When I saw this headline this morning in the WSJ — “Inside the Mind of the Oslo Murderer” — I thought, “Here we go again, with someone presuming to know something he couldn’t really know.”
I was wrong. You might want to go read it. It’s written by a guy who apparently helped inspire the shooting suspect:
But I was stunned to discover on Saturday that Breivik was a reader of my own work, including my book “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.” In comments posted in 2009 on a Norwegian blog, document.no, Breivik expressed admiration for my writings, but criticized me for not being a cultural conservative (although he was pleased that I was not a Marxist, either)….
In his manifesto, which is written in such good English that one wonders whether he had the assistance of a native speaker, Breivik quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times. It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo.
It is also chilling to see the way he moves from a legitimate concern about genuine problems to an unspeakably evil “solution.”…
That’s gotta make a guy think twice about what he’s written.
It did not change the writer’s mind, however. And it would be facile to say that it should have. Of course, he may advocate many offensive ideas — I don’t know, not having read his books. But the fact is, Islamism does present a challenge to liberal societies. The main challenge being how to absorb large numbers of people whose cultural frame of reference is at odds with liberal values, without losing sight of those values.
Related Posts
But the fact is, Islamism does present a challenge to liberal societies.
-Brad
To folks that subscribe to the traditional Christianity social profile that statement may make some sense. Frankly to those of us in the minority, non-Christian world Islam is really no more difficult to deal with than something as equally bizarre, like say the Catholic Church. It all depends on one’s perspective.
That’s an aside. The real problem is folks that continue to write these kinds of thinly veiled hate documents then act surprised when lunatics act on them. We can’t sensor offensive writings but we can certainly condem them. Perhaps if this stuff wasn’t becoming mainstream their credibility would not be so influenctial.
“I hoped Norwegian leaders would respond to this act of violence by taking a more responsible approach to the problems they face in connection with Islam. When it emerged that these acts of terror were the work of a native Norwegian who thought he was striking a blow against jihadism and its enablers, it was immediately clear to me that his violence will deal a heavy blow to an urgent cause.”
-From the WSJ piece
We can only hope. Seriously, these kinds of people are a piece of work. They provide the inspiration for mass murder then proclaim that same “inspiration” is an “urgent cause”.
“The main challenge being how to absorb large numbers of people whose cultural frame of reference is at odds with liberal values, without losing sight of those values.” Well, first of all, there are examples of Islam and liberal-democratic values coexisting, if uneasily. Secondly, “uneasy coexistence” is not a bad way to describe the relationship between orthodox Christianity and liberal-democratic values in this country: that’s a challenge too. While Christian terrorists like Brevick and McVeigh seem to be more rare than Islamic manifestations of terrorism (at THIS particular moment in history…in other eras it was different) we still have a less-violent but therefore perhaps politically-more-powerful strain of religious fundamentalism in this country, embodied by a number of very prominent political leaders, that represents a truly profound threat to America’s liberal-democratic values.
But it wouldn’t be right to execute the killer, right? I mean maybe he’s innocent, right?
These are the cases where I wish anti-death penalty people would use a little common sense. This guy is guilty and cannot be rehabilitated. To expend any resources aside from the cost of the bullet to kill him is an utter waste. (And I don’t know what Norway’s policy is on death penalty… )
Doug, there is no death penalty in Norway. The most he can get is 21 years — total. So this guy is probably wishing he’d killed more people while he was at it. And I say that as an opponent of the death penalty. Just because I hold a certain view doesn’t mean I don’t see the flaws in it, especially in such circumstances as this.
Phillip, I wasn’t talking about Islam. I said “Islamism.” I’m talking about a political position, which among other things tends toward the establishment of Sharia law.
And the position of Islamists — in significant numbers, and holding themselves apart — within Western democracies is quite different from that of religious conservatives in this country.
We’re talking about culture here. Protestant conservativism derives from sources that are quintessentially American, in no way alien. While these folks may claim too much and express it inelegantly when they say this is a “Christian nation,” we all know that the founder of this country were culturally Christian. Even the deists held their beliefs from a Christian cultural framework.
Islam is “the other” in European cultures in a way that Christian conservatism is not here. And militant Islamism is a force that is qualitatively at odds with the prevailing cultures.
It is ALSO at odds with MODERN European culture to leap from there to the point of wanting to bar, or persecute, such immigrants. (Although let’s face it, this tolerance is a fairly recent phenomenon in Europe.)
So European liberals (and remember, in every instance here, I’m using the term “liberal” correctly, as opposed to the way it is popularly used in this country) find themselves squirming in an uncomfortable position — between newcomers who don’t value modern liberalism, and atavistic members of their own homegrown cultures who respond with hostility to the newcomers. Both are at odds with the prevailing culture.
From a blog at The Washington Post:
“As in other European countries, the death penalty does not exist in Norway. Nor does Norway provide for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The maximum prison time under Norwegian law is 21 years, with the possibility of parole. (There is no provision for consecutive sentences.)”
Both are at odds with the prevailing culture.
-Brad
Huh? What prevailing culture? There are gazillions of different cultures in both Europe and the US. As for the US no particular culture is really “prevailing”. We have a drug “culture”, a religious “culture”, a gun “culture”. We are a melting pot with different folks with different beliefs, ideas, dress codes and the vast majority of these “cultures” seem strange to me. The Amish for instance seem especially strange. But they are hardly any kind of a threat. The hippies were a culture back in the 60s. They seemed to be a threat to Nixon’s silent majority. But in the end they turned out to be correct. (Vietnam was wrong and pot was harmless).
Brad, I’m sure you’re not intending it this way but this post is coming across as very chauvanistic. A kind of my way or the highway manifesto. Anyone who is different is a threat. Anyone who wears their hair different, has an accent or believes the law of the land should be different from what it is should be watched and perhaps tolerated but certainly not accepted as part of the prevailing, acceptable “culture”.
In the old south we accepted it as “culturally” correct to have separate drinking fountains and two state fairs because that was the prevailing “culture”. Frankly the threat of Sharia Law pails in comparison to the Tea Party movement. Yet in many respects the Tea Party comes pretty close to the prevailing “culture” as articulated by Brad and accepted by millions. And to me that’s a damn shame.
You know, it sometimes surprises me how much people don’t understand me after all this time.
I talk about the prevailing political culture of Western Europe — which is a definite, identifiable thing, quite distinguishable from the forms one sees predominating in Asia, Africa, Latin America or THIS country, or anywhere else you choose — and Bud thinks it’s about ME and what I identify with and what I think.
I am an observer. There are few things I look at and say, “That’s me!” It’s why I just can’t be comfortable with either of the political parties.
There are certain cultural identifiers in my use of English, and the fact that I’ve lived most of my life in this country. But I am acutely aware of such things, and stand back and look at them with a cold eye all the time. I constantly question my own assumptions, and it’s pretty silly for anyone to assume that I DON’T just because I don’t arrive at the same conclusions about them that they do…
I saw something just today Burl wrote years ago about what sociological oddities military brats are. And we are. And one of the ways we are is that we tend to look at the communities we live in as alien cultures. Even when we love them, even when we want to be part of them, we tend — when we’re growing up — to be outsiders, looking in. I think that’s one reason you find a lot of military brats among journalists. They are more likely to be observers than participants.
It’s why I’ve written that — apart from the rather unstable nuclear family situation, such as not really knowing his father growing up — I’ve always had a certain identification with Obama, as I wrote in that column in 08.
Obama has made certain decisions about identification — deciding to think of himself as black, deciding to be a liberal democrat — that are different from my own, but which I understand as DECISIONS. He may be totally committed to it — just as I am to being a South Carolinian, and a Catholic — but they were DECISIONS, not inevitabilities. It’s one reason why he has this cool detachment. He is not the prisoner of his points of view, and I am not either. I remember choosing them, and I remember all the alternatives, and I not a prisoner of cultural destiny — certainly not the way Bud, and some others, seem to think I am…
One barrier to communication in this regard is that people see me defend certain positions, or attack others, with such vehemence. That’s because I’ve considered the alternatives carefully, and value the conclusions more than I would were they simply prejudices, or habits of thought. I know why I think what I do, and how I got there, and why I ended up rejecting other positions on the issue in question.
So accuse me of all sorts of things with justice, but being some sort of narrow cultural chauvinist who looks at things unthinkingly and monolithically is not one of my sins.
Obama thinks of himself as Black? I wonder what gave him that idea.
Do you think if Obama decided to be white, he’d have an easier time?
Of all the decisions he ever made, I would imagine deciding to be black may have been the easiest.
First off, Obama couldn’t “pass” for white–he looks definitely on the black side of mixed race. In this country, thanks to Plessy v. Ferguson, that counts as black. No decision.
I cannot recall when I decided to be tall….
My earliest recollection in the womb was deciding to be left handed. That was right about the same time that I decided my current residence was too crowded and hot for my liking so I went out the only exit I could find.
Sorry, should not have written that last comment. Please delete, if you would.
I not a prisoner of cultural destiny — certainly not the way Bud, and some others, seem to think I am…
-Brad
Have you ever considered being an atheist? Have you ever entertained the idea of playing video poker? Do you wish to participate in wife swapping? Of course you’re a prisoner of cultural identity. Probably more so than just about anyone I’ve ever known. But then again so am I. I just accept it and move on.
OK, Herb, I took it down. But I don’t know what was wrong with it. That’s partly because I don’t think I understood it. I couldn’t tell what, or whom, you were referring to.
And bud…
Considered being an atheist? Sure. Considered playing video poker? Yep. I tried it once or twice back when they first appeared. WISH to participate in wife-swapping? No, but that’s because I’ve thought it through, and I can see that it would lead to unhappiness. (Every man, even Jimmy Carter, has thought about such things.)
But none of those are really cultural things. Oh, the atheism thing might have been, 100 or 200 years ago. It was socially unacceptable then. Not so now, at least not in the same way.
Still don’t buy the “choosing to be black” idea. Based on what you wrote, it appears he chose to ACT “black” (whatever that means). None of the choices he made (his wife, his community organizer job, his church) are choices that define his “blackness”. Are you seriously suggesting that he chose Michelle in order to meet some goal of achieving a higher black quotient?
Would he be any less “black” if he chose to listen to Bill Cosby than Richard Pryor? Or would he be more black if he listened to Amos and Andy records? My record collection in college consisted mainly of Earth, Wind, and Fire, The Gap Band, Teddy Pendergrass, Luther VanDross, etc. Was I just searching for my roots?
Was his choice of Harvard a decision to meet his 50% white requirement?
He didn’t choose to be black.
Maybe Norway can find a way to try him for a different murder every twenty years as this is a guy who should clearly never see the light of day again.
As much as I personally see this as a clear example of the appropriateness of capital punishment, how sad was it to see the killer’s father say he should have just killed himself instead of surrendering? There’s a guy who sounds like he himself ought to bear some responsibility for his son’s inhumanity.
I’d also say that one could substitute “Zionist”, etc. for “Islamist” to more clearly see just what kind of old order European the killer really is. That’s a lesson we also should not loose sight of.
As for those of you who think the idea that Obama DECIDED to be black… read his book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
In it, he describes essentially teaching himself to be “black” based on cultural references from the Mainland. You sort of have to have spent some of your youth in Hawaii to understand why those references have to be from the Mainland. I wrote about that in the 08 column referenced above, “Barack Like Me.”
This was a neutral-skinned kid being raised by his white grandparents, sometimes his white mother and to some small extent by his Indonesian stepfather. He had to listen to recordings of Richard Pryor, spend time with an older black mentor he managed to find and hang with the one actual black kid in his school, a guy who brought a lot of cultural stuff with him from the mainland.
Read the book. Read my column. That doesn’t mean you will view it the way I do. Burl probably won’t even view it the way I do, in spite of the similarities of our backgrounds (and Burl’s experience of Hawaii is far vaster than mine). But I’ve always felt a kinship to Obama as a guy who really didn’t naturally fit into any one cultural reference, and had options before him, choices to make.
I realize that from a mainland perspective, you look at pictures of Obama in high school (when he wore his hair longer), and you think, there’s a light-skinned “black” kid. But you know what? He didn’t have to live on the mainland (he could have picked Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, or some other cosmopolitan place where he had never been, such as London), and once he was here, he could have chosen to live in places and under circumstances in which such observations would have been odd. He didn’t have to be a community organizer, or to join Jeremiah Wright’s church, or marry a black woman. He’s a guy who could have remained ethnically vague, indistinct. He certainly has the intelligence and force of personality to have been an individual who did not need such identification.
Obama did not have to embrace ethnicity. And even though he did, he will always be haunted by accusations that he is “not black enough,” that in fact he is a sort of poseur. That, in fact, was a very widespread view before his momentum built up in late 2007 and early 2008 — after which people inclined to say that made their own decisions to embrace him as the guy with the potential to be the “first black president.” That has become an important part of the popular narrative, so you don’t hear “not black enough” much any more. But the factors that led people to say that are still there.
Doug’s argument is pretty persuasive. Not sure Obama was really all that focused on BEING “black” as oppossed to simply exploring that side of his biology as a sort of curiosity. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of his whiteness that could be cited.
I’m still trying to figure out how Obama decided to be a black man? Did he wake up one day and finally look in a mirror? Did he have other options? I don’t ever recall having to make a decision on whether or not to have to decide to be Asian, Caucasian, Indian, Black, etc.
I agree, he doesn’t use words carelessly… he reads the teleprompter word for word.
I’m not surprised that Doug doesn’t “buy the ‘choosing to be black’ idea.” I’m not surprised that Bud finds Doug’s position “pretty persuasive.”
We have different “cognitive styles.” I reach out and grab conclusions from a lot of seemingly unrelated or even vague phenomena, and am comfortable with that because I find that such conclusions are verified, when they are verifiable (often they are not; they are observations that you either accept on the basis of my having been right other times, or you don’t). Bud and Doug are more concrete thinkers; they want hard facts and figures and evidence that they can hold in their hands.
All I can offer them in this case are a couple of direct quotes from Obama’s book: first the one in which he described having realized as a youth “that I needed a race.” Then, within the context of his description of how he went about learning and embracing a racial identity (and that context is what I draw my conclusions from, more than the direct assertions, and that is how I’m different from Bud and Doug), he later wrote, “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”
Sounds awfully deliberate to me. And Obama, in case you haven’t noticed, is not a guy to use words carelessly.
Those direct quotes alone (particularly the latter one; the first is more oblique) support what I am saying here. But my assertions are based on broader evidence than that; they are based upon the entire thrust of his narrative about that time in his life.
Again, I urge you to go back and read my column about this, in which I explored these points more fully.
Mark, I too am an adament opponent of the death penalty. This is exactly the kind of horrible act that buttresses, rather than diminishes my opinion on it. I know that sounds rather contradictory but it seems to me that very public executions tend to give permission to these crazy killers to act on their impulses. They relish in the publicity of it all and ultimately find great satisfaction in knowing they will die as a sort of martyr for their actions. If we just throw them in the slammer and forget about them that removes some of the incentive to act out. In the end fewer such atrocities will result.
@Brad
I also think you should consider that maybe Obama is coming up with a narrative that is more compelling when told as the story of a black man becoming President. Hindsight can be much more intriguing when you are writing your own history. Sorry, but I am very doubtful that a young Barack Obama pondered what race he wanted to be and made a series of decisions (Today, I will watch “Good Times” and learn how to say “Dyn-o-Mite!”) to lead him on his journey to blackness.
It’s like me saying today that my failures to find a girlfriend in high school were a conscious decision to set myself up to marry my current wife.
He’s telling a story where he already knows the result.
Well, yeah — but most stories are told that way. If they’re not — if they are told midway through the described events — they are incomplete, and lack perspective. They’re great to mine later for authentic detail of what people were thinking and doing at the moment, but if you really want to figure out what happened, wait a bit.
That’s sort of the difference between journalism and history.
History normally requires some documentation and evidence.
We’re talking about a memoir, not history anyway. I could write a many different versions of my own memoirs depending on the message I wanted to craft.
I’m just highly skeptical of the idea that Obama chose to listen to Richard Pryor albums solely to strengthen his blackness. Same goes for your belief that he played basketball to up his “regular black guy” standing.
Back to the original topic of this post, a few lines from Human Rights Newsletter by Mazin Qumsiyeh:
“It is amazing how the spin media continues to spin. After the atrocity in Norway, they were quick to blame ‘Muslim terrorists.’ Then suddenly silence when it became clear that the attacker espoused Zionist and ultra-right views against Muslims, against Palestinians and against ‘multiculturalism.’
In fact hardly any mainstream newspaper reported that the Utoya Island youth camp targeted by this criminal had signs for ‘boycott Israel.’ No mainstream media used the language used when such a person happen to come from a Muslim background. We did not hear terms like ‘Christian Terrorist’ or ‘Norwegian fanatic’ or even ‘Zionist terrorist.’
See the full link at http://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2011/07/yes-men-and-more.html
Well, this thread is off the radar now, but I still post a link, in case somebody comes back to it.
Two things are noteworthy, I think. One is that Bud’s critique against religion as being a basis for such acts is off the mark. This was not really religiously motivated, but political. The article underscores that. Religion is in use here, but only in use; it is not foundational.
I asked that one comment to be taken down because it was too much frustration directed at Brad. I won’t go into the specifics; no need, anyway.
http://www.themediaproject.org/article/norway-massacre-born-ideology-or-belief?page=0,4