Fjordman’s latest essay concerns the contrast between media
coverage of the massacre in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, and the
kid-glove treatment granted the Toulouse murderer Mohammed Merah.
This text will form a part of Fjordman’s upcoming book about the
Breivik case, “Witness to Madness”, which should be in circulation in
the second half of 2013.
Two Terrorists and a Double Standard
by Fjordman
The mass murder committed by Anders Behring Breivik during his twin
attacks in Norway in 2011 understandably attracted a lot of media
attention. ABB claimed to represent a much larger organization called
the Knights Templar, which triggered a massive hunt for potential
accomplices at home and abroad. Not a single trace has been found of
this organization, which is most likely a figment of Breivik’s vivid
imagination.
While
it is understandable that such a claim had to be checked, in hindsight
it comes off as highly questionable that the mass media in multiple
countries launched a veritable witch-hunt on named individuals based on
nothing other than the word of an obviously deranged mass murderer who
clearly enjoyed being at the center of attention. It is instructive in
this regard to compare the Breivik case to the rather different behavior
displayed by the mass media when dealing with another terrorist in
Western Europe some months later, Mohammed Merah.
In March 2012, in the Toulouse region of France a young Muslim man
named Mohammed Merah committed a series of three gun attacks targeting
French soldiers and Jewish civilians, some of them children. He murdered
seven people, including three Jewish children, and was eventually
killed resisting arrest after a 36-hour police siege.
In January 2013, French police arrested two men in connection with the attacks carried out by
Mohamed Merah.
Police officials say they doubt whether the killer acted alone. His
brother Abdelkader has been charged as an accomplice and remains in
custody.
In February 2013, the Jewish community in Toulouse suffered an unpleasant flashback to the previous year’s killings. “
Fear is
everywhere,” said Arie Bensemhoun, the chairman of Toulouse’s Jewish
community. “With every passing day we become more convinced of this:
that Mohamed Merah, there was not just one of him.”
The case keeps expanding. In late March 2013, more than a year after
Mohammed Merah’s death on 22 March 2012 following a standoff with French
police, a French soldier
was arrested
in connection with the shootings. Merah told negotiators during the
siege that he was a member of al-Qaida. He expressed no regrets other
than “not having claimed more victims” and said he was motivated by the
fate of the Palestinians, the French military presence in Afghanistan
and France’s ban on the full veil.
In other words, Mohammed Merah openly cited a perfectly
straightforward Islamic justification for his terrorism. Yet in many
news reports, Merah is still simply referred to as a “gunman” of no
specific beliefs, whereas Breivik is nearly always labeled a “right-wing
extremist terrorist” espousing “Islamophobic” views.
The
French intelligence
services downgraded an investigation of Merah just five months before
he opened fire on a crowd of parents and children outside a Jewish
school in Toulouse, according to leaked intelligence documents. He had
been under surveillance since 2006 and was identified as a “privileged
target” in 2011 upon his return to France from a trip to Afghanistan.
Agents intercepted Merah in 2011 after he returned from another trip to
Pakistan. Despite evidence that he had been in regular contact with “the
radical Islamist movement in Toulouse” and was receiving funds from
known extremists, the agency concluded that his surveillance could be
curtailed. French authorities later admitted to “
flaws” in the way the authorities dealt with the terrorist Merah.
Needless to say, with millions of Muslims in France, it is nearly
impossible to keep track of all potential Jihadist threats. This problem
continues to grow in all Western countries every single day, alongside
Muslim immigration.
Abdelghani Merah,
the oldest brother of the Toulouse killer, in a book denounces the role
of his own father, mother, sister and brother in spawning a “monster,”
claiming that the youngest of his four siblings was raised in an
“atmosphere of racism and hatred”, but also of violence and neglect. He
has written the book
Mon Frère, ce terroriste (“My brother the terrorist”) to try to counter hero-worship of Mohamed, 23, among young Muslims.
He recalls visiting his mother’s house for a wake for Mohamed, where
he was met with whoops of joy for the mass murderer from many local
Muslims. People were congratulating his mother and saying “Be proud.
Your son brought France to its knees.” Abdelghani screamed: “My brother
is not a hero. He is a common assassin.”
Their sister, who was known to French
intelligence
services for being close to extreme Salafi Muslims and attending
classes to study the Koran, as a devout Muslim believer has proclaimed
great “pride” in her murderous brother and professed strong hatred of
Jews and other non-Muslims: “
Mohamed had the courage to act. I am proud, proud, proud… Jews, and all those who massacre Muslims, I detest them.”
Yet despite all of this, the then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, allegedly a conservative, declared with confidence that “
The Islamic faith has nothing to do with the insane motivations of this man.” Really?
Merah’s attacks were far from the only time Jews, some of whom are
now leaving France for Israel or North America, have been attacked by
Muslims in France. One of the most horrific such cases was the young
Ilan Halimi, who in 2006 was tortured over a period of weeks near Paris
and eventually killed by a Muslim gang. They kidnapped Halimi, a
23-year-old cell phone salesman, because he was Jewish and they thought
Jews were rich. They subjected his family and a rabbi to hundreds of
abusive phone calls and e-mails demanding ransom.
As journalist Nidra Poller comments in
The Wall Street Journal, “
The
murder of Ilan Halimi invites comparison with the November 2003 killing
of a Jewish disc jockey, Sébastien Selam. His Muslim neighbor, Adel,
slit his throat, nearly decapitating him, and gouged out his eyes with a
carving fork in his building’s underground parking garage. Adel came
upstairs with bloodied hands and told his mother, ‘I killed my Jew, I
will go to paradise.’ In the two years before his murder, the Selam
family was repeatedly harassed for being Jewish.”
The Koran and other Islamic texts teach Muslims to despise and hate
non-Muslims in general, although Jews may be slightly more hated than
other infidels. In France and other European countries, Muslim
immigrants have already progressed beyond attacks on the Jewish minority
to verbal and physical harassment of the Christian majority population,
including acts of vandalism against churches and abuse of worshippers.
Racist attacks or violence against white natives, ranging from
robberies to gang rapes, are all too common and seem to be increasing.
In certain lawless areas, ambulances or fire brigades risk being attack
by young immigrants for no other reason than doing their job. In urban
areas in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands to
England, France, Greece and Spain, immigrant gangs — often Africans or
Muslims — engage in street crime against the native population or even
against other immigrants as well as tourists.
In early 2013, Chinese authorities publicly made a complaint directed to France that many
tourists
from China had been robbed of their personal belongings in the streets
of Paris. Previously, the Socialist mayor of two local districts in the
increasingly Arab-dominated city of Marseilles, herself of immigrant
origins, pleaded that the French army must be set in against armed
criminal gangs there, since the local police are overwhelmed and no
longer capable of maintaining a bare minimum of order. This request has
so far been
rejected.
The overwhelming number of cases of what could be deemed racist
violence in Europe these days thus tend to involve immigrant
perpetrators and white victims. Despite this, many Western media outlets
in the spring of 2012 automatically assumed that these violent attacks
in France were carried out by a white native person.
The Norwegian dissident writer Nina Hjerpset-Østlie, who has a sharp pen, noted that the left-wing newspaper
Politiken in Denmark, a rough equivalent to
The Guardian
in Britain, before the terrorist’s identity become known asked about
the sources of “right-wing extremist hate.” After it became clear that
the terrorist had a Muslim immigrant background, the same newspaper
suddenly changed its tune and now stated that “the tragedy of Toulouse
should not be misused politically.” Apparently, ideology is deemed to be
of tremendous importance if the perpetrator is a European, but of
little or no importance if the perpetrator is a Muslim. Hjerpset-Østlie
noted the huge
double standard displayed by Western mass media, which was embarrassingly obvious in this case.
While Western mass media and the political establishment still
thought the perpetrator of Mohammed Merah’s terror attacks was a white,
native European neo-Nazi (despite having no real evidence indicating
this), the
New York Times ran a prominent story which inferred
that the killings were a byproduct of anti-immigrant sentiment and
European so-called xenophobia. Yet after it was revealed that the killer
was a Muslim who supported al-Qaida, left-wingers and so-called
progressives went into overdrive to dissociate the violence from Islam.
Yes, I know that shortly after Breivik’s bomb in central Oslo, many
people thought it was carried by an Islamic group. Yet I remain firmly
convinced that had this truly been the case, the mass media would have
gone out of their way to disassociate terrorism or violence from Islam,
as they nearly always do, and would instead have emphasized more Western
outreach to Muslims to improve “integration,” understanding” and
“dialogue.” This is largely what they did after the Islamic terrorist
bombings in Madrid, Spain, and London, England.
In contrast, after Breivik the mass media assumed that he was part of
a wider movement among native Europeans. I felt the negative effects of
this myself, but the media harassment went far beyond Scandinavia to
Switzerland and the USA. Even in England, people who had never met
Breivik lost their jobs simply for being peaceful, conservative critics
of Islam and Muslim immigration, as the case of
Chris Knowles demonstrates.
Tariq Ramadan,
a notorious professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University in
England and the grandson of the founder of the internationally powerful
Muslim Brotherhood, pretended that the terror attacks had nothing to do
with Islam. Ramadan instead portrayed Merah as a victim of alleged
anti-Muslim discrimination in France and Europe.
The
Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan was one of the more sensible voices, warning that it’s wrong to make a victim of a child killer: “
His killings
were premeditated. He filmed the murders as he did them, a tactic
frequently used and advocated by al-Qaeda. He had a history of crime and
a collection of weapons. He told police he had travelled to Afghanistan
and Pakistan to train as a jihad fighter. He had been on a watch list
of Muslim extremists, one reason the police found him quite quickly.
When they approached he opened fire. His film of the shootings was
mailed to the al-Jazeera TV network for dissemination. The footage
depicted all seven murders, taken with a camera slung from the gunman’s
neck. The film had been dubbed with verses from the Koran invoking jihad
and the greatness of Islam.”
The media were quick to portray Merah as a victim of circumstances or
a mentally disturbed “lone wolf,” an isolated psychiatric case. I
suppose the “wolf” analogy is easy to grasp for journalists, who often
hunt their prey in packs themselves. Perhaps Merah really was a mentally
unbalanced individual, but so was Breivik whom the mass media
desperately wanted declared sane, so he could be used as a tool against
opponents of Islamization.
Moreover, while they may have been mentally unstable, both Mohammed
Merah and Anders Behring Breivik were influenced by the Jihadist network
al-Qaida when carrying out their terror attacks; Merah possibly with
direct ties to them, Breivik at least as an admirer and copy-cat.
al-Qaida in turn base their ideas and methods on the Koran and other
Islamic texts, plus the
Sunna or personal example of Islam’s founder Mohammed.
On July 23 2011, the day after Breivik’s twin attacks in the Oslo
region, the commentator Nicholas Kulish wrote in the internationally
influential American newspaper
The New York Times that “
The
attacks in Oslo on Friday have riveted new attention on right-wing
extremists not just in Norway but across Europe, where opposition to
Muslim immigrants, globalization, the power of the European Union and
the drive toward multiculturalism has proven a potent political force
and, in a few cases, a spur to violence.”
Notice that there is no hint of any possibility here that Muslim
immigrants, the European Union, Multiculturalism or open-border policies
themselves might represent problems; only opposition to this does.
The writer proceeded to lament that so-called populist parties in
Europe who are critical of the above-mentioned wonders have created “a
climate of hatred in the political discourse” that may encourage violent
individuals. Kulish went on to state that “In the United States the
deadly attacks have reawakened memories of the Oklahoma City bombing in
1995, where a right-wing extremist, Timothy J. McVeigh, used a
fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal government building, killing 168
people. That deadly act had long since been overshadowed by the events
of Sept. 11, 2001.”
The attacks in New York City and other locations in the USA on
September 11th 2001 were Jihadist acts of war, according to their
Islamic perpetrators from al-Qaida. They murdered about 3000 unarmed
civilians, and tried to murder tens or even hundreds of thousands. Yet
to this writer in a New York-based newspaper, these were merely
unfortunate “events,” carried out by people with no particular
ideological or religious affiliation.
Kulish wrote about various allegedly right-wing extremist or populist
parties, among which he counted the Sweden Democrats, the Danish
People’s Party, Norway’s Progress Party, the True Finns in Finland,
Marie Le Pen of the Front National in France as well as Geert Wilders’
Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. As proof of the alleged extremism
of Wilders was mentioned that he has compared the Koran to Adolf
Hitler’s autobiography
Mein Kampf. Mr. Wilders has indeed made
such a comparison, but so has the former British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, without being labeled a “right-wing extremist” or potential
terrorist for doing so.
The front-page headline in
The New York Times on July 24th
2011 was stunning: “As Horrors Emerge, Norway Charges Christian
Extremist.” As the American television host and author Bill O’Reilly
asked at Fox News, on what grounds did the NYT brand Breivik a
Christian? He has no history of extensive Christian activity and has
partly admitted to committing acts counter to all Christian teaching.
According to Bill O’Reilly, “
Breivik
did not kill in the name of Jesus. He was not a member of a
Christian-based al-Qaida-like group. He was not funded by Iran or
enabled by Pakistan. It seems he is simply a murderer, a man devoid of
any spiritual conscience.”
It is thought-provoking that Western mass media, which are often very
reluctant to label somebody “Islamic terrorists” even in cases where
their Islamic motivations are openly stated, were quick to seize the
Breivik case to launch an attack on alleged right-wing extremists and
“Christian terrorists.” In Norway, the powerful state broadcaster NRK on
national television branded Breivik as one of several “
Christian
terrorists.” They eagerly embraced a suggestion by the American writer
and alleged terror expert Mark Juergensmeyer that Breivik is a “
Christian terrorist,” even though Anders Behring Breivik himself admits that this is not the case.
ABB made a number of references to both Christianity and Islam in his
manifesto, but these are incoherent, as are most other things there.
Not a single piece of evidence indicates that he was a devout,
practicing Christian prior to his attacks. On the contrary, ABB states
explicitly on page 1344 of his so-called manifesto that “I’m not going
to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie.” Even his
main defense lawyer Geir Lippestad
admits that ABB admires the violent methods employed by the Islamic terror network al-Qaida.
There is stronger case for an Islamic link than for a Christian one,
given Breivik’s great admiration for Jihadist terrorists. I am on the
record as stating that I will not be surprised if Breivik converts to
Islam in prison, yet although I am willing to discuss the matter, I
remain unconvinced that he was a convert prior to his attacks.
Mohamed Merah claimed to “
love death”
more than life, a common slogan among Islamic Jihadists, and he did
actually embrace death when he was killed during an armed standoff with
the police. Anders Behring Breivik could easily have done the same thing
and embraced “martyrdom” as he suggested, but he didn’t. That’s
probably because Breivik loved fame more than death. To the extent that
Breivik and his highly confused mind belonged to any “religion” at the
time of his terror attacks it was the Cult of Celebrity and Narcissism.
Active support for the murders committed by Breivik in Norway was
minuscule in right-wing circles; with the possible exception of
extremely marginal figures or fringe neo-Nazi groups — if one classifies
such Socialists as “right-wing.” The investigation and trial revealed
no connections whatsoever between ABB and any wider movement. This is in
sharp contrast to the attitude about Mohamed Merah among quite a few
Muslims.
Several otherwise well-meaning people have suggested that “the Koran
is what Muslims make of it,” which seems to imply that the text is
nearly infinitely elastic and that it’s therefore largely irrelevant
what it actually says. I happen to disagree with this assertion, and I’m
not the only one doing so.
In Denmark, the linguist
Tina Magaard
has concluded that Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far
greater degree than the texts of other religions. She has a PhD in
Textual Analysis and Intercultural Communication from the Sorbonne,
Paris and spent three years on a research project comparing the original
texts of ten religions. “
The texts
in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by
encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious
beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for
terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is
a fact we need to deal with.”
Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Koran for fighting
against people of other faiths. “If it is correct that many Muslims view
the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or
rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts
encourage terror and violence. Consequently, it must be reasonable to
ask Muslims themselves how they relate to the text, if they read it as
it is,” says Magaard.
After Breivik’s attacks, some of the peaceful authors who were cited
in his confused manifesto, such as Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer or me, were
accused by members of the press of inspiring terrorism. Yet not one
journalist could come up with a single quote where these Islam-critical
authors have encouraged terrorism.
At the same time, we are told by members of the press to ignore
references to Jihad or Islamic teachings invoked in countless Islamic
terror attacks around the world, even though the Koran and Islamic texts
contain many explicit and graphic references encouraging aggression or
violence against non-Muslims. Such a blatant lack of logic does not
stand up to closer scrutiny, but has nevertheless become surprisingly
widespread.
In January 2013, Muslim Jihadist terrorists with links to the
al-Qaida terror network took hundreds of people hostage at a natural gas
facility near In Aménas, Algeria. Algerian Special Forces soon raided
the site, but many hostages were killed by the Islamic hostage takers.
It later turned out that at least two of the Muslim terrorists who
died in Algeria were Canadian citizens. One of them was a convert to
Islam of European origins who “
came from
a comfortable middle-class neighbourhood.” It is strange how converts
to Christianity or Buddhism hardly ever behave in this manner, whereas
converts to Islam often do, disturbingly often. Why is that?
One Algerian who managed to escape told France 24 television that the kidnappers said, “
We’ve come
in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.” The
kidnappers then immediately executed five hostages who, sadly, got to
learn what Islam is in the most brutal manner possible. They also
separated Muslims from non-Muslims and systematically targeted
non-Muslims, following a perfectly traditional Islamic pattern of Jihad
warfare. The suspected leader of this extremely brutal and highly
organized attack, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was a committed Jihadist warrior
who named one of his sons after
Osama bin Laden, the long-time leader of al-Qaida.
Sonatrach, the Algerian state oil company running the Ain Amenas site
along with Britain’s BP and Statoil, Norway’s most powerful company by
far, confirmed the refinery had
been mined.
The terrorists had planned to kill more people and blow up the entire
gas plant. In Britain, the reliably pro-Islamic public broadcaster BBC
was criticized for calling the murderous thugs behind the hostage
killings “
militants” rather than “terrorists.”
What is disappointing, but not the least surprising to those who
actually understand what’s going on, is that some of these Islamic
terrorists apparently had weapons
and equipment
that were supplied to Jihadist groups in North Africa with Western
backing, when NATO and Western governments from Britain and France to
the USA supported Islamic rebel groups in their overthrow of Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011.
Some of the more sensible voices, for instance the eloquent American author and newspaper columnist
Diana West,
have consistently warned against the dangerous lack of wisdom in
supporting armed Jihadist groups who might well target Westerners in the
future. These timely warnings were, as usual, not heeded by the
arrogant and stupid Western ruling class. They have learned absolutely
nothing from this strategic blunder, either, and are currently in the
process of repeating the exact same mistake, arming enemies and
potential terrorists among the Jihadist so-called rebels in Syria, who
are known to include al-Qaida sympathizers within their ranks.
Several of the murdered victims of the Islamic terrorists in Algeria were Norwegians and other Europeans, yet Prime Minister
Jens Stoltenberg
of Norway nevertheless officially stated that while these violent acts
were reprehensible and must be condemned, we do not known the motivation
the terrorists had for doing this.
Actually, we do: it’s called Jihad, and has been an inseparable
component of Islamic teachings and practice for well over a thousand
years. Whatever other faults these Jihadists have, they can sometimes
(if not always) be quite open about their intentions. The same Mr.
Stoltenberg and other representatives of his coalition government have
indicated that “anti-Islamic forces” were partly to blame for Breivik,
even after the police indicated that he had carried out his attacks
alone and the first psychiatric evaluation indicated that he is insane.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his government thus don’t want to
link aspects of Islamic culture to terrorism even when such links are
glaringly obvious, but have been quite aggressive in pointing fingers at
allegedly anti-Islamic connections to terrorism when these were dubious
at best. The hypocrisy is staggering, but unfortunately not surprising.
Most of the Western ruling elites now behave in largely the same
manner.
Let’s make a summary:
Breivik’s sister and other family members were horrified by his
terror attacks, which they had nothing to do with. Mohammed Merah’s
sister is on the record as praising her brother for his mass murder, and
one of his brothers has been charged with actively aiding these
murderous attacks. Except for some extremely marginal figures, no one on
the “right wing” in Europe has supported Breivik’s terror attacks.
Mohammed Merah has become a hero for an alarming number of young Muslims
in Europe because of his terror attacks.
Immediately after his identity became known, many Western mass media
claimed that Breivik’s terror attacks were ideologically motivated by
anti-Islamic writings. Immediately after his identity became known, many
Western mass media claimed that Merah’s terror attacks were not
ideologically motivated and had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or
Islamic writings. In other words: Terrorism has nothing to do with being
Islamic, but a great deal to do with being anti-Islamic.
After his attacks, the media indicated that while Breivik may have
carried out his attacks alone, he was sane and came from a big flock of
supporters. The same people indicated that Merah was a lone wolf and
possibly insane. Yet years later, the police have found to trace of
Breivik’s alleged “flock,” whereas Merah probably
did come from a flock of supporters, and may have been aided by others in an organized manner prior to his attacks.
The very different treatments these two terrorists have received
reveal a sometimes staggering double standard in the mass media and
academia, not just in one nation but in multiple Western countries on
both sides of the Atlantic.
This finding says a lot about the sorry state of Western civilization
in the early twenty-first century. It is in many ways more significant
and interesting than the mind of the deranged sadist Anders Behring
Breivik.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/04/two-terrorists-and-a-double-standard/
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