Posted on 07/24/2011 9:58:09 PM PDT by presidio9
Friday's bombing in Oslo scattered debris across the square where Norwegians marked the first anniversary of 9/11 by lighting a torch for each of the thousands of victims.
The ceremony was all the more touching because Norway was not among the 54 countries that lost somebody at the World Trade Center.
Now, as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 nears, Oslo itself has gotten a taste of terror. Anders Behring Breivik followed the bombing with a shooting spree on a nearby island camp. He ended up killing at least 92 people and he is rightly called a murderer.
Some compare him to America's own Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 in Oklahoma and is also rightly called a murderer.
Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden and his gang kill nearly 3,000 in downtown Manhattan and they are called combatants. As if flying hijacked planes into occupied office towers were combat and not just murder simply because more than one killer was involved.
The danger of calling murderers anything other than murderers is that it blinds us to the ultimate enemy.
Our biggest threat is not Islam but extremism itself. And extremism among Muslims is essentially no different in its ends as well as its means from the extremism of right wing loners such as Breivik and McVeigh.
Be it radical Islamic fundamentalism, or radical right wing conservatism, extremism is not driven by the particular cause but by the twisted needs and desires of the particular perpetrator.
Bin Laden was his mother's only boy, but the 17th of his father's 54 kids. I have to figure that jihad for him had more to do with standing out than standing up for Islam.
Take any Al Qaeda operative and you are sure to find a similar pathology. Mohamed Atta flew the first plane into the trade center and his father's reaction was, "It couldn't be him. He's too weak."
McVeigh initially sought to make himself into a big man by trying out for Special Forces, but he washed out. He then decided to become more than just another loser by detonating a rental truck full of fertilizer soaked in fuel oil.
Breivik's motivation was made clear by the single tweet from his new Twitter account. It was a quote from the 18th century John Stewart Mill, semiaccurate, but truer in text than context:
"One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."
That was posted on July 17, five days before this 32-year-old mama's boy went on his rampage. The force is clearly more important to Breivik than whatever the belief happens to be.
All the poison he spewed about Muslims and immigration and the purity of Norwegian culture was just a pretext. What he really wanted was to be a big guy.
In this, he is brother to both Bin Laden and McVeigh. For them, the belief was also just a pretext for exercising the force of 100,000, an excuse to commit inexcusable violence and experience the rush of supreme power that psychopaths derive from killing innocents.
When I first heard of the bombing in Oslo, I remembered that Bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, once called for action against Norway. Some observers thought at the time that perhaps he had confused Norway with Denmark. Friday's slaughter initially seemed to prove he must have meant Norway after all.
Then word came that the slaughter was not the work of Al Qaeda or any other jihadis, but a lone Norwegian.
Breivik does seem to have adopted Al Qaeda's strategy of staging multiple attacks. He also appears to have employed a McVeigh-style bomb, which was in turn inspired by the one employed by Islamic fundamentalists in the first World Trade Center bombing.
Breivik decided to top it with a shooting spree such has been mounted by various terrorists and maniacs bent on getting a double rush of power and attention. At least nobody is calling him a combatant or otherwise trying to make him into anything more than a murderer.
We should remember to gather outside our city hall next July and mark the first anniversary of the attack in Oslo by lighting a candle for each of their murdered innocents.
And we should never lose sight of the real enemy.
The difference between bin Laden and Breivik (which the News never fails to identify as "right wing" in every on of its articles) is that bin Laden specifically declared war on the US, and let us know that he planned continued attacks after 9/11. Until followers of Breivik repeat his attack elsewhere, he and bin Laden don't have all that much in common.
And I'm curious to know if Breivik supports some or any of his culture's socialist entitlement policies. Hard core righties tend to reject them.
An economic liberal is necessarily a socialist, as liberal economics function on debt, government spending and entitlement programs, and can never be sustained. Therefore, liberal economics constantly requires more goverment coercion to produce necessary revenue, inevitably deteriorating into full blown Marxism and a complete crash.
A proper anti Marxist knows this, so we have an impossible conflict in philosophy in the manifesto proving deception on one of the points, if not the purpose of the entire document.
The above statement is totally wrong because muslim extremist(if they are extremist)are far more numerous per one hundred thousand muslims than right wing extremist(and this guy was not a right winger)per one hundred thousand right wingers.
99% of terrorist attacks(murderous attacks)are done by muslims. If you count this Norwegian as a right winger(which he isn't)and McVeigh as a right winger then we have two right wing extremist attacks in the last 50 years compared to thousands of muslim extremist attacks over the same period. There is no comparison.
Were there no grownups there to defend the helpless? No boy scouts? Was no one there to group together and plan how to take this guy down? For him to be allowed to just walk around aimlessly picking people off is tragic. I just don’t understand how no small group could make a plan in that amount of time - 90 minutes? a group of people rushing him from all directions with whatever they had available, stick, rocks, pots, pans, fists, knees, elbows....I don’t understand how it wasn’t done. When seconds count, the police are 90 minutes away.....
In realpolitik, Islam bears careful watching because it has bred more “extremism” than any other single extant ideology. Almost unique to Islam is a built in imperative to take over the world by force, together with a credible mass of humanity behind it. Nazism flirted with a similar dream of globalism, but it was too novel and had too many dedicated opponents to succeed. Other “extremism”-prone organizations like skinheads or KKK generally are happy to remain local.
“Our biggest threat is not Islam but extremism itself.”
So, a person who is extremely opposed to Islam taking over the world is om the same moral plane as a Mooselimb extremist.
Camel hockey.
We *need* some extremism on our side of the fight.
How many acts of “extremism” in the form of terrorism have occurred since 2001 and predominately by what group? =.=
Not sure where you’re coming from on that one.
See Many young politicians are still missing after yesterday's massacre.
Simple use of Google or any other search mechanism will answer the question I asked: Acts, or attempted acts, of extremism, in the form of terrorism, has been largely perpetuated by those who claim to adhere to Islam.
This man is an idiot. Islam's prime goal it to murder or enslave every individual that isn't Islamic. In our Western culture Breivik's or McVeigh's acts of murder is an aberration, yet within Islam murder of the non-Muslim is an act of grace to gain Allah's mercy.
“Simple use of Google or any other search mechanism will answer the question I asked: Acts, or attempted acts, of extremism, in the form of terrorism, has been largely perpetuated by those who claim to adhere to Islam.”
Yes, I know that. What I was wondering is what your reply had to do with what I said.
My comment was not necessarily to you but was to what you quoted: “Our biggest threat is not Islam but extremism itself.”
True enough, he does describe himself as economically liberal.
Here’s the definition of “economically liberal “from wikipedia:
Economic liberalism is the economic component of classical liberalism. It is one the main components of the ideology of capitalism. It is an economic philosophy that supports and promotes laissez-faire economics and private property in the means of production. Although economic liberalism can be supportive of government regulation to a certain degree, it tends to oppose government intervention in the free market when it inhibits free trade and open competition. Economic liberalism opposes economic planning as an alternative to the market mechanism. Economic liberalism contrasts with mercantilism, state capitalism, socialism, market socialism, and fascist economics (Corporatism) . www.wikipedia.org
That being said, he did claim to be opposed to globalistic capitalism, which he felt was too cozy with multiculturalism, and responsible for mass immigration due to the need for ever-cheaper labor.
“My comment was not necessarily to you but was to what you quoted: “Our biggest threat is not Islam but extremism itself.””
Ah. So we agree that this is outrageous drivel.
I feel no more remorse about this "camp" getting shot up than I would if someone took out an Al Queda run madrassa.
THey have the manifesto in common. Some people out there are fascinated by death and these types of people, and liberal nuts tend to respect their opinions, when it all is about reorienting the policies of entire swaths of people. Bin Laden wanted control of the USA through terror, to influence our policies. The manifesto was BS and could change any other time.
How could we let that happen as a matter of precedent? BUsh did the right thing and had the right instincts to fire back, thank goodness.
Furthermore, folkes like Breivik might have been shunned but they could still be heard, or they could still have oriented the media attention via other “tricks” than murdering a bunch of kids. THis is disgusting.
Hence the true manifesto was not what was written but the murder of people itself, ie. the genocide and inherent wish of feeling superior and destroying targets to be condemned, written in the flesh of the bleeding to death. It was not about wishing them success or correction, so to speak, but outright destruction and revolution.
This is the baseline of the leftist concept, and this is why the left is inherently evil, because it does not merely embrace it like a Hitler, it wants to control and infect people and possess them to make them do these things. IT is straight diabolical in the seeking of immunity from consequences, sitting in safe spot while manifesting all these things.
This is where BUsh erred too. To be in charge is not necessarily to be successful. When he said to Zero “we want you to be successful”, many heard that he was associating success with being in charge and pimping people. This was the most damning media distorted statement, and BUsh should have known better. I just do not get it.
It’s not about Zero being unsuccessful or a foreigner, it is about him accepting corrections, accepting to the fact that he should not be in charge, period. THat does not mean failure, but vanity in the heart of people suggests otherwise. Success is when one lets the good prevail even if it does not come from us.
When we said we did not want him or a Bin Laden or a Breivik to be in charge of us, it really meant not for them to be failures. BUt the game of politics was plaid on that. Now blood flows for good with this disease spreading.
Your comment is pathetic, disgusting and offensive.
Dozens of innocent young people lost their lives. Who cares what their political ideology is?
In my opinion, not even a low-life, scum-of-the-earth loser would be so horrid as to say such a thing.
How long have you been a Communist sympathizer?
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