Are American conservatives to blame for the Oslo massacre?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I haven't yet commented on the Oslo massacre, mainly because I think it's pretty clear what it was all about -- why it happened -- once you strip away the despicable knee-jerk efforts of conservatives to pin the blame on Islamic jihadism (placing it squarely in their anti-Muslim narrative).

Events like this don't happen in a vacuum. This was not some random outburst but rather an act of right-wing Christian terrorism directed at "the left" and based largely on anti-Muslim bigotry and hate generally. And we must turn our attention not just to the accused but to that which created him. As Scott Shane writes at The New York Times:

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.

In the document he posted online, Anders Behring Breivik, who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp, showed that he had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

In the United States, critics have asserted that the intense spotlight on the threat from Islamic militants has unfairly vilified Muslim Americans while dangerously playing down the threat of attacks from other domestic radicals. 

Yes, we need to turn our attention to anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States as a major contributor to the "culture" that created this killer. But we're not just talking about a "subculture" of "bloggers" and "activists," we're talking about elected officials and major media figures, specifically about the Republican Party and the conservatism that sustains it.

The subculture is there, yes, but it's not really that "sub." It's pretty much in the mainstream these days. Expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry can be heard all over Fox News and right-wing talk radio. They can be heard from the likes of Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Peter King, and Allen West, among many others. Muslims, including Muslim-Americans are being treated as the new Other, as a threat to the very fabric of American life. Fearmongering in full swing, they are being vilified and scapegoated, lumped together as fundamentally anti-American. We are told that they wish to impose Sharia law on America, that their mosques and community centers are training grounds for terrorism, that they want to take our freedom away, that if we're not vigilant, that if we don't fight back, our whole way of life is doomed.

Is it really any wonder there is violence? Is it any wonder the Oslo massacre happened?

Yes, it takes someone unhinged to do such a thing, but that's exactly the problem. No one expects, say, Newt Gingrich to go on a shooting spree, to act out his anti-Muslim bigotry in violent ways. But what happens when someone unhinged gets hold of what Gingrich says, of what others say, when their message gets through? And when the "culture" basically tells this person that violence not just okay but, given the threat, even makes sense and may even be the only way to preserve our freedom?

All it takes is one Anders Behring Breivik.

So are American conservatives to blame? Not entirely, of course, but yes. Many of them, those who feed the culture of hate, those who target Muslims. And it's not always with explicit rhetoric either. You don't have to say you hate Muslims, or that Muslims are evil, just that they shouldn't be able to worship in your community, that they're "foreign" and not like you, that they're "different" and "alien," that they're trying to take over. That's the sort of thing that is all-too-common among American conservatives these days, including from high-profile figures in the media and the Republican Party.

Oh, they'll try to deflect attention and say they deserve no blame, lashing out at their critics, just as they did with the Oklahoma City bombing and more recently with the Tucson shooting and just as they do whenever there's an act of right-wing terrorism, which is more frequent than you might think from the way it's not at all covered in the media.

We just mustn't let them get away with it.

91 dead in Oslo

By Capt. Fogg

People have made it very clear to me that Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Federal building in 1995, was not a Christian, the connection between that vicious, inhuman act and the Waco, Texas incident notwithstanding. He couldn't be, you see, by virtue of the fact that he did such a thing.

It's too bad that Muslims who are horrified by terrorism aren't given the benefit of the same rationale, but I'm still waiting to hear about Anders Behring Breivik. Despite the initial prejudice that had the Oslo bombing and the murders at a summer camp as the work of al Qaeda, it looks like Breivik, identified by a survivor as the attacker, was a Christian conservative disturbed by the presence of other cultures, other religions, in Norway. Would he fit in with a spectrum of Americans, from the Aryan Brotherhood to the Tea Party, trying to promote our intentionally secular republic as a "Christian nation" and perhaps an exclusively Christian nation?

How long can we go on pretending that religious tribalism of any denomination hasn't been and doesn't remain a potentially destructive, oppressive, and communicable human vice?

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Fuck you, Peter King, you bigoted piece of anti-Muslim shit

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Too strong? Maybe. I'm sorry if I've injured your delicate sensibilities. (No, not really.) But King* deserves no less for what he's doing.

This former IRA enthusiast -- an avid supporter of terrorism and of a group that had an awful lot of American support even as it targeted a close American friend and was called a terrorist group by the U.S. government -- has ramped up his hatred of Muslims and is holding hearings on Capitol Hill on the supposed Muslim threat to America. (Both Stewart and Colbert had good bits on this last night.)

King is a loathsome little bigot who has stacked the deck not with experts, not with people who actually know something about Islam, the Muslim-American community (which of course shouldn't be treated as monolithic), and terrorism (including the far greater threat, right-wing domestic terrorism) but, predictably enough, with, if I may borrow the term, dittoheads, those who share his bigotry, his view that the Muslim community is festering with terrorists (not good Irish ones targeting Britain, but bad Muslim ones targeting America).

But he wasn't able to silence his own critics, including Rep. Keith Ellison, who delivered an emotional rebuttal to King's efforts:

The first Muslim elected to Congress broke into tears Thursdayas he delivered his opening remarks at a hearing on radicalization in theMuslim American community.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) became heavily emotional as hespoke about a 23-year-old New York Police Department cadet and paramedic namedMohammed Salman Hamdani.

Hamdani, a Muslim, was killed attempting to savepeople from the collapsing World Trade Center buildings on Sept. 11, 2001,following the terrorist attacks, Ellison said.

Here's some of what Ellison said, with the video below:

Let me close with a story, but remember that it's only one of many American stories that could be told. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a 23-year-old paramedic, a New York City police cadet and a Muslim American. He was one of those brave first responders who tragically lost their lives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks almost a decade ago. As The New York Times eulogized, "He wanted to be seen as an all-American kid."

**********

Mr. Hamdani bravely sacrificed his life to try and help others on 9/11. After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.

* As I've stressed before, no, not that Peter King, that Peter King -- who seems to call himelf "Pete," perhaps to distinguish himself from the more famous other Peter King. Obviously.

Waiter, there's a terrorist in my tea

By Capt. Fogg

"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it."

- Ron Paul -

What is it about Florida? Is it as Frank Lloyd Wright once said, that since it's the lowest point on the map of the U.S., everything loose wound up down here?

We may be no more fatuous than the rest of the country in blabbering about our "freedom" and how everyone in the world is jealous of it and how every military exploit is about freedom and every casualty is a sacrifice for freedom and that this freedom is the result of our foreign wars rather than our constitutional law, but we sure look strange to that supposedly jealous planet when we agitate that more and more of it be taken away from us -- in the name of freedom.

Speaking of loose things floating around in the bilges of America, Florida Representative-elect Allen West, soon to represent the 22nd district, who identifies with that nebulous assemblage of misfits and nitwits called the Tea Party, seems to be all in favor of censoring the press despite all his tea soaked and treacly rhetoric about constitutional restraints on government power:

I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to do this and also supported him and applauding him [Julian Assenge] for the efforts. So that's kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime.

No, he's not talking about reporting troop positions or exposing covert agents, he's talking about embarrassing the administration as "a serious crime." That's the same administration Tea Party folks have been waving guns at and making threats at and calling tyrannical, Marxist, and illegal.

Yes, it's been all too hard for most of us to tell exactly what message the Tea Party people are bringing to the party, and this message of government for government's sake; government by, for and of the Executive Branch and military authority and damn the Constitution, smells more like plain old exaggerated nationalism and authoritarianism than tea.

One of the ways "the terrorists" won is that domestic authoritarians posing as libertarians can simply identify anything that threatens them: things like the truth, for instance, as "terrorism" and make it a crime. Things like identifying high crimes and high criminals and the kind of lies and manipulations of truth that get people killed and bankrupt economies. Revealing a crime -- a politically motivated burglary, for example -- becomes, by the Logic of Tea, "aiding and abetting a serious crime" and "terrorism," while actually aiding and abetting by hiding it or obstructing justice becomes... what, freedom?

Is West a moderate compared to Uncle Mike Huckabee, who demands summary execution for Assenge? Palin, Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and even CNN are calling him a "terrorist" and telling us not only that we can't handle the truth but that we don't deserve it and the government doesn't owe it to us. It's all about freedom, of course, and all of this from people calling Obama a "tyrant." So whatever the Tea party is selling, I think we can dispense with the idea that it has anything to do with less powerful government, a government restrained by lawm anything to do with a government of the people, responsible to the people and most of all, anything to do with freedom other than to garble its meaning.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Glenn Beck admits to being a terrorist

By Capt. Fogg

Not that he admits to having admitted it.

We've all had e-mails insisting that some event hasn't been reported by "the media" because the media is so biased. every week brings news of stories the "liberal media doesn't want you to know." I recall one that proved the "liberal" media was biased in favor of, or at least opposed to revealing the criminal nature of Black people. I've had others insisting there was some cover up of the fact that Jews, Gay people, black people and others were trying to take over or already controlling things in some secret and sinister matter. Most of them these days have to do with covering up the essentially evil nature of Muslims as Muslims.

Many of these alleged omissions share a great deal with the lack of coverage of the invasion from planet Mongo in that there is no truth to them and many simply represent that age-old gambit of taking over by insisting someone else is taking over; lying, cheating and stealing by insisting someone else is lying, cheating or stealing.

You can't get away from the fact that Glenn Beck and his employers have become rich by creating the feeling that the United States is in great danger, often from things they recently denied could even be a danger, like the National Debt and international terrorism, for instance - even things hard to seriously criticize like meat inspection.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the real media usually cowers and rarely challenges the absurd claims of the Right, for after all they're also owned and controlled by corporate interests of their owners and advertisers. When they do speak up, they often get beat down and portrayed as clowns or traitors, so I have to admire the courage of Fareed Zakaria in calling on Beck to stand behind his absurd lies. It's about goddamn time.

Beck the Bigot for hire, claims that nearly ten percent of the world's Muslims are terrorists. That, says Zakaria would make for 157 million of them -- a large number to keep hidden, even for a liberal entity like CNN, obviously out to support the violent overthrow of the US.

"Well, Glenn, again, maybe because it just isn't true," Zakaria noted on his CNN program yesterday. "I can't find any poll or study or shred of data that suggests that 1.5 million Americans, which is what that number would work out to, want to violently overthrow their government."

Backpeddling like an abashed PeeWee Herman on his Schwinn, Becks' mouthpieces, having done the math, fell back to saying that well, perhaps that many support terrorism, thoughtcrimewise even if they're not shooting at us because they are angry at the US government -- which makes them terrorists. Bad move, that was.

"Does supporting such anger against the American government make one a terrorist?" he asked in a check-mate moment.

Well if it does then what do we call Mr. Beck? What else is he? What do we call the guy who spends all his time railing about the wickedness of Mr. Obama, the evils of social justice, about the need for regime change, the need to override the election process in favor of some magic substitute for free elections, the need to take action before it's too late?