Israel Matzav

Norway massacre: Where did this guy come from?

This is the first live post of the evening.

It turns out that the bomb in central Oslo that was reported just before the Sabbath started here in Israel was just the warm-up. During the evening, a man opened fire on a youth convention of Norway's ruling Labor party and murdered anywhere from 85-98 people, mostly teenagers.

The shooter confessed - who is also charged in the bombing in central Oslo that killed seven people - is said to be a Christian who is opposed to 'multiculturalism.' But it sounds like most of his victims were Norwegian teenagers and not necessarily of any specific ethnicity.

Breivik had belonged to an anti-immigration party and wrote blogs attacking multi-culturalism and Islam, but police said he had been unknown to them and that his Internet activity traced so far included no calls for violence.

Witnesses said the gunman, wearing a police uniform, went on a prolonged shooting orgy on Utoeya island northwest of Oslo, picking off his prey unchallenged as youngsters scattered in panic or jumped in the lake to swim for the mainland.

A police SWAT team eventually arrived from Oslo, 30 km (19 miles) away, to seize Breivik after nearly 90 minutes of firing, acting police chief Sveinung Sponheim told a news conference.

"We don't know yet" if he acted alone, Sponheim said, adding that Breivik had surrendered immediately and had confessed.

Sponheim said 85 people were known to have died in the shooting and seven in the Oslo bomb blast. The overall death toll could reach 98 if some missing people proved to have died.

Police gave no figure for the number wounded in Norway's worst violence since World War Two.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, sharing the shocked mood in this normally safe, quiet country of 4.8 million, said: "A paradise island has been transformed into a hell."

Labour Party youth member Erik Kursetgjerde described the panic on Utoeya when the gunman began shooting.

"I heard screams. I heard people begging for their lives and I heard shots. He just blew them away. I was certain I was going to die," Kursetgjerde, 18, told Reuters outside a hotel in the nearby town of Sundvollen, where many survivors were taken.

"People ran everywhere. They panicked and climbed into trees. People got trampled."

The killer, dressed as a policeman, "would tell people to come over: 'It's OK, you're safe, we're coming to help you.' And then I saw about 20 people come towards him and he shot them at close range," he said.

Kursetgjerde said he ran and hid between cliffs, then swam into the lake and nearly drowned. "Someone (in a boat) rescued me. They saved my life."

Norwegian NRK television showed blurred pictures taken from a helicopter of a man, apparently in police uniform, standing with his arm outstretched amid numerous victims, some prone on the rocky shore, others floating in the water.

"This lasted for hours," Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere told a news conference, describing the killings on the island northwest of Oslo where about 600 young people had gathered.

The bloodbath was believed to be the deadliest attack by a lone gunman anywhere in modern times.

Here's video of the emergency services on the scene at Utoya Island shortly after the massacre. Let's go to the videotape.



Here's a CNN report from Friday night. Let's go to the videotape.



Someone was kind enough to link this post on Twitter after the Sabbath started here in Israel. It's no secret that there is lots of anti-Semitism in Norway. But this attack apparently had nothing to do with that. In fact, the attacker is allegedly pro-Israel. But that's not to say that we would want him.

In his twisted ideology, the struggle was not between Christians and Jews, but Christians and Jews versus Muslims. Jews, and especially Israel, formed the bulwark against Muslim domination of Europe.

There are many web sites where adherents of this particular brand of racism connect, stew and brew with one another. Islamversuseurope.com (“Where Islam Spreads, Freedom Dies”) even now posts an apologia for the child-killer, essentially blaming Muslims for Breivik’s massacre of Christian children.

“These are Google translations of comments Anders Behring Breivik made on the website document.no.” the author writes. “There is very little that he said that I would disagree with. It is clear that he is a Counterjihadist and visits the same sites that most of us do, Gates of Vienna, Jihadwatch, Atlas Shrugs, etc. He cites Fjordman’s “Defeating Eurabia” many times.”

Here is a taste of Breivik: “When did multiculturalism cease to be an ideology designed to deconstruct European culture, traditions, identity and nation-states?” said one entry, “According to two studies, 13 percent of young British Muslims aged between 15 and 25 support al-Qaida ideology.”

It is just bizarre, right, that the new Nazism embraces the Jews and Israel. In an essay on AlArabiya, Ravi Shankar, executive editor of the New India Express, makes a compelling case that Christian Europe’s compulsion to hate has found a new roost.

“… Europe’s Muslim population of 15 million will become 30 million by 2015, while Europeans will shrink by 4 per cent,” he writes. “Princeton academic and Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis famously said, ‘Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.’ 
If Friday’s bombings in Oslo is a dark harbinger of troubled times, soon, Muslims will be the new Jews of Europe. For all the old Jews are dead: murdered by fellow Europeans in Auschwitz, Riga, Buchenwald and so many other “anus mundis.”

“Anti-semitism has strong roots in Europe going back centuries; in the Dark Ages, Venetians preferred to trust Arabs as trade partners and equals while Jewish merchants were exiled to ghettos or deported at will.



“Europeans today hate America for its Jewish gestalt, distrusts US Israel policy which they argue is driven by a powerful Jewish financial lobby in America; much like how the Rothschilds financed wars in 18th century Europe. 

An interesting 1980s study about why Europe has been more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause until the late 1990s and hostile to Israel puts it down to simple neighborhood deprivation: the postwar generation of Europeans grew up without Jewish neighbors, Jewish classmates, Jewish friends. Hence, they had no natural empathy with Jews.



“Now the reverse is happening in Europe. It is the presence of Muslims in Europe that is the source of social panic and anger. The fear of being overwhelmed and alienated in their own country by outsiders who they think will breed terrorists. All this makes a fertile breeding ground for anti-Islamic neo-Nazism…What happened in Oslo Friday may be the early beginning of a new civil war ‑ Europeans fighting each other, both Muslim and Christian.

In this scenario, the horrifying irony could be that Islamist terrorism may become redundant. “

The Jewish reaction to all this should be strong and clear: take your hate elsewhere. To paraphrase our prophet Groucho Marx, we don’t want to be part of any club that would have us as a member.

These racists see Judaism as a tribe with which they can make a strategic anti-Islam alliance. That is a misconception. Judaism has a tribal aspect, but it is more than just a tribe. It is a set of laws and values that Jews believe God set before that tribe, and which they must adhere to (with room for argumentation and interpretation, thank God).

Those values pretty much preclude the murder of innocents, baseless hatred, and the death penalty for people whom you fear. And that is why a person like Breivik’s head would spin to know that Muslims in Israel have greater rights to free speech than they do in most Muslim countries, as well as the freedom to practice their religion. Israel’s record on Arab minority rights isn’t perfect (standard disclaimer), but it reflects the values of Judaism that supersede those of pure tribalism.

In other words, against the Muslims and the Brieviks, I side with the Muslims.

Indeed.

By the way, did you note the penalty this guy faces? 21 years in prison? He'd still have a life when he gets out. That's unbelievable.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Eurabia, Norway, Oslo bombing, Utoya massacre

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:18 PM