Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/24/2011

There are several interesting items from WorldNet Daily on the Oslo massacre that cast a new light on some of the events. It’s too early to tell for certain, but the initial media “narrative” may not hold up much longer.

In other news, the Egyptian military will not allow international election observers into the country for the September elections. Meanwhile, Islamic authorities in Malaysia have refused to allow the word “Allah” to be used by Christians as the word for “God”.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

A reminder: Gates of Vienna is closed to comments for the time being.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Fjordman Welcomes Our New Readers

Welcome to readers of Dagbladet and Der Spiegel!

The latter publication, however, falsely labels us a “hate blog.” This is not true: we are a love blog; we are lovers of truth.

I will try to respond to the best of my abilities to the rumors that are now spreading. The top rumor to kill, still being circulated in certain quarters by people who should know better, is that I am identical to the shooter.

I am not. Nor have I ever met him. I have not yet had the time or energy to read his alleged manifesto, but it I hear he has posted quotes from my work. I dislike that in the extreme, but there is little else I can do about it. All of my writings are made available for free on the Internet. However, I also hear rumors from others, which I cannot myself confirm at the moment, that he has posted references to Shakespeare, John Locke, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill as well.

I hope these writers will not be classified as “hate speech” from now on.

I would also like to point out that the latest information quoted in the mass media indicates that he planned this attack as far back as nine years ago. I did not exist under the name Fjordman back then, nor as far as I know did Robert Spencer’s website Jihad Watch. Please keep that in mind, as we all try to digest the unspeakable evil that we witnessed this past Friday.


Note from this blog’s owners: Due to the unusual situation in which it has recently found itself, this blog will be closed to comments until further notice.

“The Norway Attacks, 2011” — A View From Ireland

Mark Humphrys, that rara avis — a libertarian, pro-American Dubliner — has fisked the Oslo murderer in a novel way: by comparing the killer’s views to his own (emphases in the original):

This sadistic, barbaric attack must be one of the strangest terror attacks ever. One would never think, from the killer’s online comments, that he was a mass murderer in waiting.

The killer was right-wing and anti-jihad, yes, but he was not a neo-Nazi (he was pro-Israel) or a white supremacist (he opposed the BNP because they are racist). He was Christian, but not a fanatic (he was pro-gay).

In fact he was apparently like me — liberal right. He was anti-racist, pro-gay and pro-Israel. So how on earth did someone like that become a terrorist against the West?

Perhaps he radically changed his politics since his last post to document.no in Oct 2010 (see below). Can we see any writings of his between Oct 2010 and July 2011?

Mark gives us some context for this latest atrocity:

• The Norway attacks, 22 July 2011.
  
• A right-wing, anti-jihad terrorist kills over 90 in Norway.
  
• Worst terror attack on the West since Madrid in 2004.
  
• Worst right-wing terror attack since Oklahoma in 1995.
  
• An anti-Islamic terrorist kills more people than in all Islamic terror attacks on the West since Madrid combined.
  
• It was sort of an attack on left-wingers, but a very strange one. It targeted children who had nothing to do with policy, and was incredibly sadistic, hunting them down and executing them close up. Even targeting the centre-left government is incredibly extreme — they support the Afghan War and the Libya War.
  
• Note there have been Islamic terror attacks on Norway: William Nygaard in 1993, and Oslo synagogue in 2006.

Mark then proceeds to list what he terms: “The killer’s mild, moderate, anti-jihad online comments”.

In some cases he shows the screen caps of these online comments, and then below his illustrations, Mark points out where he himself has linked to the same sites, the same bloggers, with the same kind of approval.

The fisk is disturbing. It’s one thing to say “yeah, he made noises like…” but Mark is an extremely rational, thorough man. He does not make appeals to feeling; he simply demonstrates with full links and credit the bizarre nature of this horror.

At one point he says:

One would expect a mass murderer to post more extreme comments. This is incredibly strange.

And that sums up the nightmare for me: it.will.not.compute.


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Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/23/2011

There’s not much in tonight’s news feed, but do pay attention to Europol’s planned task force, which is being designed by “experts” to deal with non-Islamic terrorism in Norway.

Rahm Emmanuel isn’t the only one who believes in never letting a crisis go to waste. The Europeans have definitely caught on.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, McR, Steen, Van Grungy, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

A Weaponized Madman

This is from our Portuguese-American correspondent João, who lives in a major city on the West Coast. As Dymphna reported last month, he has educated himself in terrorism-related matters, and learned Arabic so that he could frequent a mosque and discover what was really going on inside.

His latest report concerns yesterday’s bombing and massacre in Norway, and what may possibly be gleaned from the available information:

Baron, this is truly a tragic event. My prayers go out to the Norwegian people. This man is obviously a monster.

Since yesterday I have been putting my analytical thinking cap on overdrive, and here are my personal thoughts.

1.		Nativist violence of this type is extremely rare — .01% if we look at the events of the past twenty years. Violent groups in my estimation may be arranged in the following in order of importance — Islamic, independence movements (Palestinians, ETA, Kurds, Tamil Tigers), leftist (Bader Meinhof, Red Brigades), and very rarely a Nativist. Norway has no violent groups of Native Norwegians. This recent event in Norway will fall into the rare one-off McVeigh category. There are no violent “anti-Muslim” groups in Norway. At the moment we cannot assign Anders Behring Breivik to any part of the counter-jihad. He is truly a “Lone Wolf”!
2.		From the open source material it appears that this man bought six tons of fertilizer to make the explosive vehicles he used in downtown Oslo. Ever since Oklahoma, merchants have been vigilant about reporting such purchases to the authorities immediately. Did this happen? And what did the security forces do with this info? With this kind of purchase he should never have left the store without someone asking him some questions. What did the Norwegian authorities know and how quickly did they act?
3.		My private observations about the level of sophistication in this plot are as follows: This would require sophisticated bomb-making training to pull off this kind of precision. Where was he trained? In a training camp, over the internet? This kind of knowledge requires hands-on training, not a correspondence course. Someone trained him, and why didn’t the authorities know about this? Did someone drop the ball and let a “Lone Wolf” develop under their nose? It’s hard to believe!

My overall view is that Anders Behring Breivik is what we might call a “weaponized madman.”

A Note About Comments

Fjordman asked me to close the comments on his most recent post.

If the trollish behavior spills over to other threads, I will close them, too.

Needless to say, comments are closed on this post.

Fjordman Speaks Out

I notice that certain bloggers such as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs keep spreading the utterly false rumor that I am the evil shooter from Utøya, the island just outside of Oslo.

I have absolutely no idea who planted that rumor or for what reason, but they obviously don’t wish me well. For the record, I was live-blogging about these horrible events the entire Friday evening, which can be confirmed by nearly a dozen different individuals.

I didn’t respond to these rumors earlier because I was too emotionally exhausted from yesterday’s events. It was hard to pay attention to such things, but now I feel that I must. Some people really do want to smear me that badly.

For the Record: Once More With Feeling

Evidently Charles Johnson is at it once more, gnawing the ropes that chain his mind to whatever delusions he needs to believe. Most of what he says is long past anything that could be termed “thinking”. Charles doesn’t think, he reaches his conclusions via the vastness of his hatreds and suspicions.

Thus do his irrational rants extrude themselves, so much baloney out of a meat grinder which ends up pasted in his blog. As Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that Reason knows not of. Black as his heart may be, it is indeed the locus of Johnson’s ideas. His atrophied faculty of Reason (a symptom he shares with much of the Left to which he has returned) is not often involved in what he says.

I am told that one of his obsessions is Pamela Geller. That’s understandable, given what he lost in the fight he picked with her. At one point, back before his irrationality was impossible to miss, Pamela attempted to reach some kind of détente with Charles. She was basing her efforts on his previous writings. But her information, like ours, was founded on what we knew of Little Green Footballs before Johnson was ‘turned’ — probably by black psy ops in Europe. This retooling of LGF was an event noticed by very few, though James Lewis sussed it out early (a point to which I will return, below).

These days Atlas Shrugs reaches a formidable audience, while LGF continues its twirling downward spiral. His self-destruction has become obvious to all… the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine indeed.

Today, Pamela Geller frontally attacks Johnson’s Leftist “smear-by-association” tactics, taking aim at the baseless lies of his charges:

Libelblogger Charles Johnson is claiming that the Norway shooter is a “Pamela Geller fan,” and that he is actually Fjordman, whose articles I have published here at Atlas on occasion. He has persisted in this even though Fjordman is online tonight and clearly not under arrest. This shows how desperate Johnson is, and how low he will sink. In reality, the shooter is not Fjordman. I have met Fjordman, I know his identity, and he is not Anders Breivik. This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.

The Jihadis took credit for it. Who would take credit for such barbarity and carnage? And yet this goes without comment. But there is no compunction in associating me with a mass murderer based on one referring link three years ago. McVeigh watched CNN when he lost it over Waco, so I guess CNN is a terrorist org?

But this is war. And the left is vicious, amoral and depraved. They mean to win, and that is the only way they know how.

As for the Johnson, he is a very sick man. Let’s hope he doesn’t hurt himself.

In a thousand words, Atlas Shrugs brings down this doddering fool. I would dissent only from her final sentence, because he has “hurt himself”, over and over again. These self-inflicted wounds don’t deserve our pity and normally they wouldn’t deserve our notice, but what she has said here needed saying. For the record.

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Back in November 2007, when LGF was doing its best to decimate the fledgling Counterjihad group (it was never a monolithic movement), he was a Big Deal with lots of traffic and credibility. So big that when he began tarring smaller bloggers with his lies (“libel” indeed) we asked the American Big Blogs for help. All of us asked. We assembled a complete refutation of his charges and sent it to the influential ‘conservative’ or right wing bloggers. Only one replied, and was obviously too nervous about the consequences to help us. None of the rest answered us by so much as a “don’t want to get involved’ email.

To this day we don’t know why they decided to stay “uninvolved”, but their silence still remains astounding. As I’ve said repeatedly, only Michelle Malkin continued to link to our posts. To the rest, it was as though we didn’t exist. Shunning is a powerful weapon and I’m here to tell you that the Right uses it every bit as effectively as the Left does. Sadly, the new media ain’t so different from the old media after all.

Soon even Pajamas Media shoved us out. We were on our own… except for our loyal readers and the people in Europe who told us how important it was to keep the Gates open.

Meanwhile, in the month following LGF’s treachery, James Lewis wrote an eye-opening essay for American Thinker. He laid out his suspicions about what had transpired, and his ideas fit Occam’s Razor very well. Even the title of his essay fit:

Political Black Ops in Belgium?

Then he proceeded to lay out the reasons this “minor war…in the conservative blogosphere…smell(ed) suspicious”:

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:

“No One Shall Bomb us into Silence”

Below is the speech given last night to the Norwegian nation by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. It has been subtitled in English, and is followed by a transcript:


Transcript:

Today Norway was hit by two shocking and bloody and cowardly attacks.

We still do not know who attacked us; much is still uncertain.

But we know that many are dead and injured.

We are all shocked at the evil that has struck us so brutally and so suddenly

This night demands much of all of us.

And the days that follow will demand even more

We are prepared to face up to this.

Norway hangs together during critical times.

We mourn our dead, we suffer with the injured, and we comfort relatives.

This is about attacks on innocent civilians, on young people at summer camp.

An attack on all of us.

I have a message to the people who attacked us, and those behind them.

This is a message from all of Norway:

You will not destroy us.

You will not destroy our democracy nor our quest for a better world.

We are a small nation, but we are a proud nation.

No one shall bomb us into silence or shoot us into silence.

Nothing will frighten us out of being Norway.

This night we will comfort each other, talk with each other, and stand together.

Tomorrow we will show the world that Norway’s democracy grows stronger when it is challenged.

We shall find the guilty and hold them responsible.

The important thing tonight is to save lives, to care for the victims and their loved ones

I would like to state my recognition for the work of the police, the medics,

and all the other people who currently do such formidable work

to help others, healing injures and saving lives.

We must never cease to stand up for our values.

We have to show that our open society can pass this test, too,

And that the answer to violence is even more democracy,

even more humanity, but never naïveté.

That is what we owe to the victims and to the those they hold dear.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 7/22/2011

There’s a lot of interesting news in the feed tonight, but today’s ordeal has been too exhausting and dispiriting for me to feel up to highlighting any of it. Poke around in the headlines and see what you can find — the economic news in particular looks inviting.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Diana West, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

For the Record

I just received this unpleasantly-worded email:

Now even LGF is getting in on the Fjordman rumor. To not have nipped this rumor in the bud two hours ago was idiotic. I suspect you are purposely throwing him under the bus.

For the record: I did not comment on the rumor that the Utøya shooter was the same person as Fjordman because the assertion is too ludicrous to be taken seriously.

Charles Johnson is free to believe any damnfool thing he wants, and probably will, but I don’t see why I have to concern myself with it.

I strongly regret having to mention this stupid nonsense at all. It is demeaning to Fjordman, to myself, and to this blog to have to refer to it.

However, I will do so here, for this one post only:

I know Fjordman personally, I know exactly what he looks like, and he does not resemble the alleged murderer in the slightest.

Furthermore, I was in conversation with Fjordman all day today, starting before the shootings, during the slaughter, and afterwards. If he was shooting up Utøya, he was doing an amazing job of communicating with his friends the whole time, even after he was thrown in a jail cell.

Finally, I know Fjordman’s character, as do all his regular readers. The idea that he could be capable of such an act is so outrageous, so deeply insulting, and so vile that I feel soiled simply having to discuss it here.

This allegation is despicable, disgusting, and deserving of any other adjectives of abhorrence that you can think of.

That’s all I care to say on this topic, and more than enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. I will not mention it again.

For obvious reasons, this post is closed to comments.

No Jihad Angle — Or Is There?

Almost as soon as the first glass fragments hit the pavement in Oslo this afternoon, the blogosphere was abuzz with the news of the deadly event. The bombing was immediately identified it as a jihad attack by many commentators. This conclusion seemed to be confirmed shortly afterwards when a Islamic terrorist group claimed responsibility for the carnage.

As later reports came in, however, the picture began to change. The shooter at Utøya was repeatedly described as “Nordic” in appearance. Initial reports that he may have been a convert to Islam were never subsequently confirmed. Then the terrorist outfit withdrew its claim of responsibility, and the case for jihad became thin indeed.

No one of “Middle Eastern appearance” was listed as being sought. No witnesses reported hearing cries of “Allahu akhbar!” in Oslo or Utøya.

Now that the suspect is in custody and has been identified as an indigenous Norwegian, the latest reports refer to him as a “right-wing extremist”, presumably linked to some ultra-nationalist group.

Yet his attacks targeted the Socialists, the most anti-Israel of the major parties in Norway. Based on the affiliation of the people he killed, some websites go so far as to describe him as a “Zionist”.

To make matters even stranger, his Facebook page is quite innocuous — unless you consider The Prince subversive. And it was only set up a few days ago.

So I have no idea what the real story is. When the Scandinavian Gang of Five wake up in the morning, they will no doubt sift the latest Norwegian-language accounts, and possibly find something worth reporting.

However — assuming that the young man is not really a “Zionist” — his being a “right-wing extremist” does not rule out a jihad connection. Not at all.

There is ample precedent for speculation in this regard. For a possible parallel, we may turn to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

I’ve read several accounts that describe the Oslo murderer as “a Norwegian Timothy McVeigh”. The crime in downtown Oslo does resemble the Oklahoma City atrocity — a powerful vehicle bomb, possibly a fertilizer bomb, detonated near a government building for the purpose of causing mass casualties. Then, after initial alarm about Islam, we hear that the alleged perpetrator is a crazed right-wing zealot bent on killing as many of his fellow citizens as possible.

Yes, Oslo and Oklahoma City definitely have a lot in common in this regard.

But one thing many people seem to forget — and which they may never have known, thanks to the American government’s actions and the media spin that followed — is that there almost certainly was an Islamic terror connection to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Updates on Utøya

Further update: The death toll at Utøya is now said to be at least eighty (Norwegian).

The second attack in today’s massacre in Norway took place on the island of Utøya just outside Oslo. Below are a few final notes provided the Scandinavian Gang of Five just before they went to bed.


The police now confirm at least ten dead at Utøya (Norwegian), from execution-style murders. They fear that the final death toll will be higher than this. They are still searching the area. They have also found undetonated explosives there.

The police are also increasingly certain that the same individual with a fake police uniform was indeed at both locations. It’s definite that he was Caucasian-looking. They have identified him, and stated that he never worked for the police.

The island has 8-10 buildings. Besides the swimmers who escaped, at least 20 different boats came to the island to evacuate those fleeing.

Finnish news says the Utøya shooter was 30-40 years old and spoke with an Oslo accent.

The Norwegian news reports say he is Norwegian, 32 years old.

The youths at Utøya used Twitter and Facebook to communicate (Norwegian).

Also: a video from Oslo just seconds after the blast.


Hat tips: Fjordman, Henrik, Reinhard, Kitman, and KGS.