Peace and Justice Post

The unspeakable tragedy in Norway is a wakeup call about the dangers of right wing political and religious extremism and Islamophobia which threaten the democratic fabric of American and European societies, notes John L. Esposito.

Middle East Online, July 28, 2011

The unspeakable tragedy in Norway is a wakeup call about the dangers of right wing political and religious extremism and Islamophobia which threaten the democratic fabric of American and European societies. They create a social cancer whose metastasis impacts not only the safety and security of Muslims but also, as the attacks in Norway demonstrate, all citizens. Like anti-Semites and racists, Islamophobes are the first to protest that their stereotyping and scapegoating are not Islamophobic.

What fuels the fires of discrimination against Muslims?

The legacy of the 9/11, 7/7 and other post 9/11 terrorist attacks has been exploited by far right political and religious leaders and media commentators, hard- line Christian Zionists whose fear-mongering targets Islam and Muslims. There is no lack of hate speech in the media, in print and on the internet to empower Islamophobia. The media, whose primary driver is sales and circulations, caters to explosive, headline events: “What bleeds, leads.” The primary focus is often not balanced reporting, or even coverage of positive news about Muslims but on highlighting acts and statements of political and religious extremists. Political and religious commentators write and speak out publicly about Islam and Muslims, asserting with impunity what would never appear in mainstream broadcast or print media about Jews, Christians and established ethnic groups.

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Anders Behring Breivik, a perfect product of the Axis of Islamophobia

When I wrote my analysis last December on the “Axis of Islamophobia,”laying out a new international political network of right-wing ultra-Zionists, Christian evangelicals, Tea Party activists and racist British soccer hooligans, I did not foresee a terrorist like Anders Behring Breivik emerging from the movement’s ranks. At the same time, I am not surprised that he did. The rhetoric of the characters who inspired Breivik, from Pam Geller to Robert Spencer to Daniel Pipes, was so eliminationist in its nature that it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone put words into action.

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Even if President Obama doesn’t do so formally, we can recognize those who bucked authority to expose and oppose U.S. abuses.

Editorial

L.A.Times, July 27, 2011

Protesters, both dressed in an orange overalls to depict detainees at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo, Cuba, demonstrates outside Britain’s Houses of Parliament, where President Obama was to give an address May 25. (Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo)

The American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations have called on President Obama to honor military personnel and civilians who opposed the use of torture in the war on terror. We would support such a gesture by the president, though we consider it unlikely given how often he has said that he wants to “look forward, not backward” regarding abuses committed during the George W. Bush administration.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take the president to shed light on the identities of government employees who balked at or questioned the Bush policies. The ACLU itself has played a valuable role in publicizing the actions of people like Joseph Darby, an Army reservist and whistle-blower who turned over Abu Ghraib abuse photos to Army investigators, and former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, who led an effort inside the Department of Defense to oppose Justice Department legal opinions condoning coercive interrogation methods.

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by Miriyam Aouragh and Richard Seymour

uruknet.info, July 27, 2011

Screen shot of Sky News feature of daily headlines showing that of The Sun European media coverage of the Norwegian tragedy has led with dangerous and clichéd arguments about ‘Islamic extremism’ and multiculturalism, even after the identity of the killer was confirmed – thus contributing to the mainstreaming of racism that helped make Breivik what he is. An hour before Anders Breivik embarked on his massacre of the innocents, he distributed his manifesto online. In 1500 pages, this urgent message identified “cultural Marxists”, “multiculturalists”, anti-Zionists and leftists as “traitors” who are allowing Christian Europe to be overtaken by Muslims. He subsequently murdered dozens of these ‘traitors’, the majority of them children, at a Labour Party youth camp. His inspiration, according to this manifesto, were those pathfinders of the Islamophobic right who have profited immensely from the framing and prosecution of the “war on terror,” including Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and Bat Ye’or. Continues >>

Finsbury Park in north London, which I represent and live in, is the kind of inner-city area the far right and nazis really despise. It is not wealthy, not iconically beautiful but warm and mixed.

Dozens of languages, nationalities, faiths and activities intermingle. Not without tensions, crime or problems, it nevertheless works as a society and community and has attracted people for many decades.

It is the kind of inner-city community to be found all over Britain in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool and beyond. Similar communities are found across Europe.

If you ask people in those areas what they like and dislike about their community it is soon apparent that the worries are housing, jobs, opportunities for young people and environment.

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by Alan Hart, Dissident Voice,  July 26th, 2011

How much was the mind of Anders Behring Breivik conditioned and warped by Zionist propaganda as peddled with the assistance of Christian fundamentalism by much of the Western mainstream media and many web sites?

In his summary of what the monster had stated behind closed doors in court, Judge Heger said he had argued that he wanted to create “the greatest loss possible to Norway’s governing Labour Party”, which he accused of failing the country on immigration and opening the door to the “Muslim colonization” of Norway and all of Europe.

There could not have been a more effective way of inflicting at a single stroke a great loss than gunning down many members of the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth wing, the Workers Youth League (AUF), which was assembled on Utoya Island.

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Richard Falk, MWC News, July 27, 2011

A Darkening Human Horizon

There are several pressures that push war in the direction of the absolute, and imperil the human future. Perhaps, the foremost of these is emergence, use, retention, and proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as the development of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki there have been several close calls involving heightened dangers of wars fought with nuclear weapons, especially associated with the Cold War rivalry, none more serious than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. To entrust such weaponry to the vagaries of political leadership and the whims governmental institutions seems like a Mt. Everest of human folly, and yet the present challenges to nuclearism remain modest and marginal despite the collapse of the deterrence rationale that seemed plausible to many during the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

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by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, July 27, 2011

Television commentator Bill O’Reilly lambasted the press for referring to Anders Breivik as a Christian terrorist, on the grounds that he is not a practicing Christian and on the grounds that no true Christian can be a terrorist and on the grounds that Christian fundamentalists are essentially different from Muslim fundamentalists (“those crazy jihadis”).

O’Reilly, who has engaged in hate speech toward Muslims of the sort that inspired Breivik’s violence, is in part trying to change the discussion so that his guilt in fostering an atmosphere of rancor is not brought up. The in-your-face pundit has insisted that “Muslims killed us on 9/11,” the kind of ‘shouting fire in a theater” discourse that could easily get people killed.

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Exclusive: A right-wing Christian nationalist has claimed credit for the terrorist attacks in Norway, killing at least 76 people. Though his writings show that Anders Behring Breivik was inspired by anti-Muslim extremists in the United States, that bigotry also made Muslims the early suspects in the U.S. media, Robert Parry reports.

If the Fox News promoters of racial profiling had been in charge of investigating last Friday’s terror attack in Norway, they might well have encountered blond, blue-eyed Anders Behring Breivik and his two smoking-hot guns only long enough to ask if he’d seen any suspicious-looking Muslims around.

After all, it has been a touchstone of the American Right, as well as right-wing Israelis, that Muslims are the source of virtually all terrorism and thus it makes little sense to focus attention on non-Muslims. A clean-cut Nordic sort like Breivik, who fancies himself part of a modern-day Knights Templar, is someone who would get a pass.

Or, as Israel’s UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman told a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2006, “While it may be true – and probably is – that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim.” [Washington Post, March 7, 2006]

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Norwegian mass-murderer had accomplices, says operation meant to ‘send a powerful signal that couldn’t be mistaken’.

By Roddy Thomson — Oslo,

Middle East Online, July 26, 201

‘Two further cells in our organisation’

More than 100,000 Norwegians thronged central Oslo on Monday in a vigil for the victims of a last week’s attacks hours after the suspect told a court hearing that he had an active network of accomplices.

Anders Behring Breivik, the gunman who said he was behind the massacre of 76 people, did not plead guilty and was remanded in custody for eight weeks while the investigation into last Friday’s twin gun and bomb attacks continues.

As thousands of flower-carrying Norwegians filed through the city centre in an overwhelming show of both grief and solidarity, even Behring Breivik’s father said he wished his son had taken his own life.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg admitted the country would be changed permanently by last Friday’s car bombing in Olso and mass shootings on a nearby island, but vowed to ensure it remains an open society.

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