Breivik's Monstrous Dream—and Why It Failed

Bodø is the last stop on the Norwegian State Railway. This city of 47,000 people lies above the Arctic Circle and is sandwiched between dramatic snow-covered mountains and the cold Norwegian Sea. The winding highways have signs reminding drivers to watch out for moose. This is the kind of slow-paced city where not a lot happens—the last place on earth you would expect the global “counter-jihad” movement to hit home.

But Bodø’s quiet, along with the rest of Norway’s, was destroyed last year on July 22 when Anders Behring Breivik, a self-described “commander in Norway’s resistance movement,” exploded a 2,100-pound homemade car bomb in central Oslo, killing eight people and injuring more than 200 others in a first salvo against his perceived “Islamic colonization of Europe.” Disappointed that the explosion hadn’t caused the government headquarters to collapse (as his trial testimony has made clear), the then 32-year-old Oslo native decided to implement his Plan B, driving twenty-five miles northwest to the island of Utøya, where the youth division of Norway’s ruling Labor Party was holding its annual camp. Heavily armed and wearing a police uniform he had purchased over the Internet, Breivik systematically hunted down, shot and killed sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers, over the course of a harrowing seventy-nine minutes, before surrendering to police. “You shall die today, Marxists!” he cried while executing some of his victims. He killed people from fifty-five municipalities across Norway, including 17-year-old Espen Jørgensen, the newly elected leader of Bodø’s Labor Party youth division, shot three times in the back while protecting another teenager.

Anders Breivik trial: Norway’s mass killer’s tears not ‘out of pity’

OSLO—Anders Behring Breivik shed tears as he went on trial Monday for killing 77 people — but not for his victims. The emotional display came when prosecutors showed his anti-Muslim video.

Dressed in a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, the right-wing fanatic defended the July 22 massacre as an act of “self-defense” in his professed civil war, and sat stone-faced as prosecutors described how he killed each of his victims.

But he was gripped by emotion when they showed a video warning of a Muslim takeover of Europe and laden with crusader imagery that he posted on YouTube before the attacks. Suddenly, the self-styled “resistance” fighter’s eyes welled up. He cringed his face and wiped away tears with trembling hands.

“Nobody believes that he cried out of pity for the victims,” said Mette Yvonne Larsen, a lawyer representing survivors and victim’s families in the court proceedings.

Breivik showed no signs of remorse on the first day of a trial that is expected to last 10 weeks. After being uncuffed, he extended his right arm in a clenched-fist salute. He refused to stand when the judges entered the room.

A vile logic to Anders Breivik's choice of target

In Anders Behring Breivik's ideological self-justification as well as in reactions to his murderous act there are things that should make us think. The manifesto of this Christian "Marxist hunter" who killed more than 70 people in Norway is precisely not a case of a deranged man's rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of "Europe's crisis" which serves as the (more or less) implicit foundation of the rising anti-immigrant populism – its very inconsistencies are symptomatic of the inner contradictions of this view.

The first thing that sticks out is how Breivik constructs his enemy: the combination of three elements (Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism), each of which belongs to a different political space: the Marxist radical left, multiculturalist liberalism, Islamic religious fundamentalism. The old fascist habit of attributing to the enemy mutually exclusive features ("Bolshevik-plutocratic Jewish plot" – Bolshevik radical left, plutocratic capitalism, ethnic-religious identity) returns here in a new guise.

Writers Cited in Breivik Manifesto Have Spoken at U.S. Military Colleges as Anti-Terrorism Experts

In February 2009, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) received some very good news. A woman named Brigitte Gabriel had been disinvited from speaking at the United States Air Force Academy, due to MRFF's year-long battle to stop the U.S. military from allowing Islamophobic fear-mongers to speak at our military's colleges and service academies under the guise of anti-terrorism training.

Just about a year earlier, in February 2008, the Air Force Academy had invited a group called the "3 ex-Terrorists" to speak at its 50th Annual Academy Assembly on the topic "Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today's Plague of Violence." One member of this trio of self-proclaimed ex-terrorists turned evangelical Christians was Walid Shoebat.

In his rage against Muslims, Norway's killer was no loner

It's comforting, perhaps, to dismiss Anders Behring Breivik as nothing more than a psychotic loner. That was the view of the Conservative London mayor, Boris Johnson, among others. The Norwegian mass killer's own lawyer has branded him "insane". It has the advantage of meaning no wider conclusions need to be drawn about the social context of the atrocity.

Had he been a Muslim, as much of the western media concluded he was immediately after the terrorist bloodbath, we can be sure there would have been no such judgments – even though some jihadist attacks have undoubtedly been carried out by individuals operating alone.

In fact, however deranged the bombing and shooting might seem, studies of those identified as terrorists have shown they rarely have mental illness or psychiatric abnormalities. Maybe Breivik will turn out to be an exception. But whether his claim that there are other members of a fascistic Christian terror network still at large turns out to be genuine or not, he has clearly fostered enthusiastic links with violent far-right groups abroad, and in Britain in particular.

Anders Behring Breivik and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Anders Behring Breivik

What the Norwegian murderer and American "birthers" have in common.

In the past 48 hours, Anders Behring Breivik has been described as a racist, a white supremacist, and an anti-Islamic fanatic. News reports of his arrest are now accompanied by analyses of Europe's failure to absorb its immigrant population, by commentary on the rise of far-right political parties, by discussions of the threats posed to Muslims living in Europe. Having mistakenly assumed that the story of terror in Oslo belonged to the narrative of the war on terrorism, we are now placing it firmly within the equally familiar narrative of white racism and anti-Islamic fanaticism.

Aren't we missing the point once again? Breivik was not, in fact, a killer of immigrants or Muslims. He was a killer of Norwegians. The particular set of obsessions that led him to madness and then to mass murder were not merely racist. They also sprang from an insane conviction that his own government was illegitimate.

Anders Breivik's Links To The English Defence League: What Do They Tell Us About Norway And Nationalism In Europe And Britain?

British police are investigating links between Anders Breivik and the English Defence League, a group the gunman described as a ‘blessing’ in an online forum.

But is the nationalist group no more than a blip on the fringes of society, or is it part of a larger movement threatening to destabilise multiculturalism in Europe?

Mohammed and his brother were in the wrong place at the wrong time. On a rainy Saturday afternoon in Chadwell Heath, East London, last month, the two came across an EDL march.

Timothy McVeigh, meet Anders Behring Breivik.

Those two jihadists—two right-wing reactionaries, two terrorists, two anti-government white supremacists, two Christians—have a lot in common, down to the way the massacres they carried out were first mistaken for the work of Islamists by an American press rich in zealotry of its own. And they have a lot more in common with the fundamentalist politicians and ideologues among us who pretend to have nothing to do with the demons they inspire.

The bombs in Afghanistan have landed in Norway

A decade of Islamophobia to justify the war in Afghanistan is now spreading violence to the West. Right-wing Islamophobe Anders Behring Breivik has killed 91 people in Norway, through the explosion of a bomb near the Prime Minister's building and a shooting spree in a youth camp organized by the Workers’ Youth League.

The initial response by international media was to blame Muslims. But when the alleged perpetrator turned out to be a blond-hair, blue-eyed Norwegian Christian nationalist, some are now denying there’s any context whatsoever for the killing. As a Norwegian official said, "It seems it's not Islamic-terror related. This seems like a madman's work."

But Breiviks was not driven by "madness," he was driven by right-wing Islamophobic politics. From 1997 to 2007 he was a member of the xenophobic "Progress Party." Since that time police chief Sveinung Sponheim describe his internet postings as having “some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views”, and others have pointed out his an admirer of prominent anti-Muslim individuals and organizations like Geert Wilders and the English Defense League.