facts and evidence when in fact they are just the same old white Supremacists , racists who believe in the creation of a Christian Nationalist state akin to a theocracy.
Jihad Against Islam - The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle By Robert Steinback July 23, 2011 "SPLC"
Activists attacking Muslims and Islam are springing up around the country. But there's a core group of 10 hard-liners
- - Rarely has the United States seen a more reckless and bare-knuckled campaign to vilify a distinct class of people and compromise their fundamental civil and human rights than the recent rhetoric against Muslims.
It would also be hard to imagine a more successful campaign. In the span of the two years since the start of Barack Obama's presidency in early 2009, an astonishing number of people have turned into a kind of political wolf pack, convinced that 0.6% of the U.S. population is on the verge of trampling the Constitution and imposing an Islamic, Shariah-guided caliphate in its place. Like the communists that an earlier generation believed to be hiding behind every rock, infiltrated "Islamist" operatives today are said to be diabolically preparing for a forcible takeover.
Ironically, the Constitution seems more threatened by certain Americans who, prodded into paranoia by clever activists, opportunistic politicians and guileful media players, seem downright eager to deny Muslims the guarantees of religious freedom and the presumption of innocence.
"As an American Muslim, what is of most concern to me is that it is no longer only a small cadre of dedicated Islamophobes who are expressing bigotry and even hatred towards the American Muslim community — but sadly, also many among our elected representatives and government officials," Sheila Musaji, moderator of the website The American Muslim, wrote in an E-mail to the Intelligence Report. "It provides a veneer of respectability and reasonableness to what would otherwise be more easily perceived to be outright bigotry."
And that bigotry has consequences. Recent news reports strongly suggest a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes. In May 2010, for example, a bomb exploded at an Islamic center in Jacksonville, Fla. In August, a man slashed the neck and face of a New York taxi driver after finding out he was a Muslim. Four days later, someone set fire to construction equipment at the future site of an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tenn. This March, a radical Christian pastor burned a Koran in Gainesville, Fla., leading to deadly riots in Afghanistan that left at least 20 people dead. Hate crime statistics for 2010 won't be released by the FBI until the fall, but it appears certain they will show increasing violence against Muslims.
The American public psyche has undergone a subtle but profound metamorphosis since 2001, moving from initial rage at the 9/11 mass murder to fear of another devastating attack by Muslim extremists to, most recently, a more generalized fear of Islam itself. That evolution from specific concerns to general stereotyping is the customary track of racism and xenophobia — and in Muslims, those inclined to bigotry may have found their perfect bogeyman.
Muslims are predominantly non-white. They practice an unfamiliar religion with unusual rituals. They are a small population in this land with a largely inconspicuous history here. They are regarded by many as a military enemy of the United States. They are perceived as a threat to the American social and cultural fabric. They have few ideological allies outside their own number. Never before has an American minority group had all of these factors arrayed against them.
"Exploiting a Tragedy" By Stephen M. Walt at Foreign Policy via Information Clearing House, July 25, 2011
July 25, 2011 "Foreign Policy" - -July 24, 2011 -- As soon as the shocking and tragic news from Norway hit the airwaves, it was entirely predictable that various right-wing Islamophobes would type first and think later. They were so eager to exploit the tragedy to peddle their pre-existing policy preferences that they blindly assumed the acts had to have been perpetrated by al Qaeda, by its various clones, or by some other radical Muslim group.
This is the sort of bias one expects from an ideologue like Jennifer Rubin (who gets taken to task for her rush-to-judgment by James Fallows here). Sadly, it is also not out of character for the supposedly respectable Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has been a reliable source of threat-mongering and distortion for years. Even as Norwegian officials were cautioning that they had no reason to suspect Islamist groups, the Journal was plunging ahead with an editorial entitled "Terror in Oslo," which drew the following utterly bogus conclusion:
Norway certainly did not buy itself much grace from the jihadis for staying out of the Iraq war, or for Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's demand that Israel open its borders with Gaza, or for his calls for a Palestinian unity government between Fatah and its terrorist cousin Hamas.
Norway can do all this and more, but in jihadist eyes it will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West. For being true to these ideals Norwegians have now been made to pay a terrible price."
Given that remarkable statement, the Journal's editors must have been deeply disappointed to learn that the person who was actually charged in the case, Anders Behring Breivik, was not in fact a jihadi, a critic of Israel, or even a Muslim. Instead, he is a right-wing Norwegian Islamophobe who is reportedly obsessed with the dangers of multi-culturalism and a contributor to extremist websites like Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs. In other words, he's the sort of person who might well subscribe to the Wall Street Journal not for its coverage of the business world, but for its predictably hardline editorial "insight."
As I write this (Saturday noon EDT), the editorial has still not been removed from the WSJ website and no apology or retraction has been issued. The Journal and its editors are obviously free to continue to sow the seeds of hatred and paranoia, but the rest of us are equally free to view them with appropriate contempt. And let us also take time to reflect on Norway's sorrow, and to remember that hatred and violence can erupt from many directions.
UPDATE: Obviously aware of the egg on its face, the Journal has posted a rewritten version of the editorial on its website here. Note the marked absence of any apology for its initial rush-to-judgment. You can find a fascimile of the original editorial here. And for an interesting commentary suggesting that right-wing hate-mongering websites might have contributed to the murderous mind-set behind the attack, see Paul Woodward's War in Context here.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University
--The Greater Threat: Christian Extremism From Timothy McVeigh to Anders Breivik
by Pierre Tristam Commondreams ,July 25, 2011
Those two jihadists—two right-wing reactionaries, two terrorists, two anti-government white supremacists, two Christians—have a lot in common, down to the way the massacres they carried out were first mistaken for the work of Islamists by an American press rich in zealotry of its own. And they have a lot more in common with the fundamentalist politicians and ideologues among us who pretend to have nothing to do with the demons they inspire.
After the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, speculation flew on television news stations about Arab terrorists seen in the vicinity of the federal building. The thought that a home-grown, Midwestern Army veteran of the first Gulf war could possibly murder 168 people, including 19 children at a day care center, seemed as foreign as those Islamic lands that were then inspiring so much of bigotry’s latest American mutant. McVeigh turned out to be as all-American as he could possibly be, with extras. His paradoxical worship of the Second Amendment was the faith that fueled his hatred of a government he felt had betrayed American ideals by enabling what he called “Socialist wannabe slaves.” His idealism of a golden-age white America was the Christian translation of al-Qaeda’s idealized caliphate.
It became quickly evident that the bombing in Oslo and the massacre on Utoya Island on Friday had been carried out by Anders Breivik, who surrendered to police 40 minutes after beginning his killing spree on the island. Yet the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on Saturday putting the blame for the attack on Islamist extremists, because “in jihadist eyes,” the paper said, “it will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West."
The paper subsequently amended its editorial to concede that Breivik “was an ethnic Norwegian with no previously known ties to Islamist groups.” But the rest of the piece still framed the attack in the context of Islamist terrorism. It’s a common tactic at the Journal and Fox News—co-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-riddled News Corp.—where facts are incidental to ideology. It is enough for the Journal to insinuate a connection for its Foxified audience to catch the drift and run with it. Breivik may be Norwegian. But he wouldn’t be doing what he did if it weren’t for the pollution of white, Christian European blood by Muslims and multiculturalists, by leftists, by Socialist wannabe slaves.
McVeigh and Breivik are bloody reminders that Western culture’s original sin—the presumption of supremacy—is alive and well and clenching many a trigger. It’ll be easy in coming days, as it was in 1995, to categorize the demons as exceptions unrepresentative of their societies. Easy, but false. Norway, like much of Europe, like the United States, is in the grips of a disturbing resurgence of right-wing fanaticism. “The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity,” The Times reports, “has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals."
Frank Schaeffer traces connections between the Islamophobes , the Religious Right, The Tea Party movement and the GOP. He also argues that there is a direct connection between the domestic terrorists and the hate filled violent and incendiary rhetoric Christian Right .
In the article he refers to his own personal experiences when he was involved with the Religious Right and that his father Francis Schaeffer had in his writings and speeches indicated that if change cannot come about by peaceful means then True Christians would have to resort to violence. And now Frank Schaeffer the West is now experiencing as in the Oslo Massacre the consequences of such violent rhetoric.
These "True Christians " Evangelical Fundamentalists believe that God and Jesus are on their side and that any actions they take will be a fulfillment of God's Law.
It is difficult to differentiate between the Islamic terrorists who believe God/Allah is on their side and the Religious Christian Right who also believe they are doing God's Will.
" Why We Should Worry About Right-Wing Terror Attacks Like Norway's in the US " by: Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet July 24, 2011
There is a history to the far right, religious right extremism on the rise today, extremism so extreme that in its congressional manifestation it is risking the good faith and credit of the US in the debt calling fiasco. The Tea Party activists also want purity of doctrine.
My family was part of the far right/violent right's rise in the 1970s and 80s when we helped create the "pro-life" movement come into existence that in the end spawned the killers of abortion providers. These killers were literally doing what we'd called for.
The terror unleashed on Norway - and the terror now unleashed by the Tea Party through Congress as it holds our economy hostage to extremist "economic" theories that want to destroy our ability to function -- is the sort of white, Christian; far right terror America can expect more of.
The "Christian Brotherhood"
Call this the ultimate "Tea Party" type "answer" to secularism, modernity, and above all our hated government. Call this the Christian Brotherhood. From far right congress people, to far right gun-toting terror in Norway and here at home, our own Western version of the Taliban is on the rise.
Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party.
It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock "faith," second only to faith in Jesus.
To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics -- people like Michele Bachmann -- don't want to work within our system, they want to bring it down along the lines of so-called Christian "Reconstruction." (See my book for a full account of what this is.)
In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government. The right even decided that it was "normal" for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies -- even for military operations ("contractors"), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.
...The Far Right intellectual enablers began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings, and so forth. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which--in the eyes of a dangerous and growing (mostly white lower class undereducated gun-toting) minority--the very legitimacy of the U.S. government was called into question, sometimes in paranoid generalities, but often with ridiculous specificity: for instance, in the persistent lie that President Obama was not a citizen or was a Muslim or that the Federal Reserve and/or United Nations were somehow involved in a plot to "take away our freedoms" or that sensible gun control equaled "tyranny."
Terror for Christ
It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, "The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control."
...Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father's 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, or for that matter a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party or those by Michele Bachmann, or Robert George or his follower Glenn Beck.
In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany.
Note the ominous rhetorical shadow Dad's book cast over a benighted and divided American future, a future that produced the climate of hate that eventually spawned the murder of abortion providers such as Dr. George Tiller in Wichita in 2009 and the threat of destroying America's credit in an effort to literally defund the USA.
Here's a bit from Manifesto on how the government was "taking away" our country and turning it over to Liberals, codenamed by Dad as "this total humanistic way of thinking":
"The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population..."
And this:
"Simply put, the Declaration of Independence states that the people, if they find that their basic rights are being systematically attacked by the state, have a duty to try and change that government, and if they cannot do so, to abolish it."
Then this:
"There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. . . . A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion. . . . It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation."
In other words, Dad's followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler's Germany--because of legal abortion and of the forcing of "Humanism" on the population--and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the "appropriate response" to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a "counterfeit state."
and Schaeffer ends his article with a warning of more violence coming in America not by Muslims but by The Religious Right:
In a country awash in weapons and wallowing in the rhetoric of rebellion against an "evil" government, sporadic outbursts of murder tinged with political overtones seem as inevitable as they seem horribly "normal."
It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to foresee a day when a "secessionist" group and/or members of some "militia"--let alone one lone individual--will use their U.S. passports, white skins, and solid- citizen standing as a cover for importing a weapon of mass destruction to "liberate" the rest of us from our federal government's "tyranny" and/or to "punish" some city like New York, known as the U.S. "abortion capital" or San Francisco as the place that "those gays have taken over." And the possibility of an assassination in the same vein is a never-ending threat.
What we fear most from Islamist terrorists will be unleashed here as it was in Norway.
Terror is on the way on the way from our very own Christian and/or Libertarian "Tea Party" type activists inspired by right wing "Christian" intellectuals and political leaders like Bachmann who - after the killing starts -- will then disown them and express horror at their actions, actions that are in fact the logical extension of the anti-government rhetoric spewing from Congress and the religious right.
also see Alex Kane's article in which he argues there is a connection between Islamophobia, racism and Pro-Israel Zionism.
The Norway Massacre and the nexus of Islamophobia and Right-wing Zionism
By Alex Kane
July 23, 2011 "Mondoweiss" - - Details on the culprit behind yesterday's massacre in Norway, which saw car bombings in Oslo and a mass shooting attack on the island of Utoya that caused the deaths of at least 91 people, have begun to emerge. While it is still too early for a complete portrait of the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, there are enough details to begin to piece together what's behind the attack. Although initial media reports, spurred on by the tweets of former State Department adviser on violent extremism Will McCants, linked the attacks to Islamist extremists, it was in fact an anti-Muslim zealot who committed the murders. An examination of Breivik's views, and his support for far-right European political movements, makes it clear that only by interrogating the nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism can one understand the political beliefs behind the terrorist attack. Breivik is apparently an avid fan of U.S.-based anti-Muslim activists such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes, and has repeatedly professed his ardent support for Israel. Breivik's political ideology is illuminated by looking at comments he posted to the right-wing site document.no, which author and journalist Doug Sanders put up. Here's a sampling of some of Breivik's comments:And then we have the relationship between conservative Muslims and so-called "moderate Muslims".There is moderate Nazis, too, that does not support fumigation of rooms and Jews. But they're still Nazis and will only sit and watch as the conservatives Nazis strike (if it ever happens). If we accept the moderate Nazis as long as they distance themselves from the fumigation of rooms and Jews?Now it unfortunately already cut himself with Marxists who have already infiltrated-culture, media and educational organizations. These individuals will be tolerated and will even work asprofessors and lecturers at colleges / universities and are thus able to spread their propaganda.For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies...(page 2-3)What is globalization and modernity to do with mass Muslim immigration?And you may not have heard and Japan and South Korea? These are successful and modern regimes even if they rejected multiculturalism in the 70's. Are Japanese and South Koreans goblins?Can you name ONE country where multiculturalism is successful where Islam is involved? The only historical example is the society without a welfare state with only non-Muslim minorities (U.S.)...(page 7)We have selected the Vienna School of Thought as the ideological basis. This implies opposition to multiculturalism and Islamization (on cultural grounds). All ideological arguments based on anti-racism. This has proven to be very successful which explains why the modern cultural conservative movement / parties that use the Vienna School of Thought is so successful: the Progress Party,Geert Wilders, document and many others...(page 13)I consider the future consolidation of the cultural conservative forces on all seven fronts as the most important in Norway and in all Western European countries. It is essential that we work to ensure that all these 7 fronts using the Vienna school of thought, or at least parts of the grunlag for 20-70 year-struggle that lies in front of us.The book is called, by the way 2083 and is in English, 1100 pages).To sums up the Vienna school of thought:-Cultural Conservatism (anti-multiculturalism)-Against Islamization-Anti-racist-Anti-authoritarian (resistance to all authoritarian ideologies of hate)-Pro-Israel/forsvarer of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries- Defender of the cultural aspects of Christianity- To reveal the Eurabia project and the Frankfurt School (ny-marxisme/kulturmarxisme/multikulturalisme)- Is not an economic policy and can collect everything from socialists to capitalists...(page 20)Daniel Pipes: Leftism and Islam. Muslims, the warriors Marxists Have Been praying for.link to www.youtube.comThe following summarizes the agenda of many kulturmarxister with Islam, it explains also why those on death and life protecting them. It explains so well why we, the cultural conservatives,are against Islamization and the implementation of these agendas... (page 27)We must therefore make sure to influence other cultural conservatives to come to our anti-rasistiske/pro-homser/pro-Israel line. When they reach this line, one can take it to the next level...(page 41)
Breivik's right-wing pro-Israel line, combined with his antipathy to Muslims, is just one example of the European far-right's ideology, exemplified by groups such as the English Defense League (EDL). The EDL, a group Breivik praises, along with the anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, share with Breivik an admiration for Israel. Anti-Muslim activists and right-wing Zionists share a political narrative that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a "clash of civilizations," one in which Judeo-Christian culture is under attack by Islam. Israel, in this narrative, is the West's bulwark against the threat that Islam is posing to Europe and the United States. The nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism was clearly on display during last summer's"Ground Zero mosque" hysteria, which culminated in a rally where Geller and Wilders addressed a crowd that included members of the EDL waving Israeli flags. This comment by Breivik is one example of the twisted way in which Islamophobia and a militant pro-Israel ideology fit together:Cultural conservatives disagree when they believe the conflict is based on Islamic imperialism,that Islam is a political ideology and not a race.Cultural conservatives believe Israel has a right to protect themselves against the Jihad.Kulturmarxistene refuses to recognize the fact that Islam's political doctrine is relevant and essential. They can never admit to or support this because they believe that this is primarily about a race war - that Israel hates Arabs (breed).As long as you can not agree on the fundamental perceptions of reality are too naive to expect that one to come to any conclusion.Before one at all can begin to discuss this conflict must first agree on the fundamental truths of Islam's political doctrine.Most people here have great insight in key Muslim concepts that al-taqiiya (political deceit), naskh (Quranic abrogation) and Jihad. The problem is that kulturmarxister refuses to recognizet hese concepts.They can not recognize these key Muslim concepts. For if they do so erodes the primary argument that Israel is a "racist state" and that this is a race war (Israelis vs. Arabs) and not defense against Jihad (Kafr vs. Ummah)
and so it goes,
GORD.
