Monday Post

The tragic murders of over ninety people in Norway appear to have been caused by an anomaly of the strangest order:

The self-described perpetrator of Norway's deadly bombing and shooting rampage was ordered held in isolation at a hearing Monday after calmly telling the court that two other groups of allies stand ready to join his murderous campaign.

Anders Behring Breivik has admitted bombing Norway's capital and opening fire on a political youth group retreat on an island near the capital. He told authorities that he expects to spend the rest of his life in prison. 

Saying he wanted to save Europe from Muslim immigration, he entered a plea of not guilty that will guarantee him future court hearings and opportunities to address the public, even indirectly.

Police believe Breivik acted alone, despite his grand claims in a 1,500-page manifesto that he belonged to a modern group of crusaders. But they have not completely ruled out that he had accomplices.

It gets stranger:

Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man who slaughtered 76 people, is not only a terrorist and a murderer, but also a plagiarist: Sections from his 1,500-page manifesto were copied directly from that of the “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski. And even the material he wrote himself is derivative: From the parts of the rambling and disjointed manifesto that I have been able to read thus far, his bigoted and paranoid worldview seems to have originated — either directly or indirectly — with The Turner Diaries, a hack science fiction novel written 33 years ago by an American white supremacist named William Luther Pierce. The Turner Diaries feature prominently on a Swedish Nazi Internet forum called Nordisk, of which Breivick was a member.

His was the cherry-pick of nutbar ideologies. See here for a plethora of fairly comprehensive articles on things like the nuthatchery of finger-pointers and a failed attempt to "reason" with Breivik:

"Some of my friends tried to stop him by talking to him. Many people think on the island that it was a test ... comparing it to how it is to live in Gaza. So many people went to him and tried to talk to him, but they were shot immediately."

Such is the mentality of a country that would punish such a man by putting him in a resort-like prison for only twenty-one years (do read Pratt's rather Marxist assessment of Scandinavia's "exceptionalism" and then wonder how some people are not so mentally impaired that they can dress themselves each day) and cannot muster enough resources to act while a madman mowed down people for an hour:

“Why didn’t you come earlier?,” survivors screamed when Norwegian police arrived after an hour in which Anders Behring Breivik had wandered the wooded island of Utoya shooting dead 68 people, most of them teenagers.


In a nation united by grief over the worst massacre in its modern history, few except the survivors quoted by media have criticized authorities for not preventing the attacks or for the speed of their response once they had been carried out.

Already reeling from Breivik’s bomb in Oslo, the police response to the island massacre was beset with problems — from a boat so overloaded with officers it took on water, to special forces without a suitable helicopter to fly them there.

Meanwhile the minutes ticked by and Breivik hunted down his victims who hid under beds, climbed trees and hid in bushes or jumped into the lake in desperate attempts to flee.

It was 5.26 p.m. on Friday when local police in Nordre Buskerud first received an alert about shootings on the island. Four minutes later they notified Oslo and another eight minutes after that they formally requested back-up.

Fourteen minutes later still, local police arrived at the shore of the mainland, but for a further 17 minutes waited for a boat.

“We asked for help from the SWAT team in Oslo, which is specially trained to deal with armed situations. 

We did not know about the extent of the situation that was out there,” North Buskerud police chief Sissel Hammer was quoted as saying by the Dagsavisen daily newspaper.

“But this was not about waiting, this was 17 minutes during which we prepared ourselves.”

Meanwhile campers on the lake shore had taken matters into their own hands and set off in boats to pluck survivors from the water, some of them coming under fire from Breivik in the process. One camper alone rescued 40 to 50 terrified people.

At 6.09 p.m., Oslo police arrived in the area and set off for the island on a boat brought from nearby Hoenefoss.

“When so many people and equipment were put into it, the boat started to take on water, so that the motor stopped,” said Erik Berga, police operations chief for Buskerud county.

“The boat was way to small and way too poor,” he said.

When a SWAT team arrived at the island at 6.25 p.m., Breivik surrendered two minutes later without a fight.

Dare I suggest that Scandinavia's "exceptionalism" helped fuel this tragedy? Yeah, sure, why not? After all, a politically rootless (he was- read his "manifesto") loner with bizarre rationalisations attacked innocent people, a few of whom assumed they could talk him down because "peace is their thing" in the fjords, while those ostensibly trained to deal with situations like these fumbled about before apprehending the madman and his legally owned guns. While some may be pleased that their political spaghetti has finally stuck to the wall (a blond killer! Not the usual Islamist terror cell), using this anomaly as a convenient excuse to ignore more urgent and frequent incidences of terrorism is doing so at one's peril.


(hat tip)



Because he's Mark Steyn:

Nevertheless, Breivik’s manifesto seems to be determining the narrative in the anglophone media. The opening sentence from USA Today:

Islamophobia has reached a mass murder level in Norway as the confessed killer claims he sought to combat encroachment by Muslims into his country and Europe.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an “Islamophobic” mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims.

Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder. Yet the Associated Press is on board:

Security Beefed Up At UK Mosques After Norway Massacre.

But again: No mosque was targeted in Norway. A member of the country’s second political party gunned down members of its first. But, in the merest evolution of post-9/11 syndrome, Muslims are now the preferred victims even in a story in which they are entirely absent. A Tweeter thinks that “turning this scumbag’s atrocity in Norway into a lesson about how Mark Steyn and his ilk are douchebags seems… opportunistic,” but that’s the least of it. Even by the elastic definitions of “Islamophobia,” the angle being pursued is bizarre and profoundly tasteless: A rambling Internet pdf is trumping the facts on the ground — trumping the specifics of what occurred, and the victims. This man Breivik may think he’s making history and bestriding the geopolitical currents and the clash of civilizations, but in the end he went and shot up his neighbors. Why let his self-aggrandizing bury the reality?

Oh, yes,  aside from the usual punching-bag nonsense, Muslims in the UK placed extra security around their mosques. Because they are the real victims here:

Muslim leaders say it's time for governments to wake up to the threat of anti-Islamic extremism and stop pandering to far right nationalist movements that have made inroads in politics from the Netherlands to Austria. European attitudes, though, are unlikely to change overnight.

That wouldn't have anything to do with the attacks in London, Madrid and Stockholm, the rapes in Norway, the attacks on cartoonists and directors, the car fires in France and just the general aura of failure and oppression, would it?


In other news, the Czech Republic finds the Durban conference "anti-Semitic" and pulls out. Good.



I had to throw this one in here. It had Spock in the article:  Logic pays off in the stock market