Peace and Justice Post

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.

Continues >>

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]

Continues >>

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.

Continues >>

patta patta boota boota: Drama Mirza Ghalib

Editor’s comment: On the sad occasion of the mass  killings  in Norway and the bombing of the  official buildings by a Norwegian fascist, who stands against social  democracy,  democratic values and is a committed crusader against Muslims and the Muslim world while being a devotee of Zionist world-view and Israeli policies, I reproduce the following  you tube video.

The setting of the scene is in mid-nineteenth century  Delhi. It was just before the British took possession of the whole of India. The major revolt against the  farangi rule (common name for the British foreigners then) took place in 1857. The British prevailed and the atrocities they committed defy description. 

 The minstrel here is singing a poem by the great Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810). The greatest Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869, in white robes in the drama) acknowledges the poetic genius of Mir.

It is a  sad lyric. Only those who know Urdu or Hindi will know the deep pain it conveys in a poetic form.

My own personal agony and the pain I have felt on the massacres in Norway are best represented in this poem.

By Toby Axelrod, jta.org,  July 24, 2011

BERLIN (JTA) — The confessed perpetrator in the attack in Norway that killed at least 76 people espoused a right-wing philosophy against Islam that also purports to be pro-Zionist.

Anders Behring Breivik is charged with detonating a car bomb outside Oslo’s government headquarters, which houses the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, that killed eight people and of shooting and killing at least 68 mostly young people at a political summer camp on nearby Utoya Island. The July 22 massacre reportedly was the the worst attack in Norway since the end of World War II.

In numerous online postings, including a manifesto published on the day of the attacks, Breivik promoted the Vienna School or Crusader Nationalism philosophy, a mishmash of anti-modern principles that also calls for “the deportation of all Muslims from Europe” as well as from “the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

Continues >>

Gilad Atzmon, MWC News, July 26, 2011

Thanks to respected anti-Zionist Jeff Blankfort (who provided me with a crucial link) I have now learned that, just one day before last Friday’s Massacre in Norway, former Trotsky-ite turned neo-con David Horowitz carried an article by Joseph Klein in his Front Page magazine, entitled “The Quislings of Norway,” which might as well have provided mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik with all the motivation he needed to commit his crime.

You are advised to read the article in full here

Continues >>

by Ron Ridenour, Dissident Voice, July 26th, 2011

Fifty-eight years ago, on July 26, 1953, 160 Cuban rebels attacked Moncada Barracks near Santiago de Cuba. Had the rebels been able to take the fort with 1,000 troops—a good possibility—it would have started a revolution that might well have defeated the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista within a short time.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

Continues >>

As soon as the shocking and tragic news from Norway hit the airwaves, it was entirely predictable that various right-wing Islamophobes would type first and think later. They were so eager to exploit the tragedy to peddle their pre-existing policy preferences that they blindly assumed the acts had to have been perpetrated by al Qaeda, by its various clones, or by some other radical Muslim group.

This is the sort of bias one expects from an ideologue like Jennifer Rubin (who gets taken to task for her rush-to-judgment by James Fallows here). Sadly, it is also not out of character for the supposedly respectable Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has been a reliable source of threat-mongering and distortion for years. Even as Norwegian officials were cautioning that they had no reason to suspect Islamist groups, the Journal was plunging ahead with an editorial entitled “Terror in Oslo,” which drew the following utterly bogus conclusion:

Continues >>

Chris Hedges,Truthdig.com, July 26, 2011

AP / Frank Augstein

People embrace and mourn at the massive flower field laid in memory of victims of Friday’s twin attacks in Norway.

The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

Continues >>