The Deadliest Believer in Norway

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The Deadliest Believer in Norway

the deadliest believer in norwayPicture courtesy of Sauer-Thompson.com

“It sure looks like Islamic terrorism,” John Bolton educated Fox News viewers. After all “there is a substantial immigrant population from the Middle East in particular in Norway.”

“Muslim extremists,” agreed Laura Ingraham later that day.

The quick verdict from the Weekly Standard: “part of the jihadist hydra.”

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal explained in detail the motivations for the Muslim attacks. Norway “will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West.” At last, we knew not only what religion was at the base of the attack, but what the terrorists were thinking.

Later, when it turned out the attacker was a self-described Christian acting on a Crusade against non-Christian immigrants, the explanations from some of the same sources was a sort of ratchet logic. Collective guilt is always at work, it seems, but it only goes one way.

The Wall Street Journal explained their preemptive accusations by saying they were only partly wrong. “Coordinated terrorist attacks are an Al-Qaeda signature. But copycats with different agendas are surely capable of duplicating its methods.” It was a theme picked up by other sources.

Oh sure, the attacks were not actually Muslim or Islamic. But that was simply detail. As Stephen Colbert put it satirically, they were “Muslish” and “Islam-esque.”

One reporter decided to actually dig out one or two facts. He subjected pro-Christian writings by the killer to a close analysis. He concluded that, although the Norwegian killer was inspired by various anti-Muslim American activists, his writing seemed mostly to have mimicked the manifesto of the Unabomber.

As details filtered in, it seemed the killer had acted alone. He had detonated a bomb that killed a few and injured others, then traveled to a youth celebration sponsored by a pro-tolerance political party. He walked around the site, an isolated island, killing anyone he could find.

The outrage in the United States was palpable. As reports came, a sizable number of folks in the US were furious. At. The. News. Reports. Themselves. How dare the news media report that the lone terrorist was a Christian! As Ann Coulter sputtered, as nearly as one can sputter in print, Christians simply don’t do these things. To the madman, Coulter explained, “Christian” simply meant non-Muslim.

She concluded with a little joke. It’s too bad the killer “wasn’t a Muslim extremist open about his Jihadist views, because I hear the Army is looking for a new psychiatrist down at Fort Hood.” Get it? I don’t either.

The anger about the fellow’s religious identity may seem a little obscure, but we can speculate. It is probably not purely defensive. There is not a sizable segment of public sentiment bent on smearing all Christians as terrorists. However, the fact that occasional Christians kill large numbers of people does tend to disrupt the narrative of those who would smear all Muslims using the same logic.

I am sympathetic to the view that the man who walked casually through a campground filled with happy young people, taking aim and killing kids, could not have been a meaningful follower of the Prince of Peace. And yet I am amazed at those who cannot bring themselves to behave just as reasonably toward sincere followers of other faiths.

In point of fact, Norwegian bigot and murderer Anders Behring Breivik is, in a very important way, a co-religionist with Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. George Tillman. They all were idealists in the sense that some ideal was more important to each than actual human life. Real people became mere collateral damage, the necessary price to achieving a higher goal. The ideal became more important than the lives of others.

They did not worship together to be sure, but they all followed the same basic dogma. With each killing, each step on the way, each step following, they all were members of the same deadly denomination, united by the same intoxicating communion of blood and flesh. And Oklahoma City, New York, Washington, Oslo, and one Doctor in Kansas City encountered that most perfectly dangerous of all the Lord’s creatures.

The one who knows that God is on his side.

This article is republished here with permission of its author and guest contributor Burr Deming.  It originally appeared today at FairandUnbalanced.com.  Graphics courtesy of MadMikesAmerica

About Post Author

Carol Bell

Carol is a graduate of the University of Alabama. Her passion is journalism and it shows. Carol is our unpaid, but very efficient, administrative secretary.
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12 years ago

I think hit more nail on more heads than one. You implicitly pointed out the following dangers:

1. The danger of him who knows that God is on his side.

2. The danger of those who Know and act out based on their knowledge, though they know others Know the opposite. In other words, the danger of believing one owns the truth.

3. The danger of following God’s will. Most defined God’s are barbarians and we have to contort Their bodies pretty thoroughly to wring out the goodness.

4. The hardest one to overcome, the danger of ethnocentrism.

Bradley scott
12 years ago

O’ really’s!? hypocracy does not extend as far as wading into a gathering of children with an assault rifle, but only just, and pehaps only if they aren’t brown children, or if he doesn’t have to be the one actually pulling the trigger. Where is his Christian compassion for the children in Iraq, or Afghanistan? Dorthy, I don’t think this slight distinction makes him idealogically different from Anders Brevik any way that matters.

jenny40
12 years ago

The fools at Fox will never change, at least not until Rupert Murdoch is arrested, abdicates his throne, or dies, and even then his son, who no doubt will share his editorial position, will carry on.

12 years ago

I’ve written and thought so much about Norway, and thought I’d use the latest loathsome commentary by bill o really, who is an affront to all Christians who try and practice their faith.

Bill O’Reilly may have had a legitimate point when he distinguished Norwegian terror suspect Anders Breivik from a jihadist by saying there was no evidence Breivik belonged to a church or “practiced Christianity in any way.” [Going to church makes one a Christian? Really? Is that all? Nothing about following Christ’s example? I guess I missed something.]

O’Reilly may even have had a legitimate gripe in alleging that calling Breivik a “radical Christian” was something of a misnomer that unfairly maligned Christianity. But the inconvenient truth for “Muslims are a world problem” O’Reilly is that Breivik clearly considered himself a Christian and acted in a way he thought was on behalf of Christians. But even if Breivik were an atheist or a Jew, O’Reilly’s hate-filled rant that tarred liberals and the liberal media with the same flimsy evidence he accused them of using was nothing less than a thinly-veiled attempt to use a tragic situation to promote a familiar, divisive agenda. The fact that he dismissed prior media attempts–right there on Fox News, even–to paint Breivik as a jihadist was even more indicative of a self-serving motive. Sadly, Jesus-loving O’Reilly seemed more upset over this liberal media/anti-Christian plot that he never substantiated than he was over the mass murders committed by Breivik.

The O’Reilly Factor spent two segments on O’Reilley’s hissy fit. The first was a lengthy editorial in which O’Reilly laid out his thesis and accusations.

“Breivik is not a Christian. That’s impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder.” Yes, o really sees nothing of himself in Breivik.

Bill O’Reilly sternly criticized the media for describing Anders Behring-Breivik, the man who has admitted to committing the mass killings in Norway, as a Christian, saying that such a thing was “impossible.”

O’Reilly singled out the New York Times, which called Breivik a “Christian extremist” in an article. Breivik also referred to himself as a Christian, as did the Norwegian police, and his 1,500 page manifesto has been described as coming from a Christian perspective. In the manifesto, he writes that he does not have a “personal,” religious relationship with Christ, believes in Christianity “as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform,” which he says “makes [me] Christian.”

I hope someone can respond to me about what makes o really a Christian. It seems to me that both Brevik and o really are the same type of “christians.”

Admin
12 years ago

This is a remarkable piece indeed, and one that shows our prejudices clearly and without question. America has come a long way but we have a long way to come when it comes to hating…

12 years ago

This is good, it proves to me what slip shod media we have, which I’m afraid reflects society as a whole. All to willing to believe what matches their own personal prejudices.

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