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Oslo attacker Anders Breivik and Eur. right's hate-filled rhetoric

The End of Innocence
July 24, 2011 - 12:39 am - by Richard Fernandez

The truth shall set you free and the apparent truth is that Anders Behring Breivik, the man who planted the car bomb in Oslo and massacred scores of young people, had no apparent relationship to any Islamic organization. On the contrary, he wrote a manifesto (warning the authenticity has not been verified) emblazoned with a cross, declaring his intention to start a European Civil War. And he did it in the name of ideas which many persons who have accounted themselves reasonable might have agreed with in parts.

This “civil war” would come in three phases, he predicts. The first runs through 2030 and includes “open source warfare, military shock attacks by clandestine cell systems (and) further consolidation of conservative forces.”

Between 2030 and 2070, he calls for “more advanced forms of resistance groups (and the) preparation of pan-European coup d’etats.” The final stage features the deposition of Europe’s leaders and “implementation of a cultural conservative political agenda.” …

“The situation is just chaotic,” he writes, noting that “thousands of Muslims” are coming into his country annually. “These suicidal traitors must be stopped.”​

It contains an extensive preliminary section detailing the historical path of the conflict between Islam and Christendom, going so far as to remind us why the Knights Templar, Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights were founded and recasts his movement as reincarnation of that effort. In order to describe why it is needed he turns to Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Bruce Bawer, Timothy Garton Ash, Walid Shoebat and various other commentators on the current War on Terror to say that a toxic mix of multiculturalism, Marxism and Islam are the reasons why today’s Europe “is burning”.

Q: Some will claim that you are Christian fanatics, just as hateful and intolerant as Al Qaeda. How would you react to accusations like that?
A: The PCCTS, Knights Templar is a European indigenous rights movement and a Crusader movement (anti-Jihad movement), a part of the pan-European and national resistance movement. In a way it is a conservative revolutionary movement. By propagating and defending Christendom we simply mean that we want to halt the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist attacks and systematic deconstruction on our Christian cultures and the Church itself and to reverse the de-Christianisation of Europe. The biggest threat to Europe is the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist political doctrine of ”extreme egalitarian emotionalism”. This type of political stance involves destroying Christendom, the Church, our European cultures and identities and opening up our borders to Islamic colonisation. The Islamisation of Europe is merely a ”secondary infection”. Western Europe has grown weak and decadent and will be completely annihilated culturally unless we succeed to implement a second European renaissance and reverse the damage done. History has shown again and again that you cannot co-exist peacefully with Islam. The only thing you can do is to isolate it as our forefathers have done for the last 1400 years.​

Burning. And he wants to bring it on. In short, if his manifesto is authentic, Breivik believes a twisted version of what many people who have opposed the Marxist and Islamic tendencies of recent years have argued to be true. He goes further than most by declaring his willingness to work with European neo-Nazis.

Q: Considering the fact that you may be willing to fight alongside so called neo- Nazis against cultural Marxists under extreme circumstances, doesnt that make you a neo-Nazi or a neo-Nazi sympathiser?

A: First of all, I don’t consider 70-80% of so called neo-Nazis to be actual Nazis, but rather misguided individuals. I believe many of these youngsters have made an unfortunate mistake by being drawn to the Nazi symbols due to lack of alternatives and because it is the strongest and most well known anti-Marxist banner. But I don’t believe the majority of so called neo-Nazis really support the slaughtering and genocide of all Jews, a one party state and an imperialistic policy of conquest. I believe they are just bewildered nationalists in search for uniting factors. In their frustration they have chosen the most despicable banner available as a way of saying a big “**** you” to the current establishment. But I am well aware that 20-30% of them really hates Jews and support most aspects of national-socialism. This shouldn’t be tolerated and we shouldn’t sympathise with them whatsoever. Driven by their Jew hate, these Nazis are willing to take side with Muslims in order to accomplish their goals. They are absolutely blinded by this hate.
Breivik is the mirror product of an increasingly rising tension in the world today. Under the seemingly placid exterior of Western Europe, the old devils lurk. And from those memetic caverns the Jihad has spawned an antithesis whose elements are sometimes rational and some not entirely so. Or perhaps the fires simply the Jihad to come out again. Whatever the case, they’re here. There will be many calls in the following days to clamp down on “hate speech” as if by doing so it could bank the fires which Breiviks tapped to justify his criminal behavior. Except that the fires a real and not the less so for having criminals like Breivik act upon them.Now both the Jihad and the West must admit that they have militants in their ranks. The age of innocence in the anti-Jihad movement is at an end. As with Islam, the West must now acknowledge that it harbors the fires that burn no less hot than al-Qaedas. Will it be Harper’s Ferry moment or another Oklahoma City bombing incident. Whichever it turns out to be, the sadness has just begun.

Solomon2 ... so what your views about this terrorist ?
 
Anders Breivik & Europe's blind right eye
Praveen Swami

There are important lessons for India in the murderous violence in Norway: lessons it can ignore only at risk to its own survival.

In 2008, Hindutva leader B.L. Sharma ‘Prem' held a secret meeting with key members of a terrorist group responsible for a nationwide bombing campaign targeting Muslims. “It has been a year since I sent some three lakh letters, distributed 20,000 maps of Akhand Bharat but these Brahmins and Banias have not done anything and neither will they [do anything],” he is recorded to have said in documents obtained by prosecutors. “It is not that physical power is the only way to make a difference,” he concluded, “but to awaken people mentally, I believe that you have to set fire to society.”

Last week, Anders Behring Breivik, armed with assault weapons and an improvised explosive device fabricated from the chemicals he used to fertilize the farm that had made him a millionaire in his mid-20s, set out to put Norway on fire.

Even though a spatial universe separated the blonde, blue-eyed Mr. Breivik from the saffron-clad neo-Sikh Mr. Sharma, their ideas rested on much the same intellectual firmament.

In much media reportage, Mr. Breivik has been characterised as a deranged loner: a Muslim-hating Christian fanatic whose ideas and actions placed him outside of society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Breivik's mode of praxis was, in fact, entirely consistent with the periodic acts of mass violence European fascists have carried out since World War II. More important, Mr. Breivik's ideas, like those of Mr. Sharma, were firmly rooted in mainstream right-wing discourse.

Fascist terror

In the autumn of 1980, a wave of right-wing terrorist attacks tore through Europe. In August that year, 84 people were killed and 180 injured when a bomb ripped through the Bologna railway station. Eleven people were killed when the famous Munich Oktoberfest was targeted on September 26; four persons died when a bomb went off in front of a synagogue on the Rue Copernic in Paris on October 2.

Little attention, the scholar Bruce Hoffman noted in a 1984 paper, had been paid to right-wing terrorists by Europe's police forces. Their eyes, firmly focussed on left-wing organisations, had characterised the right “as ‘kooks', ‘clowns', ‘little Fuhrers', and, with regard to their young, ‘political punk rockers'.” Less than four months before the Oktoberfest bombing, Dr. Hoffman wrote, an official German Interior Ministry publication dismissed the threat from neo-Nazi groups, saying they were “most armed with self-made bats and chains.”

Earlier this year, the analysts who had authored the European Police organisation Europol's Terrorism Situation Report made much the same mistake as they had before the 1984 bombings. Lack of cohesion and public threat, they claimed, “went a long way towards accounting for the diminished impact of right-wing terrorism and extremism in the European Union.”

Zero terrorist attacks might have been a persuasive empirical argument — if it was not for the fact that no EU member-state, bar Hungary, actually records acts of right-wing terrorism using those terms.

Europol's 2010 report, in fact, presented a considerably less sanguine assessment of the situation. Noting the 2008 and 2009 arrests of British fascists for possession of explosives and toxins, the report flagged the danger from “individuals motivated by extreme right-wing views who act alone.”

The report also pointed to the heating-up of a climate of hatred: large attendances at white-supremacist rock concerts, the growing muscle of fascist groups like Blood and Honour and the English Defence League, fire-bomb attacks on members of the Roma minority in several countries, and military training to the cadre.

Yet, the authors of the 2011 Europol report saw little reason for alarm. In a thoughtful 2008 report, a consortium of Dutch organisations noted that “right-wing terrorism is not always labelled as such.” Because “right-wing movements use the local traditions, values, and characteristics to define their own identity,” the report argued, “many non-rightist citizens recognize and even sympathize with some of the organization's political opinions”— a formulation which will be familiar to Indians, where communal violence is almost never referred to as a form of mass terrorism.

Thomas Sheehan, who surveyed the Italian neo-fascist resurgence before the 1980 bombings, arrived at much the same conclusion decades ago. “In 1976 and again in 1978,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “judges in Rome, Turin and Milan fell over each other in their haste to absolve neo-fascists of crimes ranging from murdering a policeman to ‘reconstituting Fascism' [a crime under post-war Italian law]”.

“When it comes to fascist terrorism,” Mr. Sheehan wryly concluded, “Italian authorities seem to be a bit blind in the right eye.”

Political crisis

Europe's fascist parties have little electoral muscle today but reports suggest that a substantial renaissance is under way. The resurgence is linked to a larger political crisis. In 1995, commentator Ignacio Ramonet argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union had provoked a crisis for Europe's great parties of the right, as for its left. The right's failure to provide coherent answers to the crisis of identity provoked by a globalising world, and its support for a new economic order which engendered mass unemployment and growing income disparities, empowered neo-fascism.

“People feel,” Mr. Ramonet wrote in a commentary in the French newspaper, Le Monde, “that they have been abandoned by governments which they see as corrupt and in the hands of big business.”

In the mid-1990s, fascist groups reached an electoral peak: Jorg Haider's Liberals won 22 per cent of the vote in Austria; Carl Igar Hagen's Progress Party became the second-largest party in Norway; Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance claimed 15 per cent of the vote in Italy; while the Belgian Vlaams Blok gained 12.3 per cent in Flanders, Belgium. In France, the centrist Union for French Democracy was compelled to accept support from the National Front in five provinces.

Europe's mainstream right-wing leadership rapidly appropriated key elements of the fascist platform, and successfully whittled away at their electoral success: but ultimately failed to address the issues Mr. Ramonet had flagged.

Now, many are turning to new splinter groups, and online mobilisation. Mr. Brevik's comments on the website Document.no provide real insight into the frustration of the right's rank and file. His central target was what he characterised as “cultural-Marxism”: “an anti-European hate-ideology,” he wrote in September 2009, “whose purpose is to destroy European culture, identity and Christianity in general.”


For Mr. Breivik, cultural Marxism's central crime was to have de-masculinised European identity. In his view, “Muslim boys learn pride in their own religion, culture and cultural-conservative values at home, while Norwegian men have been feminized and taught excessive tolerance.”

He railed against the media's supposed blackout of the supposed “100 racial / jihadi murder of Norwegians in the last 15 years.” “Many young people are apathetic as a result,” Mr. Brevik observed, “others are very racist. They repay what they perceive as racism with racism.”

Mr. Breivik, his writings suggest, would have been reluctant to describe himself as a fascist — a common feature of European far-right discourse. He wrote: “I equate multiculturalism with the other hate-ideologies: Nazism (anti-Jewish), communism (anti-individualism) and Islam (anti-Kaffir).”

These ideas, it is important to note, were echoes of ideas in mainstream European neo-conservatism. In 1978, the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously referred to popular fears that Britain “might be swamped by people of a different culture.” In 1989, Ms Thatcher asserted that “human rights did not begin with the French Revolution.” Instead, they “really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity”— in other words, faith, not reason.

In recent years, key European politicians have also used language not dissimilar to Mr Brevik. Last year, Angela Merkel asserted that multikulti, or multiculturalism, had failed. David Cameron, too, assailed “the doctrine of state multiculturalism,” which he said had “encouraged different cultures to live separate lives.” France's Nicolas Sarkozy was more blunt: “multiculturalism is a failure. The truth is that in our democracies, we cared too much about the identity of the migrant and not sufficiently about the identity of the country that welcomed him.”

Mr. Brevik's grievance, like Mr. Sharma's, was that these politicians were unwilling to act on their words — and that the people he claimed to love for cared too little to rebel.

The Norwegian terrorist's 1,518-page pseudonymous testament, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, promises his new “Knights Templar” order will “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.” He threatens an apocalyptic war against “traitors” enabling a Muslim takeover of Europe: a war, he says, will claim up to “45,000 dead and 1 million wounded cultural Marxists/multiculturalists.”

For India, there are several important lessons. Like's Europe's mainstream right-wing parties, the BJP has condemned the terrorism of the right — but not the thought system which drives it. Its refusal to engage in serious introspection, or even to unequivocally condemn Hindutva violence, has been nothing short of disgraceful. Liberal parties, including the Congress, have been equally evasive in their critique of both Hindutva and Islamist terrorism.

Besieged as India is by multiple fundamentalisms, in the throes of a social crisis that runs far deeper than in Europe, with institutions far weaker, it must reflect carefully on Mr. Brevik's story — or run real risks to its survival.
 
A hunt for possible British accomplices of the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik is under way after it emerged that he began his deadly “crusade” after meeting other Right-wing extremists in London.

Before he carried out Norway’s worst terrorist atrocity, Breivik typed out a chilling 1,500-page description of his plans, written entirely in English and datelined “London, 2011”.

He signed the document “Andrew Berwick”, an Anglicised version of his name, and described his “mentor” as an Englishman he identified as Richard.

Scotland Yard counter-terrorism officers are now trying to establish whether Breivik visited London in recent years and whether he was part of a wider network preparing to carry out similar attacks.

The 32 year-old boasted that he was just one of up to 80 “solo martyr cells” recruited throughout Western Europe who were ready to follow his example of trying to overthrow governments tolerant of Islam.

He said he regarded himself as a successor to the medieval Knights Templar, and claimed to have been recruited at a meeting in London in April 2002, which was hosted by two English extremists and attended by eight people in total.

Any member of a political group that has allowed Muslims to migrate to their country is regarded as a “target” who deserves “the death penalty”, according to his writings.

He also spoke of being in touch with the far-Right English Defence League and made repeated references to British politicians, including Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who were blamed for making London a global hub of Islamic terrorism.

In other developments yesterday:

• The death toll in the twin attacks on Oslo and the island of Utoya rose to 93, with five others still missing.

•  Breivik’s father, a retired diplomat who once served in London, spoke of his “absolute horror”.

•  Norwegian police were caught out despite having issued a warning in March of the danger that far-Right groups could be planning an attack.

•  It emerged that the police response to the massacre on Utoya was hampered when a boat was overloaded with equipment and its motor stopped

•  Breivik’s lawyer said his client regarded his actions as “atrocious but necessary”.


At a memorial service yesterday, Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian prime minister, was joined by the country’s king and queen in mourning the “national tragedy”.

Breivik spent nine years planning Friday’s atrocity, and spent three years writing his manifesto A European Declaration of Independence, which was emailed to 5,700 people hours before he detonated a bomb in Oslo.

The bomb, he made clear, was merely a diversion designed to draw police away from the real target, the Labour Party summer camp on Utoya. He even discussed his reason for disguising himself as a policeman — to cause “confusion and hesitation”.

But it is his detailed descriptions of meetings with British accomplices that has led to fears he may be part of a network of Right-wingers intent on mass murder.

Scotland Yard’s domestic extremism unit is trying to identify the seven other people who attended the inaugural meeting of the “European Military Order and Criminal Tribunal” of the “Knights Templar” in London in April 2002.

He wrote: “The order is to serve as an armed Indigenous Rights Organisation and as a Crusader Movement” and said the session was hosted by an English Protestant. Another English extremist was also present as well as French, German, Greek, Dutch and Russian delegates.

He also said an Englishman became his mentor. “He was the one who first described the 'perfect knight’ … let’s call him Richard.”

He added that most of those at the meeting “were successful entrepreneurs, business or political leaders”.

A Scotland Yard source said Breivik was not thought to have visited Britain this year, but police were “making inquiries into any possible links to British extremists and liaising with the Norwegian authorities”.

MI5 is not currently involved in tracking down Right-wing extremists but sources admitted the attacks could force a change of tactics. One of the largest arms caches found in recent years in England was in the possession of a Right-wing terrorist in Yorkshire two years ago.

Breivik claimed to have had online conversations with members of the English Defence League and urged “them to use conscious strategies”. However, he dismissed the group as “naive fools” for refusing to sanction violence.

The EDL issued a statement saying: “We can categorically state that there has never been any official contact between him and the EDL.”

Breivik also wrote of using dum-dum bullets to cause maximum injury, and surgeons confirmed so many of his victims died because he had used similar ammunition.

Dr Colin Poole, from Ringriket Hospital in Honefoss, north-west of Oslo, said: “These bullets more or less exploded inside the body.”

Breivik even harboured ambitions of acquiring a nuclear weapon to hold Western governments to ransom and discussed the merits of using biological and chemical weapons to kill up to two million people.


Hunt for Britons linked to Norway killer Anders Behring Breivik - Telegraph
 
Breivik also wrote of using dum-dum bullets to cause maximum injury, and surgeons confirmed so many of his victims died because he had used similar ammunition.

Dr Colin Poole, from Ringriket Hospital in Honefoss, north-west of Oslo, said: “These bullets more or less exploded inside the body.”

Breivik even harboured ambitions of acquiring a nuclear weapon to hold Western governments to ransom and discussed the merits of using biological and chemical weapons to kill up to two million people.

And none of this rang alarm bells -- oh, it must have been because authorities were paying more attention to conversations Ahmad and Mohammad were having --but overall, what a screwed up mess this whole jihad and GWOT has turned out be - Honestly, who the heck is safer??

Behind blue eyes??
 
Slap in the face for people who automatically associate Islam with terrorism.

Not really, for every guy like this, 100's of fundies strike.
Kind of like if you have two types of aircraft. One has crashed five times, the other five-thousand. Wich is safer?
There is a reason people assume it's islamist every time...because USUALLY it is!
 
Not really, for every guy like this, 100's of fundies strike.
Kind of like if you have two types of aircraft. One has crashed five times, the other five-thousand. Wich is safer?
There is a reason people assume it's islamist every time...because USUALLY it is!
That is an outright lie. Western world has seen more of Christian and Jewish fundamentalist bombers than Islamists bombers. You take islamophobia to another level and it is thoughts like yours which constantly remind us that extremism is prevalent on both sides and the govt pursue you in the same manner they pursue terrorist suspects. I won't be surprised if you are a member of one of those nationalists forums.

Google Images
 
That is an outright lie. Western world has seen more of Christian and Jewish fundamentalist bombers than Islamists bombers. You take islamophobia to another level and it is thoughts like yours which constantly remind us that extremism is prevalent on both sides and the govt pursue you in the same manner they pursue terrorist suspects. I won't be surprised if you are a member of one of those nationalists forums.

Google Images

Of course it is a lie.
 
It is sad to see world becoming less of a tolerant place.
 
He's a murderer. What did he think the mass killing of innocents would accomplish?

so the guy who killed 100 people is a murderer??? he is not terrorist

lets just get into english teaching class shall we??

murderer: To kill (another human) unlawfully, The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice.

murder - definition of murder by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

act of/terrorism: act of terrorism, terrorism, terrorist act - the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear

terrorist - definition of terrorist by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

now you jewish guy tell me if Anders was a terrorist or a murderer?? either your english is so weak which is really pathetic because oyu actually dwell in an english speaking country, or you have specific intentions
 
July 24, 2011
Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.
By SCOTT SHANE

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.

In the document he posted online, Anders Behring Breivik, who is accused of bombing government buildings and killing scores of young people at a Labor Party camp, showed that he had closely followed the acrimonious American debate over Islam.

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.

In the United States, critics have asserted that the intense spotlight on the threat from Islamic militants has unfairly vilified Muslim Americans while dangerously playing down the threat of attacks from other domestic radicals. The author of a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism withdrawn by the department after criticism from conservatives repeated on Sunday his claim that the department had tilted too heavily toward the threat from Islamic militants.

The revelations about Mr. Breivik’s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described “counterjihad” activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.

Mr. Spencer wrote on his Web site, jihadwatch.org, that “the blame game” had begun, “as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.” He did not mention Mr. Breivik’s voluminous quotations from his writings.

The Gates of Vienna, a blog that ordinarily keeps up a drumbeat of anti-Islamist news and commentary, closed its pages to comments Sunday “due to the unusual situation in which it has recently found itself.”

Its operator, who describes himself as a Virginia consultant and uses the pseudonym “Baron Bodissey,” wrote on the site Sunday that “at no time has any part of the Counterjihad advocated violence.”

The name of that Web site — a reference to the siege of Vienna in 1683 by Muslim fighters who, the blog says in its headnote, “seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe” — was echoed in the title Mr. Breivik chose for his manifesto: “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” He chose that year, the 400th anniversary of the siege, as the target for the triumph of Christian forces in the European civil war he called for to drive out Islamic influence.

Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik’s violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.”

“This rhetoric,” he added, “is not cost-free.”


Dr. Sageman, who is also a forensic psychiatrist, said he saw no overt signs of mental illness in Mr. Breivik’s writings. He said Mr. Breivik bears some resemblance to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who also spent years on a manifesto and carried out his mail bombings in part to gain attention for his theories. One obvious difference, Dr. Sageman said, is that Mr. Kaczynski was a loner who spent years in a rustic Montana cabin, while Mr. Breivik appears to have been quite social.

Mr. Breivik’s declaration did not name Mr. Kaczynski or acknowledge the numerous passages copied from the Unabomber’s 1995 manifesto, in which the Norwegian substituted “multiculturalists” or “cultural Marxists” for Mr. Kaczynski’s “leftists” and made other small wording changes.

By contrast, he quoted the American and European counterjihad writers by name, notably Mr. Spencer, author of 10 books, including “Islam Unveiled” and “The Truth About Muhammad.”

Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.

Mr. Breivik also quoted European blogs and writers with similar themes, notably a Norwegian blogger who writes under the name “Fjordman.” Immigration from Muslim countries to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe has set off a deep political debate across the continent and strengthened a number of right-wing anti-immigrant parties.

In the United States, the shootings resonated with years of debate at home over the proper focus of counterterrorism.

Despite the Norway killings, Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he had no plans to broaden contentious hearings about the radicalization of Muslim Americans and would hold the third one as planned on Wednesday. He said his committee focused on terrorist threats with foreign ties and suggested that the Judiciary Committee might be more appropriate for looking at non-Muslim threats.

In 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security produced a report, “Rightwing Extremism,” suggesting that the recession and the election of an African-American president might increase the threat from white supremacists, conservatives in Congress strongly objected. Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, quickly withdrew the report and apologized for what she said were its flaws.

Daryl Johnson, the Department of Homeland Security analyst who was the primary author of the report, said in an interview that after he left the department in 2010, the number of analysts assigned to non-Islamic militancy of all kinds was reduced to two from six. Mr. Johnson, who now runs a private research firm on the domestic terrorist threat, DTAnalytics, said about 30 analysts worked on Islamic radicalism when he was there.

The killings in Norway “could easily happen here,” he said. The Hutaree, an extremist Christian militia in Michigan accused last year of plotting to kill police officers and planting bombs at their funerals, had an arsenal of weapons larger than all the Muslim plotters charged in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks combined, he said.

Homeland Security officials disputed Mr. Johnson’s claim about staffing, saying they pay close attention to all threats, regardless of ideology. And the F.B.I. infiltrated the Hutaree, making arrests before any attack could take place.

John D. Cohen, principal deputy counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security, said Ms. Napolitano, who visited Oklahoma City last year for the 15th anniversary of the bombing there, had often spoken of the need to assess the risk of violence without regard to politics or religion.

“What happened in Norway,” Mr. Cohen said, “is a dramatic reminder that in trying to prevent attacks, we cannot focus on a single ideology.”
 
Whats this world coming to?? This is bad in the long run. Western Governments should nip these aberrations in the bud, if not they will start producing even more dangerous terrorists that are already present.
 
Yes they should but these governments are now on a collision course ---- Please remember the external policies are a reflection of internal ones -- We often criticize ourselves for being insular - but we are not the only ones to be insular -- we often criticize ourselves with regard to obscurantist ideas, but we are not the only ones who give such ideas a wide berth -- and really, here, the pivotal role of the US, in the sense of the attitudes that are cultivated, cannot be overlooked.

We are all hostage to extremes in society, but I don't think this idea has any currency in the US -- the very future of the US depends on relations with countries that some forum members have described as "unworthy" of deep relations with the US -- such attitudes and their articulation is not without consequence.
 

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