Recently by Justin Raimondo: Who Was Behind the Anthrax Attacks?
It had to happen: the rise of a “counter-jihadist” terrorist outfit that is the mirror image of al-Qaeda. That it first arose in Norway, rather than, say, in the US, is just a coincidence, although I’m sure Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Norwegian mass murder in Utoya, has his American collaborators, as he claimed in his manifesto, “2083: A Declaration of European Independence,” [.pdf] and an accompanying video. Indeed, a good many of the sources he cites in “2083" – which is basically a compendium of previously published works by others – are American. Material from David Horowitz‘s website, Frontpagemag.com, figures prominently, along with articles taken verbatim from the Horowitz-affiliated “Jihad Watch,” run by professional hater and make-believe “scholar” Robert Spencer.
Breivik’s “book” is a mishmash, half diary of his careful preparations for the attack thrown together with anti-Muslim materials and boilerplate conservative rhetoric about the importance of faith, family, and community – Breivik lifts an entire section of a screed on “Cultural Conservatism” by the late Paul Weyrich – totaling well over a thousand pages. Thankfully, we don’t have to plough through this disjointed “compendium,” as he calls it – which shows signs of being hastily thrown together in preparation for his international debut as the Norwegian Timothy McVeigh, just like his Facebook page and his Twitter account. Breivik created a much more coherent video version which gives us a lot more clues about why he murdered 90-plus (at last count) of his fellow Norwegians in the name of fighting Islam.
In the video, Breivik targets the Enemy, which he calls “cultural Marxism.” So you thought communism failed with the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe? Wrong! In reality – according to Breivik – the Marxists, under the banner of the Frankfurt School theorists, infiltrated the mainstream political parties, academia, and even exercised a dominant influence on the “global capitalists.” Their goal: the eradication of European cultural identity, to be subsumed under a multi-culturalist “EUSSR.” The present rulers of the West are cultural “traitors,” who are conspiring openly with Islamists to reestablish the old Ottoman Empire in Europe and pave the way for the “Islamization” of the entire continent.
The second part of the video details the threat posed by an inherently aggressive and implacable Islam, the long history of Islamic imperialism, and the submission of the subject peoples to “dhimmitude.” This section relies heavily on the writings of the professional Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Andrew G. Bostom, Bernard Lewis, etc., that reads like the table of contents for a routine edition of Horowitz’s online magazine. It is neoconservatism, of the old cold war variety, with the only difference being that International Islam has taken the place of International Communism as our unsleeping foe.
Part three of the video is the most successful and creative: it presents a pantheon of heroes – every European military figure or ruler who ever fought a battle against the Ottomans – from Charles Martel to Vlad the Impaler, and even including Czar Nicholas II. I have to add that all this is accompanied by soaring “Celtic”-sounding music, like something out of the Lord of the Rings score: interspersed with images of Crusaders, and such historical figures as El Cid, Richard the Lionhearted, and events such as the Battle of Tours and the Ottoman siege of Vienna, this section links the sympathetic viewer to a usable past, an heroic tradition of which he can feel a part. This segues easily into the fourth and final part, which is chiefly exhortatory – a call to action. The cultural Marxist “traitors” must be hunted down and exterminated: he is very clear about this. A Cultural Marxist Hunting Permit is depicted, so as to make Breivik’s strategic principle unmistakable. These new “Crusaders,” then, are to be an army of assassins – a “Christian” Western version of al-Qaeda.
