Although the attorneys of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik are claiming their client is insane (see video below), MSNBC's in-house Nazi claims he was right... no, not just right-wing, correct. He may be borderline senile but Pat Buchanan has been an unrepentant Nazi since at least the 1970s. Here's what he wrote at the American Conservative:
[A]wful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.
That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.
Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis...
As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.
MSNBC should be ashamed. What they ought to do is fire this hate-spouting bigot and give the conservative slot-- if they insist they need another one-- to someone principled and rational like David Frum.
As Media Matters pointed out after Buchanan's outburst, terrorists are never right. "Their actions are wrong, and the ideas that motivated them are wrong." Norwegian society is grappling with the whole concept of how tolerant they can afford to be of Breivik's (and Buchanan's) kind of extremism.
Hours before the bombing in central Oslo and a shooting rampage that killed at least 76 people, self-described perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik reportedly posted a video on YouTube containing anti-Muslim imagery. Set to eerie music, the video features text that rages against multiculturalism and echoes Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto calling for a Christian war to defend Europe from Islamic domination.
Breivik has been described in the media as a lone lunatic on the far-fringe of society.
But Rune Berglund Steen of the Norwegian Center Against Racism disagrees.
"Most of his ideas, his view of society is not original," Steen says. "He has bought into a certain ideology already there, including the distrust, hatred of Muslims."
Breivik, 32, once belonged to the ultra-rightwing Progress Party, which has become the second largest party in Norway. Steen says the Progress Party wants much stricter controls on immigration, while Breivik is much more violent.
"What he wants is to kill the people who are not like him," Steen says.
...Breivik claims he is part of a terrorist network with two other extremist cells in operation, and investigators are focusing on whether he acted alone or had accomplices.
It's a big challenge because rightwing extremism had been more or less ignored by Norwegian security officials.
Professor Lars Gule of Oslo University has monitored extremist websites for years, even chatting with Breivik a few years ago on one of the suspect's favorite ultra-rightwing sites.
"These websites are working as greenhouses because they tend to be isolated," Gule says. "There is no opposing voice there, so the extremist postings are the fertilizer within the greenhouse and we should not be surprised when a terrorist flower sticks its head up."
He estimates that many thousands of people regularly visit such websites in Norway alone. Adding the rest of Scandinavia, Britain, France and Germany, Gule says, "We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people with extremist, reactionary, xenophobic, and islamophobic views."
True, there may be no opposing voice on these deranged websites, but the voice that's there is reinforced by a mass media dominated by inveterate fascists... like Rupert Murdoch. Just take a look at how the supposedly mainstream Wall Street Journal reported the tragedy through its own far right prism.
Before they knew the facts of the terror attacks in Norway last Friday, editors at the Wall Street Journal concluded it was the work of Islamic extremists and whipped off the following kicker paragraph for an editorial that appeared in Saturday’s paper:
In Jihadist eyes [Norway] will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West. For being true to these ideals, Norwegians have now been made to pay a terrible price. They are not in the wrong movie. They are on the right side.
...The Journal’s editorial page wasn’t alone in jumping to conclusions. ABC News’ Brian Ross breathlessly suggested in the hours after the attack that al-Qaeda and Ansar al Islam might be behind it, but then scrubbed the online article of any mention of radical Islamic groups. And there were many other examples [though none as disgusting as right-wing hack Jennifer Rubin's in the Washington Post] Friday afternoon of hasty conclusions hastily withdrawn after an ironic rush to look well-sourced or ideologically validated.
Honest journalists, when they get something wrong, don’t expunge the record, they correct it. But in the larger sphere, the premature Islam-alarm has set off a resonating debate over whether anti-Islamism fuels Christian-extremist violence. A variety of Western politicians and writers in the U.S. and Europe have pushed back in recent years against what they see as decades of multiculturalism which has allowed the infiltration of Islamic values antithetical to societies that are properly Judeo-Christian. Leading the post-Norway backlash, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald says:
If, as preliminary evidence suggests, it turns out that Breivik was “inspired” by the extremist hatemongering rantings of Geller, Pipes and friends, will their groups be deemed Terrorist organizations such that any involvement with them could constitute the criminal offense of material support to Terrorism? Will those extremist polemicists inspiring Terrorist violence receive the Anwar Awlaki treatment of being put on an assassination hit list without due process?
Don't forget Breitbart.
WHEN THERE'S WINGNUT STUPID-AND-CRAZY IN THE
AIR, YOU KNOW GLENN BECK HAS TO BE HEARD FROM
Especially now that he's off the TV, our Glenn probably worries that people will forget about him, maybe think he can't match anyone in the land for stupid-and-crazy. So Monday on his radio show he likened the camp at which so many young Norwegians were slaughtered while learning about democracy and the political process to . . . the Hitler Youth. Now amid the blowback, he's defending himself by, as the Telegraph's Jon Swaine reports, "suggest[ing] that people who sought to stop his use of such comparisons were leading the US into a 'society of gas chambers.'"
I'll have more on our Glenn's relentless crusade to keep himself at the top of the stupid-and-crazy rankings in my 6pm PT post. -- Ken
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