Ever since Jared Loughner’s murderous attack in Tucson, Americans have been more sensitive to the way extreme political discourse can effect the deranged, paranoid and alienated, and how perverse inflammatory metaphors (gunsights, 2nd amendment solutions, watering the tree of liberty) can actually provide the ideas that feed political violence.
However, in Europe, obsessed as it is with Islamist demons, convinced of its own secular moderate rectitude, we’ve forgotten how easily the thin skin of tolerance is broached. In France, they ban niquab. In Switzerland, they ban minarets. Holland includes an Islamophobe bigot in its ruling parliamentary coalition. The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel talks about how ‘multiculturalism’ has failed. In Britain, the biggest threat to public order in the last few years has been hard line Islamphobic English Defence League which now targets Muslims (though Jews, Blacks and Gays are next in line).
Even the Prime Minister of Britain – itself a multinational, multiethnic, multi-denominational state for hundreds of years – David Cameron has joined this fashionable chorus of which somehow blames ‘multiculturalism’ as the cause of the rise of Islamist extremism.
Now these alarms have reaped their bitter harvest. With 92 people dead, the vast majority 16-19 year olds at a Labour summer camp, there is no doubt of the political aspect of Anders Brehing Breivik’s crime.
It was revealed that the 32-year-old former member of the country’s conservative Progress party – who had become ever more extreme in his hatred of Muslims, leftwingers and the country’s political establishment – had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser in May to be used in the bombing. While police continued to interrogate Breivik, who was charged with the mass killings, evidence of his increasingly far-right world-view emerged from an article he had posted on several Scandinavian websites, including Nordisk, a site frequented by neo-Nazis, far-right radicals and Islamophobes since 2009.
The Norwegian daily VG quoted one of Breivik’s friends, saying that he had become a rightwing extremist in his late 20s and was now a strong opponent of multiculturalism, expressing strong nationalistic views in online debates.
Breivik had talked admiringly online about conversations he had had with unnamed English Defence League members and the organisation Stop the Islamification of Europe (SIOE) over the success of provocative street actions leading to violence.
“I have on some occasions had discussions with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use certain strategies,” he wrote two years ago. “The tactics of the EDL are now to ‘lure’ an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already.”
Before the attacks, Breivik uploaded his manifesto to Youtube.