Anders Breivik is a rightwing Christian terrorist who bombed government buildings in Oslo and killed 69 boys and girls in cold blood with automatic weapons on a little island near Oslo.
His political orientation suggests that he chose these children to kill because they were attending a youth camp organized by the ruling Labour Party, an organization he detested, but he also killed them because they were innocent. Breivik is a symbolist: he needed to kill a critical mass of innocents to shock Norway, Europe, indeed the world, into paying attention to his grievances and prescriptions. What we saw on Utoya was ritual child sacrifice performed with a Glock. After shooting them on land and then shooting them in the water (as they tried to swim away), Breivik described the killings as grotesque but necessary.
This parade of composure and dispassion is part of the persona that Breivik has taken some trouble to construct. Breivik’s narcissism, his keenness on military costume, medieval and modern, shouldn’t mislead us into thinking of him as a dysfunctional adult playing at soldiers. Breivik is a special kind of monster; he’s the internet stalker on steroids, the anonymous bigot who hones his hatred in a dozen chatrooms, a fanatical autodidact who begins to see himself, thanks to the anonymity and equality of the worldwide web, as a world-historical intellectual.
And he is an intellectual. Breivik has careful ideological positions, a world view that makes sense of the noise of the modern world and a highly developed sense of historical mission. He has a 1500 page political manifesto posted online which sets out his grievances, his hatreds and his plan for the world. Contrary to the stereotype of the monster as loner, Breivik sees himself as part of a global uprising against Muslims, immigrants and black people (so often contained in the same vile body) and in his mind, he is surrounded by allies in this struggle. Islamophobic bloggers like Daniel Pipes, best-selling bigots like Mark Steyn, the skinheads of the English Defence League, Israeli Zionists beset by violent Arabs, Indian ‘Sanatan Dharmists’ threatened by fertile, fast breeding aliens are, in his obsessive manifesto, potential comrades-in-arms.
For Breivik the children he killed were individually innocent but collectively guilty because they were associated with the Labour Party which supported multiculturalism and had been instrumental in allowing the Muslim migration that now threatened Norway’s white, Christian identity. Reading Breivik’s online rants, the Indian reader will immediately recognize his loathing of the Labour Party and other advocates of multiculturalism as the exact equivalent of the Hindu Right’s denunciation of its own bogeyman, the ‘pseudo-secularist’.
The reflexive assumption that the killings in Norway were the work of Muslim terrorists made many rightwing commentators look silly but their stupid bigotry is less worrying than the justification that has been offered for their ‘mistake’. The standard defence has been that while these bloggers and journalists were wrong to jump to conclusions, their error was understandable because Islamist terror is overwhelmingly the main threat to peace in Europe. The conviction that terrorism in Europe is coterminous with Muslim mayhem is so widespread as to need no explanation or documentation. The only problem with this conviction is that it’s wholly false.
In 2009, there were 294 terrorist acts in Europe (not including the United Kingdom) of which one, yes, one, was committed by a Muslim. The vast majority of terrorist attacks in 2009 (237 out of 294) were perpetrated by white, non-Muslim separatist groups, mainly in Spain and France. In 2007, two out of a total of 581 terrorist plots had been inspired by Muslim radicals, whereas in 2008 not a single one of 441 documented terrorist attacks was carried out by a Muslim.
These figures aren’t compiled by some bleeding-heart liberal think tank dedicated to manufacturing alibis for bad Muslims; they are cited in a report called the Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2010, compiled by an European Union agency, Europol. In its own words, “[t]he TE-SAT aims to provide law enforcement officials, policymakers and the general public with facts and figures regarding terrorism in the EU, while also seeking to identify trends in the development of this phenomenon. It is a public document produced annually on the basis of information provided and verified by the competent law enforcement authorities in the EU Member States.”
These figures, therefore, are officially endorsed by the EU’s member states. According to the report’s typology of terror, most terrorist attacks in Europe are carried out (in descending order of frequency) by separatists, leftwing terrorists and rightwing terrorists. The incidence of Islamist terror attacks in Europe over the last three years has been vanishingly small. And yet this grotesquely violent killing in Norway had respectable journalists in the Washington Post and the New York Times looking for Muslim connections that didn’t exist.
As it became clear that the killer might well be a blond, rightwing Christian, the New York Times, that pillar of the liberal press in America, tried to salvage something from its earlier assumption that the perpetrator was a Muslim jihadi:
“Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida’s signature brutality and multiple attacks. If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from al-Qaida,” said Brian Fishman, a counter-terrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.
Notice that the first sentence of this passage suggests by implication that if Muslims weren’t responsible for the Oslo killings, mass murder wouldn’t amount to terrorism. Even when the killer turned out to be a white, Muslim-hating Christian, al-Qaida remained, in some speculative way, responsible for the violence. The main lesson of the Oslo tragedy has been that “terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target”. Replace ‘American’ with ‘Indian’ and Glenn Greenwald could be writing about us.
In majoritarian discourse, no violence committed by non-Muslims can be legitimately labelled terrorist because such violence is either trivial (compared to global jihad) or retaliatory, the involuntary response of a goaded majority. This form of passive-aggressive denial rules out the possibility of majoritarian terror while simultaneously holding out the threat of massive violence if the tolerant, much-tried majority is provoked beyond endurance. A good example of this position is Chandan Mitra’s criticism of those who pointed to Hindutva terrorism in the aftermath of the Malegaon explosions:
“The fact is that individual miscreants or petty bomb peddlers do not constitute anything like Hindu terror groups; they have no sympathy, at least yet, from the community. But stoked and insulted repeatedly, the tolerant and largely passive Hindu might just start justifying the actions of fringe groups. By nature, the Hindu can never be a terrorist. Secular-fundamentalists should not provoke him to a point where he seriously contemplates the option.” (Italics mine.)
Anders Breivik didn’t just seriously contemplate the option, he acted on it. We can either grant such acts the preemptive absolution Chandan Mitra recommends or we can learn to call terrorism by its proper name regardless of the identity of the terrorist.