Utøya Horror

My heart grieves for the families affected by the atrocities in and around Oslo, Norway.

As with any terrible occurrence, be it a natural disaster or a cold-blooded murder spree, the meaning is up to those who survive and those who look on. In this case, I find it more than a little unsettling how quickly so many media sources assumed Islamic terrorists were behind what is turning out to be a politically motivated hate crime of the highest order.

We can deduce from social networking clues that Anders Behring Breivik, aka "Andrew Berwick", considered himself to be a force. Indeed, his one and only tweet, posted the day before the massacre, is a quote from John Stuart Mill: "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

What were Breivik's beliefs? Do you want the long version, which runs over FIFTEEN HUNDRED PAGES, impeccably organized and endnoted, a compendium astounding in its seeming respectability through very long stretches? Or do you want the short version, which can perhaps be summarized thus: Marxism is evil, Muslims are evil, multiculturalism is evil, and "armed resistance is the only rational option" (pp. 791 et seq.)?

Here's something in between the two...

What I find most terrifying about this compendium is how coherent it is. This isn't random gibberish. In fact, I have heard most of this argued before. It is something of a dark irony that many of the people I have run across on right-leaning forums--the ones who unfailingly blamed Islamic terrorists before the bullets had even stopped flying--would likely have embraced Breivik and his hateful ideology: he reads in many places for all the world like Mark Steyn.

There are, I fear, a great many American citizens who would empathize with Breivik's cause. I suspect you'll find quite a few in Arizona, given the outrage there over a perfectly ordinary Arabic word--haboob, the actual meteorological term for a dust storm. This, too, scares me. It's not near as far a road as you'd think from banning words to burning people. Especially in times of stress, like, say, what America's going through right now.

Now, granted, Islam is not exactly the religion of peace it claims to be. And anyone suggesting one crazed Christian/white supremacist somehow "makes up for" over 17,000 known Islamic terror attacks in the past decade is just being foolish. But people, whatever their faith or lack of it, are individuals and should be treated as such. We need to be vigilant against those of whatever religious or political stripe who would kill to advance their cause, while bearing in mind that such people represent a tiny minority. If we overreact, then, to borrow somebody's phrase, "the terrorists win".