Last week in Norway, comfortable illusions were shattered so suddenly that people around the world were left grasping for new ones. A nation known as a peaceful bastion of liberalism exploded in a convulsion of sheer hatred. And the reflexive media reaction that followed ricocheted between fear-mongering about Muslim violence to flaunting a uniquely American extremism.
Many corporate news media outlets are still trying to assemble a coherent narrative, but a few instructive lessons have emerged. The first is that they never learn. Once again, reporters seized on the Muslim terrorist meme in the minutes following the attack. The instant association of "terrorism" with Muslim or Arab has become standard practice even among established news outlets.
Benjamin Doherty at Electronic Intifada traced how one tweet from a supposed terrorist expert went viral following Anders Behring Breivik's attack and swelled into a myth about "global jihad." Even after the misinformation became clear:
For hours after McCants posted the update that the claim of responsibility was retracted, BBC, the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post were still promoting information originally sourced from him. The news was carried around the world and became the main story line in much of the initial coverage
The threshold for a terrorism expert must be very low. This whole rush to disseminate a false, unverifiable and flimsily sourced claim strikes me as a case of an elite fanboy wanting to be the first to pass on leaked gadget specs.
As the facts of Breivik's ideology slowly broke through, mainstream news showed momentary compunction. But that emotion was quickly overtaken by a second and equally familiar theme in coverage of political violence: the often-deceptive "lone wolf" trope that threads through debates about domestic white supremacist movements.
On one hand, the lone-wolf theory is refreshing in that it recognizes individuals can commit acts of terror even without the direction of an established group. But it also affords mainstream Americans a mental safe zone that detaches "the crazies" from more acceptable right-wing and racist currents in the public discourse. The failure to grasp the continuum of extremism creates self-enforcing ignorance, as seen in Homeland Security's attempts to downplay the threat of militant right-wing groups amid pressure from conservatives.
True, extreme ideologies can't be solely to blame for extreme violence. But curiously, that principle just doesn't seem to apply to Muslim community leaders, constantly pressured to formally denounce every act that carries any suspicion of Islamic radicalism. The "lone wolf" concept doesn't buffer European and American Muslims against the collective guilt that so many right-wingers gleefully impose on their religious identity.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald dissected the media's conflation of religion, politics and terror in the coverage of Norway on corporate outlets:
[This] is what we've seen repeatedly: 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. Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn't Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn't).
The assumption is that Western Christian liberalism is incompatible with fundamentalist violence. But Frank Schaeffer points out the flip-side of those vaunted Western values:
There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.
So how many more "lone wolves" will it take to force people to recognize a collective threat?
Another lesson we can pull from the wreckage in Oslo is that when those with the power to shape public opinion do learn, it's typically too late. Though the Oslo attacks have spurred some news outlets to take a harder look at the rise of right-wing ideologies -- and their violent offshoots -- in the political establishment, evidence of this trend has been mounting quietly for years.
In the U.S., state and federal lawmakers have pandered to the right by directly targeting Muslim communities, most notably in Rep. Peter King's hearings on Muslim American extremism, and some have pushed fanatically absurd "anti-Sharia" legislation. In some European countries, the far right has ascended through political parties, capitalizing on widespread xenophobia and backlash against "multiculturalism."
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, this political climate enables ultra-conservative activists like Pam Geller to inspire, from a distance, violent convulsions such as the Oslo attacks. Research director Heidi Beirich told Colorlines:
What Breivik did is, he sucked in this anti-Islam ideology--part of it from European organizations, some of it from the United States.... That kind of propaganda eventually gets to people who are willing to act on it. And that's why it's so irresponsible to be saying these things. Obviously, people like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer have freedom of speech rights. But at the end of the day, you have to think about, "Who is this influencing?" You constantly demonize a population, eventually they're going to become a target of someone.
One such individual made himself known last week with stunning barbarity.
The key lesson from Oslo is that fear can and does blind, not just those who act on violent impulses but also those who bear witness to it. Maybe now some Americans might finally examine the ripple effects of political ideas with which they've grown dangerously comfortable over the past decade. When Norway's tragedy put a crack in America's mirrored walls of false security, we got a glimpse of something truly terrifying, something sheltered within.
Cross-posted from Colorlines.com
Follow Michelle Chen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/meeshellchen
Mustafa Akyol: From Jihadism to Crusade-ism
Jake Townsend: Branding Peace: Norway's Identity Put to the Test
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Terrorism, Fear and Spirituality
This is the kind of romantic primitivism that the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall calls ‘designer tribalism.’
Non-Western cultures are automatically assumed to live in harmony with animals and plants according to the deeper dictates of humanity and to practice an elemental spirituality. ( Ayaan Hrsi Ali in her book, Nomad)
It is this kind of "designer tribalism" that many rational thinking Europeans oppose.
Yes. Breivik included opposition to multicultural dogma in his narrative.
No, his murderous methods do not invalidate the cause of opposition to unlimited immigration policies. Policies which wreaked such havoc upon European stability and prosperity.
A loner, probably with mental problems and soaking up the hate and having no other outlet than to escape into violence.
I am afraid that our internet age may produce more of these kinds of lone wolves. There are too many people nowadays who have nobody to talk to but the internet.
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/violence-directed-liberal-and-govern
All is one. Figure it out. Evil needs no motive, and or excuse.It just is, always has been, always will. Live with it, fight it, put give it no special name.There is no choice.
Terrorism is a political and military tactic. People usually don't kill their own children for that reason.
All evil. People kill each other and their own children because they are human,and humans can be evil, as it is in the dna, animals are killers for survival , but are they evil? Anyway I surely agree everything evil in not terrorism.
Every religion has a tiny percentage of extremists. Muslim extremists feel they're fighting a war.
http://cpost.uchicago.edu/index.php
They don't represent mainstream views within Islam, any more than Breivik represents mainstream views within Christianity.
http://clarifyingislam.com/2011/04/30/600-page-fatwa-condemning-terrorism-by-internationally-respected-islamic-legal-scholar/
I have an instant suspicion of any article that uses a web site dedicated to promoting terrorism as a source of information.
http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/07/pamela-geller-edits-post-to-conceal-violent-rhetoric-in-email-from-norway/#comments
Are you referring to those Jews who have merely returned to their ancestral homelands?
Are you referring to that remote place lost in the millennia, that before 1948 was nothing but a distant, barely archaeologÂical, mostly mythical, theologicaÂl memory, that have politically managed to become a state under the name of "Israel", by occupying the same geographical territory that all ancient and modern maps have always recognized by its unique historical name: Palestine?
"The Khazar Empire and its Heritage"
http://198.62.75.1/www2/koestler/
Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3591990,00.html
I appreciate his perspective. The interview is here: http://bit.ly/oBIhAq
It is an eye opener. I hope more will access and read his beautiful ideas.
There seems to be no option for mutual co-existence and tolerance on all sides.
If it's true political rhetoric inspires violence, then it's true of Naser Abdo, who was hailed as a hero by CNN and became one of the faces of the far left anti-war movement. He has worked directly with several socialist anti-war groups, such as IVAW, Code Pink and Courage to Resist. He's a Bradley Manning supporter.
http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=26009
Now that you know this, are you going to be consistent and blame these groups for Abdo's attempted mass murder? No double standards now.
No double standards.
That said, there is a reason for that. In most instances of modern Islamic terrorism, especially in European cities, the perpetrators tend not to have passive relationships with those inciting the violence, but direct contact with them or their representatives. There isn't any indication that Breivik, other than his suspect rantings, that he was directly contacted, trained, and instructed by Geller or Spencer, or any other larger organisation.
None of this is to say that Michelle Chen isn't wrong in condemning the assumption that all acts of violence must be committed by Islamic terrorists. Nor is it wrong to condemn the view that the general Islamic community is responsible for Islamic extremism while seeing far-right (or far-left) extremism independent of the general political communities they come from. But it's not wrong to imagine that we can view two things differently, and that the level of culpability people have for other people's actions is not always identical, even if the action itself is quite similar. It is reasonable, logical, and morally acceptable to discuss the way that extremist Imams interact with the violent members of their community differently than the way we discuss repugnant bloggers and their relationship with violent members of their community.