From The Nation:
Breivik carried out his monstrous actions to glorify himself and to promote his view that Europe is locked in a death match with Islam. He hoped, through an orchestrated use of violence and the calculated use of new media, to launch a bloody civil war in Europe that would last for decades. But the indications coming from Norway are that, at least for now, he has failed completely. Surveys indicate that after July 22, Norwegians reported greater support for immigration than before the attacks (from 72 percent to 82 percent), and many of the loudest right-wing voices in Norway have had to retool their message in the wake of the massacre.
But Breivik’s attack illustrates more than its own failures. It also points to the changing nature of right-wing discourse over the past decade and how this new right-wing ideology, based largely on alarmist half-truths and often outright lies, has a foothold in Norway. Before 9/11, mainstream right-wing thought in Europe was fueled by a general anti-immigrant sentiment, while the discourses of the extreme right were, like their American counterparts, marked by conspiracy theories of Jewish control of government. Since 9/11 the narratives have shifted and narrowed. Now, Europe’s right-wing extremists and populist parties believe that Muslim immigrants are out to occupy the continent and destroy Western civilization from within, aided by naïve elites enthralled by multiculturalism. This anti-Muslim ideology is zealously pushed in bestselling books such as Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept and Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan. It’s screamed out on popular blogs like Gates of Vienna, Document.o and Atlas Shrugs, and it’s put on the streets by Britain’s English Defense League, Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Danish People’s Party. In Norway right-wing bloggers bray warnings that Muslim supremacy lurks just around the corner, even though immigrant Muslim birthrates decline over time and Norway’s Muslim community numbers only 100,000 to 150,000 people—a mere 3 percent of its population.
This is “a new version of European anti-Semitic ideas,” explained Tore Bjørgo, a professor at the Norwegian Police University College and a specialist on right-wing extremism. “The structure is much the same: an external enemy who wants to invade us and take over our country, our culture; and to achieve that they use internal traitors who collaborate with them.” The right today believes it is “the true resistance movement,” he told me, explaining that this narrative works particularly well in countries, like Norway, that had resistance movements during World War II. Raymond Johansen, secretary general of the Labor Party, also sees the shift in the populist position. “If you look into the right-wing populists’ rhetoric, it has changed from general anti-immigration issues to anti-Islam,” he told me. “Then you have the cultural thing about women veiling, how they are dressed, how you have to watch the religion. It started in Holland and continued in the previously very liberal countries, like Denmark. The right-wing populists’ number throughout Europe is growing, and there is reason to be worried.”
Certainly, right-wing extremism and right-wing populism are not the same, but “they are at least cousins,” according to Johansen. “Right-wing populists rhetorically are using the same vocabulary as the right-wing extremists,” he said. “They are not willing to use the same means as the right-wing extremists. But a single act of hatred starts with words of hatred.”
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Almost all extremist violence in Norway’s modern history has come from the far right. The 1970s witnessed bombings of left-wing bookstores, and the ’80s saw internecine violence in the neo-Nazi movement. In January 2001, Boot Boys in search of “getting a foreigner” stabbed 15-year-old Benjamin Hermansen, the son of a Norwegian mother and Ghanaian father, and a Somali-Norwegian taxi driver and father of six was killed in Trondheim in 2008 by a man who wrote that he wanted “to kill Muslims if the opportunity presented itself.” In neighboring Sweden, Peter Mangs was arrested in November 2010 for a yearlong sniper campaign against immigrants in Malmö, a neighborhood with a high concentration of Muslims. Breivik has praised Mangs as a European “patriot.”
But the July 22 attacks signify a change in the strategies of far-right violence: Breivik directly targeted Norway’s ruling party, not its Muslim minority. “Random violence against Muslims is considered counter-productive and will only create more sympathy for Islam at best,” writes Breivik in his compendium. To kill the young politicians was to implement a policy of political assassination with the aim of changing the future of the Labor Party in Norway.
It hasn’t worked. Eskil Pedersen, the 28-year-old leader of the youth wing (AUF) of the Labor Party, was on Utøya on July 22. Breivik had considered assassinating him specifically. “It was a very traumatic experience that day. It took quite a long time before I felt safe,” Pedersen told me. But Breivik didn’t succeed at killing off the AUF. Its membership has since grown 45 percent, and the political nature of the attack has caused the AUF to reassess its priorities. “We have always been involved in the work against racism in Norway, but that issue is now even more important,” Pedersen said.
In fact, a state commission determined that immediately following the attack and before Breivik was known as the assailant, at least fifteen hate crimes or acts of harassment against Muslims occurred throughout Norway. Lingering in the background for many Norwegians is what the response would have been had the attacks been carried out by a Muslim; many admitted to me their fear of a less tolerant society. Fabian Stang, Oslo’s popular Conservative mayor, addressed this question head-on and with considerable introspection when visiting a mosque in Oslo shortly after the attack. He told his Muslim audience, “The murderer was white, Christian for all I know, a little younger than me and very similar in appearance. None of you have branded me as a possible murderer. If a Muslim ever does something that can’t be accepted, I promise I’ll never brand you.”
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Norway’s right-wingers base their worldview essentially on three dangerous fictions that have now proven deadly. The first is that Muslims are about to take over and impose Sharia law in Norway, a near-impossibility considering Norway’s tiny Muslim community. The second is the repeated right-wing complaint that discussions of Islam and immigration are silenced by political elites. This too is belied by the facts. Norway’s anti-immigrant Progress Party is the second-largest party in Parliament. Discussions of Islam, far from being suppressed, are overrepresented in the media, contributing more to a culture of polarization than political correctness. A 2010 study by Norway’s Directorate of Integration and Diversity found that in 2009 Norwegian media coverage of Islam almost outpaced references to the country’s prime minister. Immigration and integration also generated a whopping 324,319 comments on the debate pages of Aftenposten, a major daily (far above the 19,049 comments on schools and education). And most media coverage of immigration and Muslims was negative and skewed. Somalis, for example, generated three times the media coverage of Polish immigrants, even though there are almost twice as many Poles in Norway.
The third fiction is that Muslims will never assimilate into Norwegian society. Despite the rage and spleen spilled over Muslims in Norway, integration efforts have been quite successful. Norway’s second-generation Muslims excel, particularly in education. Although the government statistics bureau still considers “Norwegian-born persons with immigrant parents” immigrants, the data reveal that second-generation Norwegians participate in higher education more than their ethnic Norwegian counterparts, and the largest group of second-generation Norwegians by far have Pakistani parents. Employment levels are only slightly lower than in the rest of the population.
Bushra Ishaq, a prominent spokeswoman for the Norwegian Muslim community, is an example of the success and complexity of being a Norwegian Muslim. A 28-year-old physician, she had just left her shift in the emergency room in a downtown Oslo hospital when Breivik’s bomb exploded. She immediately turned around and went back to work. The emergency room treated 150 people in two hours, she told me, and patients with glass shards under their skin continued to pour in the next day. There wasn’t time to think of anything but treating the wounded, yet afterward strange feelings of guilt begin to float her way, feelings that “because of you, because of being a Muslim in Norway, people are killed,” she said.
Her work with anti-racist youth groups keeps her optimistic, nonetheless. Ishaq believes that everyday racism against Norwegian Muslims has declined since the attacks and that a larger sense of national community has opened up. “After the trial, people will understand what kind of ideology has been growing in our country,” she said. “And that we have to take more responsibility toward it.”
This, finally, is a truth worth pondering.
