Israel Matzav

'A normal Norwegian boy'

Anders Behring Breivik didn't need any of the Right wing thinkers and bloggers that the Left is trying to tag with the blame for his bombing in Oslo and shooting rampage on Utoya Island. He came to it all by himself. In fact, his father was a Norwegian diplomat who was affiliated with the same Labor party whose youth movement members were targeted by Breivik.

For many Norwegians, still numbed by the worst violence in the country since World War Two, the fact the alleged killer looked and acted so normally is one of the most disturbing aspects of the attacks.

"What keeps me awake at night is that he is not a monster," wrote Peter Svaar, a Norwegian journalist who was at school with Breivik as a young teenager. "He is a normal Norwegian boy."

Most of those close to Breivik have gone to ground since the attacks of July 22. Phones are left answered and a policeman who answered the door of Breivik's mother's upmarket Oslo house simply smiled and said "There's no one home."

And while some of those prepared to speak say there was always something odd about the quiet, serious young man, others insist they saw no warning signs at all.

"He was a normal, well-behaved Norwegian boy," his former stepmother Tove Oevermo told Reuters in a short telephone interview. "There were no signs."

...

Breivik's upbringing was remarkably privileged, even by Norwegian standards. He went to the same Oslo primary school as Crown Prince Haakon, who was a few years older.

At Handelsgymnasium, a high school in central Oslo where parents of new students are treated to an organist playing music by Edward Elgar, Breivik would have been surrounded not only by a keen sense of tradition but by his country's future business and political leaders.

"I haven't really had any negative experiences in my childhood in any way," Breivik himself wrote of his upbringing.

But some of those who knew him say that even as a child Breivik always pushed the limits.

"He seemed a tough guy who could do things that were unthinkable for us. Like spitting in the cellar, urinating in the neighbour's storeroom and took great pleasure in killing ants," Lina Engelsrud, a childhood friend who knew him from roughly the age of 3 to 14 wrote in Aura Avis, a local newspaper.

Crime researchers speculate that Breivik may have struggled to cope with the absence of a high-achieving diplomat father who abandoned the family when his son was only one. Jens Breivik worked for the Foreign Ministry from 1966-96, ministry spokesman Frode Andersen said. Breivik senior served postings in London, Tehran and Paris before retiring in France.

Jens and his new wife Tove -- another career diplomat -- briefly sued for custody of the young Anders, he writes, but lost the case. He occasionally visited them in France, he says, but grew up with his mother Wenche, a nurse, and her new husband, a Norwegian army officer.

Breivik says his youth was dominated by strong "matriarchal" figures he worries "feminised" him, devoting a significant proportion of its manifesto to bemoaning the decline of conventional "fatherhood" in western Europe in general.

"The absence of fatherhood has created a society full of social pathologies, and the lack of male self-confidence has made us easy prey to our enemies," he said. "If the West is to survive, we need to reassert a healthy dose of male authority."

Contact with his father was broken off completely, Breivik says, after he got into trouble for graffiti during his teens -- although he remained in contact with his stepmother. He said his father had also isolated himself from his other four children "so it is pretty clear whose fault that was". Breivik talks of his occasional desire for a rapprochement, but says it never happened.

Speaking to Norwegian television from France after the attack last month, Breivik's father said he sometimes wished his son had killed himself rather than attack others.

"Maybe he felt he was not as good as his father, but this is just speculation," Ragnhild Bjoernebekk, a researcher at Norway's police school who specialises in crime and violence, told Reuters.

So whom else can we blame for this 'normal Norwegian boy' turned killer? Read the whole thing.

Labels: Anders Behring Brievik, Oslo bombing, Utoya massacre

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:50 AM