Comment: Here is an interesting analysis on what happened in Norway and how some of us “experts” jumped the gun by pointing the finger at al-Qaida.
“Countless security experts queued up to tell me so,” Charlie Brooker writes. “This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn’t add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they’re the experts. They’re sitting there behind a caption with the word ‘EXPERT’ on it.”
What is most worrying according to the writer (and we have already noticed it on Migrant Tales) is a disturbing “but” appearing after we condemn the mass killings by Anders Behring Breivik. In other words, what this lunatic did was awful, but…
“These “but” commenters then go on to discuss immigration, often with reference to a shaky Muslim-baiting story they’ve half-remembered from the press,” continues Brooker. “So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren’t Muslim, they’ve managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they’ve been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by ‘security experts’ quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about ‘Muslim-only loos’ or local councils ‘banning Christmas.'”
Another disturbing matter are politicians like Jussi Halla-aho of the right-wing populist Perussuomalaiset (PS) party, whose writings appear to have inspired a deranged mass killer. Brevik mentioned how he agreed about Halla-aho’s views published in 2006 on “the cooperation of the left-wing and Islamists.”
See Ossi Mäntylahti’s blog (in Finnish).
The PS appears to be the party that represented Brevik’s views the best in Finland.
Thank you JusticeDemon for the heads up!
________________
Charlie Brooker
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Let’s be clear. If someone goes and kills Halla-aho because he/she read your blog and agreed, that
– He is a nazi spirited racist
– That racism is a social illness which need to be weeded out and fought in it’s every form, without hesitation.
Then he/she goes and weeds out racism so that it’ll hit the news and he/she gets to be a star, would you really consider yourself the cause of it?
If yes, I don’t think you should. Because you never told anyone to do anything. You expressed your opinion in your own manner and you have all the rights to do it, no matter what some calculating machine devoid of human emotions or a bunch of calculating machines do. You “call em like you see em” and that’s it. It needs to be respected.
There’s always a bunch of crazies agreeing with us we want it or not, but the most scary ones are those, that don’t agree with us.
I see this is just the start what happened in Norway. We’re heading to that direction, we’ve been heading for that direction since the economic downfall started. But PS popularity, rise in racism and the attack are both just side effects of it. We’re sliding down the pyramid, and at the bottom we’re just a bunch of animals fighting over who gets to eat first, who gets laid and what belongs to who. The rest is just superficial surface. Insignificant form that can be anything.