In his dark, deluded imagination, Norwegian killer Anders Breivik believed that his hideous shooting rampage on Friday would set in motion a military struggle that would cleanse his continent of Muslims. He accomplished the opposite: From now on, every pundit or activist who delivers even the mildest and most well-informed critique of multiculturalism and militant Islam will be handicapped by the taint of Mr. Breivik’s odious actions.
The effect will be felt in the security apparatus of Western nations, as well: Islamist radicalism and murderous right-wing bigotry are both life-threatening challenges to open societies such as Norway. Mr. Breivik has guaranteed that resources once available to fight the former now will be diverted to the latter. To take just one example: On page 516 of his manifesto, he speaks with implicit approval about the practice of using racial profiling to target people of Middle Eastern appearance at security checkpoints. Yet this massacre by a blond Aryan reminds us that mass murderers come in all colours — thereby weakening the case for profiling.
Put another way: Even by the killer’s own hate-addled calculus, his crimes were senseless and counterproductive.
In the case of some terrorists, it is unclear why they killed. But Mr. Breivik is the opposite: His 1,500-page manifesto, which became available on the Internet over the weekend, spells out his anti-Muslim beliefs many times over. In fact, the document serves as a sort of PDF-formatted document dump for just about every single event, statistic and controversy touching upon the existence of Muslim communities in Norway and other Western nations. Mr. Breivik exhibits his logorrhea because no amount of words is enough to defend actions that any sane human understands to be indefensible.
In his manifesto, Mr. Breivik ticks off a long list of conservative pundits whose views he admires. Some of these pundits are indeed fringe radicals, including Pamela Geller, a New York-based Birther conspiracy theorist who describes European Muslims as inveterate criminals and rapists. But many others, such as Mark Steyn, are thoughtful, mainstream thinkers who now will be pressured to explain away the radioactive seal of approval imparted by Norway’s murderous madman.
We should remember that even clinically sane individuals such as the Columbine shooters, Nidal Malik Hasan, Timothy McVeigh, Marc Lépine, Mr. Breivik and other killers tend to be highly unstable in their views. The same goes for the jihadis who are the leading source of terrorist violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and other Muslim nations. Spree killers of the Breivik variety typically are narcissists intoxicated with the evil idea that they should hold the power of life and death over fellow citizens — and they will latch onto whatever grab-bag of faux-grandiose ideological nonsense suits their needs. Mr. Breivik is a classic example in this regard: His manifesto is a hodge-podge of not just anti-Islamic ranting, but also contains material about sexually transmitted diseases, “cultural Marxism” and his own vaguely felt Christian identity. The people he name-drops in his manifesto bear no more responsibility for what he did than does the average Canadian reading this column.
Mr. Breivik’s evil cannot be undone. But by dismissing his twisted logic for the poisonous nonsense it is, we can act to ensure it does not metastasize into the marketplace of ideas.
jkay@naitonalpost.com
Source: National Post
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