What Do We Know?

The mass murderer at Utøya is now said to have been a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. He is reported to have posted frequent comments at various anti-jihad websites up until sometime last year. The Scandinavians tell me that these comments showed mainstream Counterjihad sentiments, with no incitements to violence or evidence of homicidal insanity.

Perhaps for that reason, some people have rushed to identify Mr. Breivik as “one of us”, that is, a member of the Counterjihad, more or less like me, Fjordman, Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, or Geert Wilders. This is absurd. If this slanderous meme is pushed by the MSM and they continue to beat that hollow drum, then judge them by their fruits.

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Let’s tackle the notion of “repudiation”. If someone reports an act of murderous violence, and fails to say “I repudiate this act”, does that report therefore constitute approval or tacit support?

Obviously not. If readers are unable to detect the implicit repugnance and horror when we write about such things, then the fault lies with the reader, who is using his own agenda to jump to his own conclusions.

And how can the Utøya fiend be characterized as “one of us”?

At no time has any part of the Counterjihad advocated violence, and its raison d’être is to eschew violence, to preserve law and order, and to uphold the rights of the individual.

There is nothing in any mission statement of any group I have ever associated with that discusses mass murder as a legitimate operational tactic. In fact, regular readers of Gates of Vienna have seen us delete comments containing such sentiments. Those comments are always wrong.

I refuse to stoop to the minutiae of time-wasting “repudiations”. It’s a Sisyphean task.

This reminds me of the left’s relentlessly malign attacks on anyone who sets foot outside the narrow multicultural ghetto. Those who dare to disagree become “racists”, “fascists”, “xenophobes”, and all the other pejoratives aimed at heretics who refuse to genuflect to their dogmas and their High Priests.

It’s a mug’s game.

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The person who did this vile deed is clearly deranged. The writers he cites have written on behalf of human rights and for the international convention of human rights. It makes no sense that he would justify his appalling actions by what he read there.

This has nothing more to do with us than Jared Loughner had to do with Sarah Palin.

As Dymphna said earlier today:

This foul deed puts the man outside the pale of any human community. I categorically reject the claim that he is “one of us”. Indeed, he is not, and I don’t care what his words were. By his acts he is judged, and those killings, ipso facto, make him a City of One, alone in whatever hatred or insanity he dwells.

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I wrote last night about the uncanny similarities between yesterday’s Oslo bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, right down to the (quite reasonable) suspicion that Islamic terrorists may well have played a part in the logistics, if not the execution, of the horrific deed.

As one of my more knowledgeable contacts said in an email this morning:

The attacks leaves a lot of questions. To the best of my knowledge, no army on earth teaches how to make bombs out of fertilizer. To make a large and effective one takes specialized training and practice. Something one gets typically at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The level of tradecraft displayed here is far too high to be a classic lone nut. It has to involve several people at various preliminary stages, if not the actual execution stage. And there may not be a single set of motives for this action.

Similar analyses are being offered elsewhere, by people with far more expertise in this field than I have.

We are left with the persistent suspicion that there is more to the Oslo atrocity than meets the eye. The Utøya massacre is very different, and hardly seems to fit the profile. One can’t help but wonder if both actions really were carried out by the same person working entirely alone.

When discussing the incident, it’s crucial to keep in mind what we know. We actually know very little beyond what has been released by the Norwegian authorities or published by the state media. Additional material comes from semi-private media — not much Scandinavian journalism operates with no state subsidy whatsoever — and sources derived from them. The journalistic digging has just barely begun.

Until an independent investigator à la Jayna Davis emerges, we must take almost everything published with a grain of salt.

Consider these questions:

1.		How do you know the man who made those comments on various websites is the man who is in custody now?
2.		How do you know that the identity assigned to the man existed more than a few days ago?
3.		Has anyone tracked the supposed culprit from childhood through high school and university, right up to today? If this were the USA, hundreds of reporters would be analyzing his old report cards, talking to his aunties, interviewing his former employers, etc. Is any of that happening now in Norway?
4.		Is there any substantive information about him that was not provided via the government or government-backed media?

The process of answering these questions has just begun. We have as yet no significant data on the murderer’s accomplices or preparations.

We need more information derived from something other than state sources. While we wait for additional data, to characterize Anders Behring Breivik as a particular type of ideologue — a “Nazi”, a “Zionist”, a “right-wing extremist”, or anything else — is to jump to conclusions.