Breivik is apparently an avid fan of U.S.-based anti-Muslim activists such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes, and has repeatedly professed his ardent support for Israel.
The nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing extremism was clearly on display during last summer's "Ground Zero mosque" hysteria, which culminated in a rally where Geller and Wilders addressed a crowd that included members of the EDL waving Israeli flags.
According to Mondoweiss website, this comment by Breivik is one example of the twisted way in which Islamophobia and a militant pro-Israel ideology fit together: Cultural conservatives disagree when they believe the conï ¬"šict is based on Islamic imperialism, that Islam is a political ideology and not a race.
While much remains to be learned about the attacks in Norway, it has exposed the dangerous nexus of Islamophobia, neoconservatism and right-wing Zionism, and what could happen when the wrong person subscribes to those toxic beliefs, Mondoweiss concludes.
Norway massacre reminiscent of Oklahoma bombing
Norway massacre seems a reminiscent of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing by the right-wing extremist, Timothy McVeigh, that claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings.
Like the Oklahoma bombing, immediately after the news of the bombing of government buildings in Norway's capital Oslo, the media was buzzed with speculations about who might have done it and why. Most speculation focused on so-called Islamist militancy and Muslims.
Not
surprisingly, The American Enterprise Institute, now home to John Bolton, Lynne
Cheney, and Newt Gingrich, got their
talking points into the Washington Post within hours.
The New York Times originally
reported: A terror group, Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or the Helpers of the Global
Jihad, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack, according to
Will McCants, a terrorism analyst at C.N.A., a research institute that studies
terrorism. In later editions, the story was revised to read: Initial reports
focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad
al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming
responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was
previously unknown and might not even exist.
According to Turkish newspaper Zaman, shortly after the bomb exploded in Oslo on Saturday, almost all European TV stations began making mention of a new wave of Islamic terror. The culprits they suggested included a wide range of "Islamist" terrorist groups, including but not limited to al-Qaeda and Ansar al Islam. As the night advanced, TV and media outlets slowly replaced the Islamist terror thesis with a new one that is probably more disturbing to Europeans (that the terrorist is a rightist extremist).
Similarly, within hours of the Oklahoma bombing on April 19, 1995, most network news reports featured comments from experts on Middle Eastern terrorism who said the blast was similar to the World Trade Center explosion two years earlier.
Ibrahim Ahmad, a Jordanian American, had been traveling from his Oklahoma City home to Jordan on April 19, the day the 4,800-pound bomb ripped through the Federal building. Scooped up in the FBI's initial dragnet, he was questioned in Chicago, and then again in London, where British authorities grilled him for six hours. "When they said, 'You are under arrest in connection with the bombing,' I thought that was the end of the world for me," he told reporters.
However, after about 36 hours it became clear that domestic right-wing extremists were the prime suspects in the case but the media jump too quickly to speculate that the bombing was the work of Middle Eastern "terrorists' while the so-called terrorist experts extended their had just like in the case of Oslo massacres to justify the media speculation.
Interestingly,
when it transpired that it was a right-wing anti-Muslim Christian, the response
was "it is unbelievable that a Norwegian would do such a thing."
Nationalists pose bigger threat than al-Qaeda
Dr Robert Lambert, Co-Director of the European Muslim Research Centre at the University of Exeter and Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, argues that while we must await the outcome of police investigations and court proceedings before reaching any firm conclusions about Breivik's motivation, it will nevertheless be instructive to begin an analysis of a violent extremist nationalist milieu in Europe and the US, and its dramatic shift towards anti-Muslim and Islamophobic thought since 9/11. To be sure, this will certainly be more relevant than an analysis of al-Qaeda terrorism.
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