Bruce Bawer: A Double Tragedy for Norway

From Pajamas Media:

 

A Double Tragedy for Norway

Not only has it lost almost one hundred people to a senseless rampage, but legitimate criticism of Islam has been profoundly discredited by association with a murderous lunatic. Also read: Can the Left Resist the Temptation to Exploit the Norway Attacks?

July 23, 2011 – 2:35 pm – by Bruce Bawer

Living in Oslo during the past few years, I passed the government buildings downtown almost every day. I lived right up the road from them, only a five-minute walk; they were my gateway to downtown Oslo. Very often, when I looked over at these structures in which, I knew, the prime minister and all of the cabinet ministries had their offices, I shook my head in wonder at the utter lack of visible security. Almost never did I see a single armed — or even unarmed — guard. (The only exceptions were on the rare occasion when a blizzard of foreign flags and a motorcade parked on the sidewalk indicated that some president or prime minister was visiting from abroad.)

This lack of security was certainly not unusual for Norway, where the police don’t carry guns, and where the very idea of police carrying guns is widely looked upon as some holdover from an earlier stage of human evolution. But — hello — in front of the main office buildings of a Western European government? After 9/11? It seemed sheer madness. In recent weeks, passing grim-faced soldiers with machine guns at Amsterdam airport, and then outside the New York Stock Exchange, I thought immediately of those vulnerable-looking government buildings in Oslo.

When I first heard the news of the explosions at those buildings, my first thought, of course, was that it was a jihadist attack. But it wasn’t: it was a right-wing lunatic. It wasn’t jihad. It was a meaningless killing spree by a madman, like the ones at Columbine and Virginia Tech. A headline in one Norwegian newspaper today noted that the death toll in Oslo and at Utøya yesterday was higher than at Columbine and Virginia Tech combined. The Norwegian media have always reported on mass murders by lone gunmen in the U.S. as if they were things that could never happen in Norway: rather, they were symptoms of a sick society that Norwegians could never possibly understand. In Norway, they use the term “amerikanske tilstander” — American conditions. It never means anything good. Yesterday’s nightmare, from a Norwegian perspective, was the most American of American conditions.

Those of us who thought, in the first hours after the blasts in downtown Oslo, that we were witnessing yet another act of jihad can be forgiven. In a way, it made sense. 9/11, London, Madrid, Beslan, Bali, Mumbai — why not Oslo? Then again…Norway, although a member of NATO with troops in Afghanistan and Libya, was not exactly in the forefront of the struggle to defeat jihad. On the contrary.  Norway calls itself “the peace country.” For years, the Norwegian government and cultural establishment have striven to communicate to even the most extreme elements of international Islam that they want to be friends.  They’ve shown their good faith in a number of ways:

They’ve made a great show of treating Jews very shabbily. Jostein Gaarder, author of the international bestseller Sophie’s World, published an op-ed a few years back declaring his contempt for Israel and the Jewish people. When Gaarder came in for some criticism, many high-profile members of the Norwegian cultural elite rushed to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. If the cultural elite in Norway is more anti-Semitic than its counterparts in any other country in Europe, it has a great deal to do with the recognition that the more you like the Jews, the more you’ll antagonize the Muslims.

For the rest of this article please click through to Pajamas Media

Meanwhile, here is the video of Bruce Bawer speaking on Islam and it’s effects on Western Liberal democracy in Europe in Ottawa 2009

Thanks Snaphanen for sending me this

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

5 Replies to “Bruce Bawer: A Double Tragedy for Norway”

  1. Breivik’s crimes as interpreted by al-CNN, puts threats from the “far-right” ON A PAR with Islamic extremism. Thanks to Breivik and the spin added by MSM like CNN, I guess we don’t have to worry about radical Islam any more – it’s out of style. Now ANYONE who doesn’t tow the leftist multiculti line is suspect.

    Just adds to the fog of confusion which is the hallmark of our anything-goes moral decay.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/07/25/domestic.extremism/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn

  2. CNN is pathetic. Like a typical liberal outlet it’s worried about rare and illusionary threats rather than focusing on what is actually harming the world and the general trend but like every liberal out there the exception to the rule becomes the rule. Every single leftist media and academia organ should be defunded ASAP. They frame Breivik as an far-right but he’s more of a libertarian bent. He’s not religious (no that fake facebook and twitter page where the words “Christian” and “conservative” were added days or hours after and before the massacre doesn’t count), he’s pro-Israeli (not a Neo-Nazi), is okay with homosexuality, is disgusted with how the left paints the right as fascist, is okay with African immigrants, was raised by a single mother and so many other factors. He’s more like an anti-Islamic libertarian.

  3. There are isolated violent cases of some non-muslim sick minds that is IMMENSELY different of muslim violence that is preached and ordered by islam, all the other religions don’t preach or order violence, then only muslims are at least potentially violent, they just have to decide for a violent action and islam supports and excuses them…
    People make a scandal when an isolated violent crazy european REacts like this… don’t they think about the millions of violent crazy muslims have acted like this and they will act even worse as their number increases and they become more powerful in West? Don’t fall in this trap… just remind them about the number of islamic terrorism:
    http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/ammunition-against-the-left-wing-hordes-capitalizing-on-the-norway-terrorist-incident/

    Remind also islamic atrocities, only one example:
    http://tundratabloids.com/2011/07/taliban-hanged-8-year-old-boy.html