In addition to the horror of Friday’s slaughter in Norway, there has been the secondary shock of what it has revealed about so much of the west’s attitude to terrorism. Glenn Greenwald at Salon put it better than I can:
“Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn’t Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn’t).”
You can follow the links yourself — and more here from Ujala Sehgal, Richard Silverstein and Benjamin Doherty — and see if he’s right, but I find it striking that there should be any doubt about applying the label of terrorism to killings directed at civilian political targets on the basis of an explicitly political-religious agenda.
The only way out of that conclusion would be to argue that terrorism necessarily involves innocent targets, and that, from Anders Breivik’s point of view, prime minister Jens Stoltenberg and members of his party’s youth wing are not innocent. But of course that route is not available to the commentators who have persistently labelled even attacks on actual military targets as “terrorism” — provided, of course, they are committed by Muslims.
There’s also a persistent tendency to try to distinguish between “madness” and “politics” as motives, as if the two did not frequently overlap. But one of the most frightening things about the massacre is precisely how rational it seems.
Breivik’s underlying political beliefs — that Islam represents an existential threat to European civilisation, and that centre-left parties are aiding and abetting it — are hardly confined to the lunatic fringe. And given those beliefs, his actions made sense; in a relatively small country like Norway, he may well have hoped to eliminate a substantial fraction of the next generation of Labor’s political leadership.
This was not a random attack like those that we have seen on subways and buses in Madrid and London. This wore its political motives on its face.
Yet The New York Times, that alleged hotbed of liberalism, somehow managed to imply that having “more political motivations” would take it outside the ambit of “terrorism”.
But even that’s not the worst of. The scariest thing about Friday is how familiar Breivik’s rhetoric seems. His themes — the evils of multiculturalism, the equation of mainstream leftists with Marxism, the solidarity with the most genocidal wing of Zionism — are the common currency of right-wing pundits across most of the western world. It comes as no surprise to discover that he is a fan of Daniel Pipes.
If we applied the same standards as we do to the “Islamists”, Pipes and many others would be under investigation today for “encouragement” of terrorism, or whatever vague word can be found in the anti-terror laws, and his books would be on their way to the Australian Classification Board, or worse.
Let me be completely clear: I don’t believe we should apply those standards. The Andrew Bolts and Janet Albrechtsens of the world should be free to spout their hateful nonsense. But those who choose to give them a public platform should be asked some hard questions.
For years now we have been asking the Muslim world to denounce and dissociate itself from its fundamentalists, and while some of those calls have been hypocritical, it is beyond doubt that many Muslim societies have a problem with extremist attitudes that incite violence.
But if al-Qa’eda is their problem, then Anders Breivik and his like are our problem.
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