Brendan O’Neill is revolted by the prospect that Anders Breivik’s rampage might be exploited by the Left the way 9/11 was exploited by the Bushite Right and its European fellow travelers: “while the attacks may not be ‘Norway’s 9/11’, they could well be the cultural elite’s 9/11 – in the sense that this is an act which the influential liberal classes may seek to politicise in an opportunistic fashion, to make moral mileage out of, in the same way that the right did after 11 September 2001.” The killer could hardly have been custom made to better fit left-wing ideas about society’s true villains.
O’Neill’s piece is doubly notable, however, for the case he makes that Breivik himself is much more of creature of multiculturalism than he realizes:
In his claim that he wanted to protect ‘white Christian identity’ from being overrun and crushed by an external powerful force – in this case Muslim immigrants – Breivik is merely indulging in an alternative form of multiculturalism. In different ways, both the 7/7 bombers and Breivik express the same sense of cultural paranoia, of cultural siege and victimhood. In recent years the right-wing critique of multiculturalism has ironically been shaped by the ethos of multiculturalism itself. From the English Defence League (which Breivik apparently had contact with) to authors who fret about Muslim immigration into Europe, there has been an attempt by right-wing elements to transform whiteness and Christianess into threatened identities, under siege from an almost colonialist tidal wave of Otherness. This sounds remarkably similar to the outlook of radical Islamists. Both groups accentuate and advertise their victim status and effectively compete for the respect of the overlords of identity-management in the multiculturalist elite. Where right-wingers warn of the rise of ‘Eurabia’, Islamists fret about the return of Christian crusaders; where right-wing activists claim their ‘white identity’ is not being accorded respect, Islamists claim their ‘Muslim identity’ is treated badly. The outlook of both groups is informed very powerfully by the victimology and craving for recognition inherent in multiculturalism.
Breivik’s alleged hatred of multiculturalism actually seems to be driven by a belief that it does not sufficiently respect his cultural identity; his violent act can be seen as a crazy, barbaric attempt to expand the remit of the politics of multiculturalism. (This is not to argue, by the way, that the EDL or anti-immigration thinkers bear any responsibility for Breivik’s violence. They do not.)
sak magundi 
Scott Lahti 
Note that Scandinavia has been going downhill since it started moving away both from social democracy and from very entrenched traditional Christianity, of which there now remains little of the former and almost none of the latter. To what consequence, we now see.
This reaction was inevitable. Nothing could be less conservative than the attempt to make the world anew, in accordance with some academic blueprint, by means of global war: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll at the barrel of a gun. The West is the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. I would die to protect it, on whatever shore it found itself, and it now finds itself on every shore. But if by “the West”, you mean the rootless, godless, globalized, hypercapitalist, metrosexual wasteland of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, then I hate it as much as does any Islamist.
Including the Islamists to whom, whatever they may pretend, the neocons have been allied from 1980s Afghanistan through 1990s Bosnia to today’s Turkey, Kosovo, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia (whence came the 9/11 attacks), Xinjiang and elsewhere. Including by taking out the bulwark against them in Iraq. Including in the form of Jundullah, the neocon-backed Islamist terrorists against the present government of Iran. Including in Libya. And including by means of the capitalist system that cannot function without unrestricted global migration. We have only ourselves to blame.
It was always going to happen eventually. Although I had almost hoped that it would come as attacks on Arab churches in the West, since that really would have made the point. But here we are, an attack by a man who has been heavily influenced by the likes of Daniel Pipes and who, via the EDL, is tied into that whole world of Harry’s Place, the Murdoch media, the American Enterprise Institute, the Henry Jackson Society, and so on, with a religion straight out of John Hagee, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Tony Blair, and with the staggeringly racist party of Israel’s Foreign Minister in the driving seat.
A lack of Mossad, even if “rogue” Mossad, involvement in this atrocity is about as likely as a lack of ISI, even if “rogue” ISI, involvement in the harbouring of Osama bin Laden. This gathering had just, as predicted, held a pro-Palestinian rally, and was taking place in support of a government about to recognize Palestine and withdraw from Libya. The attacker’s website called for all Jews in the world to move to “a liberated and Muslim-free Zion”. With views like that, he could be a member of the present Israeli Cabinet. What next? No link between 7/7 and Iraq? No link between 9/11 and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia? This is far more an Israeli attack than 9/11 was an Afghan attack (9/11 was in fact a Saudi attack).
It is no wonder that the neoconservative wars have been and are most enthusiastically promoted by media moguls who, far from being conservative figures, are somehow all and yet none of Australian, American and British, or somehow all and yet none of Canadian, American and British. They were and are also the people keenest on Margaret Thatcher. Those media have been the prime movers in turning first New Labour and then also its imitators who have taken over the Conservative Party into what most of Britain’s supposedly conservative newspapers have long been, more loyal to the United States and to the State of Israel than to the United Kingdom, a position as unconservative and as far removed from Labourism as it is possible to imagine, and without parallel in any comparable country, if in any country at all.
Much comment on Anders Behring Breivik’s favourable quotations from the London Daily Mail column of Melanie Phillips. But Melanie Phillips is nowhere near any centre of power. Whereas Breivik also quotes favourably from the Sun and Sunday Times contributions of Jeremy Clarkson. Yet there is little or no comment on that. How odd. But then, the Sun and the Sunday Times are owned by Rupert Murdoch. And Clarkson is not only a near neighbour, but also a very close personal friend, of David Cameron.
Neocons have of course been mass murdering teenagers for quite some time, including British teenagers sent to the front lines of the wars to further their deranged and venal schemes. But note that, suddenly, this has become a problem, now that the victims are white and, unlike squaddies, middle-class in the European sense of the term.
Douglas Murray’s Neoconservatism: Why We Need It manages not to mention Trotskyism or Max Shachtman at all in its supposed study of its subject; that’s Leo Strauss for you, I suppose. And on page 170, we read that, “As soon as blond Swedish men get into the habit of plotting and committing acts of terrorism against Western society, then blond Swedish men should be stopped and searched.” So, that’s still all right, then. Isn’t it? Don’t you believe it. These matters are in the hands of people who cannot tell an Arab from a Somali, from a South Asian, from, in one notable case, a Brazilian. So blond Norwegian men are by no means the only people who now need to give Britain a very wide berth indeed. Or have I missed something?