Who Is the Oslo Massacre a Wake-up Call for?

Racist and Islamophobic 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik committed the most outrageous massacre on Norwegian soil since World War II, killing 76 people, most of them teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18.

Breivik, in his 1,518-page manifesto, strongly argues that he carried out the killings to warn Europe to fight against two main enemies: the multiculturalism advocated by the Marxist left, enabling Muslims to settle in Europe; and Muslims, who he says will dominate the continent in the coming decades.

When the bombing happened in Oslo on the afternoon of Friday, July 22, almost all the TV channels in Europe and the US argued that, first and foremost and without any real clue, the attack had been carried out by Muslim fundamentalists and most likely al-Qaeda. In the immediate aftermath, Norwegian Muslims had already started to bear the brunt of these accusations, with some of them being personally harassed.

As reported by BBC, Mehtab Afsar, secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Norway, said, “We heard some Muslims had already been beaten up in Oslo, and women who were scared phoned me asking for help.”

According to the Norwegian police, Breivik was a “Christian fundamentalist,” a phrase that sounds strange and bizarre as the world in general and the West in particular have only put the word “fundamentalist” together with the word “Muslim” and never with “Christian” or “Jew.”

Borrowing from American professor Bernard Lewis’ book title, people frantically started to ask “what went wrong?” Professor Lewis, an expert in Ottoman-Turkish history and the Middle East wrote the book in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in an attempt to analyze what in the Muslim world was breeding these fundamentalist youth.

Experts, journalists, writers, intellectuals and politicians tried to answer what was wrong in Europe. What kind of cultural, political and social atmospheres could have created a mass killer like Breivik? Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that his peace prize should be awarded by a committee of five people chosen by the Norwegian Parliament to a person who, he said: “… shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Some Norwegians, it seems, got Nobel’s message completely wrong. So, people are deciding for whom the Oslo massacre should be a wake-up call. According to racist groups on the extreme right wing, it is a wake-up call for Europe to be more vigilant on the encroachment of Islam. The leader of the English Defence League (EDL), Stephen Lennon, said: “What happened in Oslo shows how desperate some people are becoming in Europe. It’s a ticking time bomb.”

However, according to some, the wake-up call is for the European polity that has largely condoned the rise of racist and Islamophobic parties, allowing them to consistently abuse one of the most sacred principles of democracy, the freedom of expression. Cecilia Malmström, the Swedish EU commissioner for home affairs, remarked in her European Voice weekly interview that “blaming Islam or immigration for all sorts of problems has become normal.” She highlighted the “permissive climate” in which such views “are no longer seen as extreme.”

What went wrong?

It would not be a problem if Islam and Muslims were being abused only by fringe parties, but Islamophobia has been gaining ground until now it is common and held as a value by many, even by center-right wing parties. It is surprising and sometimes shocking how mainstream parties have condoned or at least turned a blind eye to the rise of Islamophobic parties, given the continent’s fascist legacy. Some are calling this a new policy of “appeasement,” likening it to events just before the Second World War.

Geert Wilders, the most Islamophobic of European politicians, was acquitted of all charges last month in the Netherlands. While I do not endorse his imprisonment, the judge should have at least given him a symbolic one euro fine to underscore that his views were not to be tolerated.

While Sarrazin’s book showed that Islamophobic views are now almost the “norm,” the Socialists and Greens still push against racist parties. The point is that the political climate, though not pushing people to commit horrible crimes, is nevertheless creating a environment conducive to such actions.

Malmström pointed to a “huge lack of political leadership” in Europe. “Parties compete with each other over who can come up with solutions most similar to those of the far right. We see this in the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, France and many other nations.” The result, she said, was a European voice that says “it’s fine to say that immigration is a threat to our country, to our identity.”

The head of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, told the German Press Agency (DPA) that a trend toward xenophobia and nationalism in the region fostered the attacks in Norway. In a society where anti-Islamic sentiment and isolation were tolerated, “Naturally on the margins of society, there will be crazy people who feel legitimized in taking harsher measures.”

“The biggest challenge is the opportunism of the center, and I think this will change now,” said Joschka Fischer, Germany’s former foreign minister and a leading European leftist, pointing to the Danish government’s cooperation with the far-right Danish People’s Party, which has pushed through a partial reinstitution of border controls.

Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, while full of calls for violence, also includes passages that echo the concerns of mainstream political leaders surrounding the preservation of national identity and values. “So much of what he wrote could have been said by any right-wing politician,” said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Green bloc in European Parliament. “A lot of arguments about immigrants and Islamic fundamentalism will now be much easier to question and to push back.” (NYT)

While Muslims have complained for a while about both the rise of Islamophobia and the tolerance shown these groups, it would be a mistake to portray Europe as a continent full of Muslim-hating racists. That would be falling into the same trap of racism, reinforcing the famous thesis entitled “The Clash of Civilizations.” European Muslims should call on Socialists and Greens to be more courageous in the fight against racism and tell right-wing politicians like Merkel and Sarkozy to keep away from extreme-right parties.

There are promising signs in the wake of the Norway attacks which would seem to show that European politicians have heard the wake-up call. First of all, those far-right politicians who had endorsed positions similar to Breivik’s in Italy, Sweden and France have been strongly reprimanded within their parties. The EU convened an urgent meeting in Brussels at which they acknowledged that they had become so focused on “Islamist” terror that the possibility of extreme right-wing terror had gone off the radar screens. Germany had already carried out a raid against neo-Nazi groups, while Belgium and Britain ordered new investigations into he activities of far-right parties.

Most promising, of course, is the way Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has handled the tragedy. In the face of very loaded questions on Friday, which tried to link the bombing to Muslim extremists, Stoltenberg, a social democrat leader, stood his ground and didn’t accuse anyone. In the following days, he insisted that Norway would respond to the massacre by being more open, more tolerant and more democratic.

Let’s hope that the wake-up call is received by all the politicians in Europe, especially by those of the center right-wing, and that they will be more responsible when talking about immigration, Muslims, Jews, Gypsies and all vulnerable minorities.

31 July 2011
SOURCE: SUNDAY’S ZAMAN