The Breivik Portfolio, Part Four: The Dot-Connection

Breivik: dot-connection


The previous essays in this series examined different aspects of Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous rampage in Norway on July 22, and its aftermath. Some parts of those posts were speculative; some were tangential to the massacre itself. The facts that concern us here are relatively few. From those earlier posts, this is what we know (as opposed to what we and others might be inclined to deduce, surmise, or invent out of whole cloth) about those horrific events:

Post 1  
  • A Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, detonated a fertilizer bomb in downtown Oslo on the afternoon of July 22, a bank holiday. The bomb killed nine people and did great damage to buildings in the area.
  • We are told that he acted alone, and had no known accomplices.
  • Mr. Breivik then traveled to the resort island of Utøya. Dressed in a policeman’s uniform, he took part in the slaughter of sixty-eight unarmed participants in a Labour Party gathering. Many of those killed were teenagers.
  • Although there were initial reports that there was at least one other gunman, we are told that he acted alone.
  • We are told that the killer was not part of a wider conspiracy, and had no assistance in acquiring his weapons and building his bombs.
  • According to published reports, Mr. Breivik acquired at least some of the components for his fertilizer bomb from Poland.
  • An early news report claimed that the head of a Polish chemical company had been arrested as a co-conspirator. This report was later denied by the Polish government.
  • Some person, later said to be Anders Behring Breivik, posted comments on various Counterjihad websites, most prominently Document.no. In these comments he stated his solidarity with those who resist the Islamization of Europe.
  • Just before the massacre began, a 1,500-page manifesto in English was sent out to various bloggers, politicians, and media outlets. We are told that this document was written by Anders Behring Breivik. The manifesto quotes a wide range of anti-jihad writers, with a particular focus on Fjordman and on Robert Spencer. Much of the material in those 1,500 pages came from American writers or websites.
  • As soon as the killer’s identity became known, media outlets and governments all across the West condemned the sources cited in the manifesto, sometimes saying that those authors bore partial responsibility for the murderer’s actions because they “inspired” him.
  • American intelligence had been conducting a large surveillance operation out of the embassy in Oslo for a number of years until it was exposed by a Norwegian television station in late October, 2010.
  • The date of the exposure of the American operation in Oslo coincided almost exactly with the cessation of Anders Behring Breivik’s visible activity on the internet.
  • Local Norwegian employees, drawn from former police officers and intelligence agents, had been hired by the American embassy in Oslo to assist in the surveillance operation.
  • A week after the Oslo massacre, the official Norwegian investigation into the embassy’s surveillance program was dropped.
Post 2  
  • Reports from Poland, Belarus, and Russia asserted that Anders Behring Breivik traveled to Belarus on at least two separate occasions. He went there to acquire paramilitary training. We were told that this information originated with sources in the Belarusian intelligence community.
  • The camp where Mr. Breivik received his training was run by a former FSB officer, according to reports from Belarus and Russia. This man is one of the directors of a private intelligence service headquartered in the Persian Gulf. Other part-owners of the company are said to include the former head of Saudi military intelligence and a subsidiary of Halliburton.
  • Some news reports claim that several months before the massacre Mr. Breivik met with an inmate who escaped from a Russian mental institution and fled to Norway. This former Russian inmate said he had been acting as an agent of the Russian government; he was purportedly under orders to kill a Chechen separatist leader in Norway. He turned himself in to the Norwegian authorities, and was eventually deported back to Russia.
Post 3  
  • The global Islamic community, especially as manifested under the aegis of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has made eradicating so-called “Islamophobia” its top priority.
  • One of the prominent features of the campaign against “Islamophobia” is a well-orchestrated strategy to criminalize “defamation of religions, including Islam” in non-Muslim countries.
  • To this end, the OIC has worked through the United Nations to pass Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. This resolution demands that member states criminalize “defamation of religion”.
  • Numerous meetings of OIC representatives are called expressly to pass plenary resolutions specifying the critical need to outlaw defamation of Islam. The specified criminal acts include insulting Islam, the teachings of the Koran, or the prophet Mohammed.
  • In June 2011 the OIC’s annual Islamophobia report released proposed a “test of consequences” for defamatory speech. This test would provide guidelines for determining what speech might be unprotected, due to its expected negative consequences.
  • In July 2011 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the OIC in Istanbul. She backed their proposed “comprehensive framework” as developed by the UN et al. to help eliminate intolerance and discrimination towards Islam and Muslims. This “framework” is clearly a violation of the U.S. Constitution and a danger to free speech. Her support of the “framework” is also a clear violation of her oath of office.
  • Some Muslim writers point to the actions of Anders Behring Breivik as a “consequence” of the “Islamophobia” displayed by writers and websites that criticize sharia and Islam.

The above outline is a rough summary of what we know about Anders Behring Breivik and the acts he committed, and the use the OIC is making of this opportunity. Notice there isn’t all that much hard information — the details of the crime, the victims, and the weapons used, plus the online postings and a manifesto that purports to be by the killer.

We must take the word of the Norwegian and Polish authorities that there were no accomplices. Information released to the public by both governments may very well be the whole truth. However, we know our governments are not always candid. They been known on occasion to release misleading, distorted, or falsified information. This is particularly likely when sensitive intelligence data is involved, or if telling the truth would interfere with the execution of crucial state policies. Even more frequently, officials lie if the whole truth and nothing but the truth would tend to embarrass the government or reveal its profound incompetence.

For these reasons, only the facts bulleted above can be assumed as given. Among those givens are statements by official sources or the press. In other words, the issuing of a statement is a fact; the accuracy of the statement may be open to question.

Everything else in this post is nothing but speculation — hypothesis, conjecture, or outright fiction. These hypotheses are attempts to comprehend the pattern of those events in Oslo and on Utøya. If fitting them into a structure makes sense and accounts for most loose ends, then we have at least a few possible paths that lead us into areas that governments and other groups have marked “off limits”.

Fiction can be useful. It may help us understand complex real-world events that would otherwise be a murky muddle. Thus, moving past the assumed factual premises listed above, from here on in I’m making stuff up out of whole cloth. The pattern of pretend I will weave may enhance our understanding of the larger picture. Other, more knowledgeable observers may produce a richer cloth with a pattern that approximates the truth more closely than mine.

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It is appropriate to begin our speculative ruminations at the end, rather than the beginning: with the political ramifications of the events of July 22 — the manner in which the event was immediately and ferociously exploited by the politicians and the media. How did their treatment of events serve the ends of Politically Correct Multiculturalism?

Oslo aftermath


Within twenty-four hours after the Oslo massacre, it became evident that there was something peculiar about the killer’s reading habits and internet preferences. The immediate horror of what Anders Behring Breivik did on that dreadful Friday made it hard to think about the implications of his manifesto and internet postings. Later on, however, when the initial furor had subsided somewhat, a number of people — especially those who were pointed to as Mr. Breivik’s “inspiration” — noticed that there was something fishy about the list of writers and websites the media gleefully associated with the Butcher of Utøya.

The roster of “hate sites” was just too perfect. From the point of view of those who would like nothing better than to discredit the Counterjihad movement and drive its adherents out of business, the list was complete. The killer’s favorite authors read like a who’s-who of the resistance to Islamization. All of the most prolific and accomplished anti-sharia activists were included; no one was omitted.

Mr. Breivik’s internet bookmarks eerily resembled an “enemies list” as compiled by CAIR or the OIC. To the skeptic, that peculiarity alone was enough to ring alarm bells.

Even more bizarre was the murderer’s overwhelming focus on English-language sites, especially American ones. Since most educated Scandinavians are fluent in English, Mr. Breivik’s preferences might not seem unusual at first glance. However, compare his preoccupation with American sites with his avowed goal of reviving European nationalism and European civilization. Is it not strange that he paid less attention to major European sites such as Snaphanen, Uriasposten, Politically Incorrect, Islam in Europe, Tundra Tabloids, Politisk Inkorrekt, and Europe News? Why did he obsess on American sources, with their parochially American focus?

It seems Fjordman was his particular favorite. Once Fjordman quit blogging, he chose to publish his writings on sites run by Americans. Those Americans who followed Counterjihad sites in the USA would discover Fjordman and realize his significance, without ever having to look at any European blogs or forums. The same is true of Bat Ye’or, Geert Wilders, and other members of the European Counterjihad, all of whom are prominent on major anti-sharia sites in the USA.

The murderer’s oeuvre resembled a list of enemies compiled by a sharia-compliant American. This peculiarity — the too-perfect listing of anti-sharia writers, with a bizarrely American focus — is what cries out for further speculation and conjecture.

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When something smells that fishy, it’s time to go looking for finned creatures, perhaps with a net.



The first post in this series gave a brief overview of the activities of American intelligence agents operating out of the embassy in Oslo during Mr. Breivik’s most active period, which ended in October 2010. The surveillance by US operatives and their local employees continued right up until the moment the operation was exposed by Norwegian television — which happened to coincide almost exactly with the disappearance of Mr. Breivik from his customary internet haunts.

That’s an awful lot of coincidence in just one haul of the net.

Now here’s where our speculation really takes us into deeper water. The presence and timing of American intelligence activities in Oslo, combined with the killer’s American focus and the too-perfect roster of his favorite writers, suggest the possibility that Anders Behring Breivik was a “weaponized psychopath”. If this were a novel, it would depict him being used by American intelligence (with the possible collaboration of elements of Norwegian intelligence) to achieve some well-defined political ends.

However, there’s a problem with this tale: any conspiracy theorizing about the “weaponization” of Mr. Breivik falls apart because it is all but impossible to believe that the CIA or Norwegian intelligence could ever be so cynical and cold-blooded as to allow (or help) a psychopath to obtain the explosives and weapons required to mass-murder his fellow Norwegians. That part won’t hold together.

A few days after the massacre, when discussing these observations with Dymphna, I said, “I can’t see the CIA doing something like that. I could see the Russians or the Iranians doing it, though — both of them have a track record of mounting false-flag operations. But the Russians don’t have the motive — why would they want to eliminate the European Counterjihad? What purpose would it serve? And besides, how could Iran manage something like that in Norway?”

An American attempt to discredit our small Counterjihad pushback makes more sense when you take into account the State Department’s overt cooperation with the OIC, and the ongoing interest of the Obama administration in currying favor with the Muslim Brotherhood. Taking out the “defamers of Islam” with a single blow would definitely suit the State Department’s larger purposes.

Surely not even the Obama administration is depraved enough to engineer a massacre in Norway just to please the OIC. Once again, we plunge into the deep water of improbability.

On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine a non-Western nation or a terror group — that is, the original scenario as suggested during the early stages of the events on July 22, when everyone was crying “terrorists!” — arranging a car bomb in central Oslo. A powerful fertilizer bomb, a few deaths, some badly damaged buildings, hysteria and terror among the Norwegian people — yes, some cynical and evil planner might find such an event useful.

But sixty-eight dead teenagers on a resort island? The chances of blowback would be so great that no competent intelligence group would consider the operation.

There’s no getting away from it: the final argument against any hypothesis involving a cynical, pre-planned operation is what happened on Utøya: the “slaughter of the innocents”. It’s impossible to conceive the utility of this slaughter for anyone engaged in political skullduggery. No matter how callous the organizers of the operation might be, they would hardly find it prudent to stage a deadly incident of this magnitude. The consequences of such horrific slaughter would be unpredictable, and might well spiral out of control.

Our fictional fishing expedition seems to have run out of fuel here, leaving us becalmed in these waters. Past this point, we can’t find enough fishes to tell a story that is convincing and plausible.

A reader of fiction must be persuaded to suspend his disbelief, so this is where an author would lose his audience. Readers would exclaim, “Aw, c’mon! Gimme a break! Nothing like this would ever really happen!”

So we’re led inexorably back to the conclusion: Anders Behring Breivik was exactly what he seemed to be — a lone psychopath who, for his own internal reasons, chose opposition to Islam as the cause for which he would engage in mass slaughter of his own people, inserting his name into the history books forever.

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We’re left with two possible stories, each with its own fatal flaws, each having annoying loose ends that are difficult to reconcile into a convincing conclusion. A good narrative demands a complete and satisfying resolution.

The most popular version of this horror story is that Anders Behring Breivik was a “lone psychopath” who conceived and carried out his crimes by himself. The loose end to this tale is the “perfect fit” of the killer’s reading preferences with people and groups that are considered “enemies of Islam” by the OIC and its affiliates, especially CAIR. The whole business smells of a setup.

However, any fictional account that manages to reconcile this loose end left by a so-called setup creates a different loose end. Anyone who could have conceivably “weaponized” Anders Behring Breivik could not also have deliberately allowed the wanton slaughter in Norway, particularly the unexpected carnage on Utøya.

Thus, to get past these seemingly insurmountable difficulties, I propose two new hypotheses. They will resolve those loose ends. They will create a fictional narrative which includes the known facts while remaining consistently plausible.

Hypothesis #1: The state actors who originally planned to “weaponize” Mr. Breivik never intended that any bomb would go off, nor that any people would be killed.

Hypothesis #2: Those who assisted Mr. Breivik in attaining his objectives expected that a bomb would be detonated in downtown Oslo. Such a result suited their purposes. They did not realize that the killer intended to carry out a mass execution on Utøya. This was carried out by the killer for his own reasons, and his plans were known only to him.

If we accept these two hypotheses as premises, we — the authors of this fictional account — can construct a narrative of the events leading up to July 22 that includes the known facts and stitches them together in a way that allows the reader to suspend his disbelief.

What follows is a fictional tale about what happened in Norway last month.

Our novel opens with a prologue, flashing back fifteen years or so before the explosion in Oslo. As Al Qaeda emerges as a potent terrorist actor — especially after the Khobar Towers bombing, and the declaration of war against the United States by Osama bin Laden — various elements in the United States government consider the possibility of a working partnership with the Muslim Brotherhood. This idea first becomes popular with functionaries in the State Department and the CIA, and then later with the Pentagon, and eventually makes its way to the White House.

This partnership with the Ikhwan seems increasingly urgent. Iran is approaching the deployment of a working missile-launched nuclear warhead. The Brotherhood starts to look like a critical ally that can help the United States thwart the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

Over the next decade, through successive presidential administrations, the Muslim Brotherhood gains increasing influence, inserting advisors into staff positions and as consultants within the State Department, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, all three branches of the military, and the White House. What could be more natural? These Brotherhood guys seem like such reasonable fellows — friendly, helpful, and above all non-violent. They are the very antithesis of Al Qaeda. It’s easy to seek and heed their advice on all matters concerning Islam. Government officials believe that by consulting with their Muslim advisors, they can successfully counter Islamic “radicals” without antagonizing “moderate” Muslims in the United States or upsetting our Muslim allies abroad, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Gradually the lexicon of officially-used terms about Islamic terrorism is changed. The terms “Islamic” and “terrorism” disappear from public statements and publications. Now we go to war against “violent extremism”. Any government employee who says bad things about Islam feels the pressure from above. Changes in school curricula are encouraged. Textbooks now include a CAIR-approved history of Islam. And so on.

Thus we keep our Muslim friends and allies happy while we hunt down and kill off Al Qaeda fighters in distant lands.

The OIC White House


The prologue finished, the novel’s opening chapters begin during the first days of President Obama’s administration. The incoming president has told his staff that he will conduct outreach to the Muslim world, thus establishing a new relationship between the United States and Islam. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton eagerly initiates a series of meetings with Muslim leaders. She begins what will become an ongoing close partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The OIC convinces her of the crucial need to crack down on hateful speech against Islam and Muslims. If tolerance isn’t enforced, they say, the likely result would be to radicalize the “moderates”, and lead to more “violent extremism”.

In the spring of 2011, her Muslim counterparts in the OIC engineer the passage of UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. It calls for laws against “defamation of religions, including Islam” in all UN member states. Mrs. Clinton’s task is to help the OIC achieve its goals, which have been all but realized in Europe. In the USA, however, the full implementation of laws against the “defamation of religions” is stymied by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Any laws implementing Resolution 16/18 must avoid public outcry until they are passed, and survive any subsequent scrutiny by the Supreme Court. The American people will have to be prepared ahead of time for the necessity of limitations on their freedom of speech. They must be convinced that “Islamophobia” is repugnant, intolerant, and anti-American. The “Islamophobes” must be thoroughly stigmatized and shunned.

Much as its immediate predecessors have done, the Obama administration repeatedly warns about the danger of “right-wing extremists”. The Department of Homeland Security issues directives to be on watch for militia members, former servicemen, Tea Party supporters, and Ron Paul voters. If a “right-wing terrorist” who opposes Islam were to stage a violent attack, it would help the administration soften up America for the necessary suppression of publicly-expressed opposition to Islamic law. Such an attack would be of immense value in silencing any objections to a crackdown on particular kinds of speech, especially “Islamophobia”. In the aftermath, anyone questioning sharia or Islamization would be suspect.

OIC: Hillary Clinton and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu


On July 15, 2011 Secretary of State Clinton gives a brief speech after meeting with the OIC in Istanbul. She promises to work with the OIC to implement Resolution 16/18, and lauds the value of “peer pressure and shaming” against those intolerant folks who engage in “incendiary actions” against Islam. Shaming is necessary, she says, to make certain that people understand such behavior is abhorrent and unacceptable.

Meanwhile, interleaved with these chapters about the Muslim Brotherhood and its inroads into American bureaucracy, and the chapters about Mrs. Clinton and the OIC, is a third element: the account of the gradual development of Anders Behring Breivik’s anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic beliefs. After 9-11 the mentally disturbed young man begins to formulate more concretely his grandiose plans for an extraordinary series of violent actions that he believes are necessary to roll back the Islamization of Europe. In his fantasies, he is the natural Nordic leader of his own Reconquista.

He begins to hang out in the Oslo underworld. There he obtains weapons, explosives, and the illegal steroids he needs for his physical training. These underworld encounters allow him access to members of various shadowy networks. Organized crime, drug-traffickers, terrorist groups, and state-sponsored espionage come together here. And it is here he makes contact with people who can obtain the weapons, chemicals, and paramilitary training he needs. His new connections include a former Soviet intelligence officer whose latest career in private intelligence opens doors to Islamic groups in the Middle East and Chechnya. Just months before the killings on Utøya, our protagonist meets an escapee from a Russian lunatic asylum who claims he has been sent to Norway by the Russian authorities to assassinate a Chechen separatist leader.

Chechnya: rubble


Mr. Breivik’s widening network begins to include Al Qaeda operatives. These men are the only ones who can provide what he needs: the greatest expertise on the construction of fertilizer bombs. While his mission is to resurrect Europe, he has no strong objection to Al Qaeda. They are not the ones colonizing Norway. Besides, he admires their dedication and ruthlessness in the service of their own cause.

In addition to these Islamic terrorists, there are foreign governments also interested in seeing powerful bombs explode in major European cities. Those who support the cause of the Ummah are dedicated to realizing the murder of infidels while terrorizing survivors into submission.

The enemies of a united Europe are also delighted to assist in actions that demonstrate the weakness and incompetence of the European authorities, while simultaneously inflicting grave damage to the nationalist cause. A successful attack by Mr. Breivik would kill any hopes for the revival of traditional, muscular European nation states.

As you can see, constructing the novel requires several separate but parallel plot lines. To include all the elements of the story, chapters of our novel must also follow American and Norwegian intelligence agents in Oslo. Anders Behring Breivik’s activities in the criminal/espionage underworld do not go unnoticed by the Norwegian security police, who have informants in place throughout the networks where Mr. Breivik is doing business. The security police keep an eye on this young psychopath, and are aware of his political assertions and opinions.

U.S. Embassy, Oslo


Further complicating the plot are officials in the American embassy in Oslo, who have been conducting surveillance operations in the city as a preventive measure against terror attacks on the embassy. As part of their mission, they also gather intelligence from the many Islamic radicals who find Norway a convenient refuge.

Needing experienced, competent Norwegian employees, the Americans recruit from among retired Norwegian intelligence agents and security police. Obviously, the attractiveness of their new employer lies in the higher salaries offered in comparison with what the Norwegian government is willing to pay. For the Americans, the advantage is obvious: their new employees understand and speak the language. In addition, they bring along their institutional experience regarding the networks of informants from the demimonde where local terrorist groups live and operate.

Still with me? Is my plot structure credible so far?

We are now more than halfway through this thriller novel. The background has been filled in for you, and you can see the major players in place.

We proceed to early 2009, when word makes its way from the higher reaches of the State Department down to the surveillance group in the American embassy in Oslo. Certain top people are in need of a far-right wacko extremist who has his own plans for a terror attack. Norwegian employees tell their supervisors they may have a subject: Anders Behring Breivik could well be their necessary tool. He is known to have grandiose plans for a major attack. However, he has been careful not to attract attention with overt behavior that could cause him to be arrested. They know he has consulted with underworld criminals and with Al Qaeda affiliates. He says he hates Islam and opposes Muslim immigration. In other words, he’s been auditioning for this part.

A team of Norwegian agents from the American embassy makes contact with Mr. Breivik. They pose as like-minded right-wing opponents of immigration. They offer assistance, and Mr. Breivik lets them in on some of his plans. He becomes the titular leader of the group, and is persuaded to let the newcomers help by commenting extensively in his name on anti-jihad websites. He tells them about his manifesto; they offer additional texts written in English, which he accepts and incorporates into his opus. Mr. Breivik believes his associates when they say their material comes from American Counterjihad sources. In, reality, however, what they turn over to him has been compiled by agents at the embassy. These operatives surf American Counterjihad websites, collect material, write summaries, and compose essays for their new colleague.

Perhaps it is at this point that, by feeding into his own grandiosity, his handlers encourage him to visualize himself as leading a larger group that will rise up and restore European civilization.

When the agents learn of Mr. Breivik’s planned bomb for downtown Oslo, their superiors decide to allow the plan to proceed. Just before the point of execution, the Norwegian authorities will be alerted and the bomb operation will be rolled up. This successful prevention of a major “terror attack” will be dressed up as a triumph of American and Norwegian cooperation in counterterrorism. It will then be presented to a compliant media. The manifesto will be “discovered”, and Mr. Breivik’s connections with the European and American Counterjihad will thoroughly discredit the movement. Meanwhile, the Obama administration will point to the near-tragedy in Oslo as an example of the consequences of “hateful”, “intolerant”, “divisive”, and “Islamophobic” speech, and as an object lesson in why such speech is a danger to every nation’s security.

You know the plot elements well enough to see that events do not proceed as planned. Just as Mr. Breivik’s preparations are reaching their crucial final stages, fate intervenes in the form of Norwegian TV2’s discovery and exposé of the surveillance unit operating out of the US embassy in Oslo. Suddenly the spotlight is turned on the intelligence operatives who have acted as Mr. Breivik’s handlers. The Norwegians among that group are called down to police headquarters for questioning. Although the confidentiality agreements they signed as a condition of their employment forbids the Norwegians to say anything to the police, attention is now focused on their work. This is a major snafu.

The Breivik operation is suspended. Some of the American agents have to be quickly reassigned, and contact with Anders Behring Breivik is cut.

However, Mr. Breivik is no longer interested enough in his former internet haunts to resume online posting. He now has more practical matters in mind. With the assistance of his other contacts in the criminal underground and terrorist groups, he is collecting the materials to construct his fertilizer bomb. And, unknown to anyone else, he is covertly acquiring advanced weaponry for his extramural operation on Utøya.

Anders Behring Breivik’s primary purpose behind his grand ideology of European culture is to exact primitive and regressive vengeance on the ruling Labour Party. The timing of his attack is based on the scheduled appearance of a prominent Labour Party leader at the summer camp on Utøya, but Mr. Breivik allows his terrorist associates to believe that the choice of date depends on the bank holiday, which would minimize casualties in central Oslo. The Islamic terror group would take credit for the bomb.

Now we reach the white-knuckled climax of our fictional account. Anders Behring Breivik executes his diversionary plan in downtown Oslo, doing exactly what the American and Norwegian agents in the surveillance group had intended to stop in the nick of time. The bomb is successfully deployed after all, and then Mr. Breivik is gone.

His Al Qaeda contacts are exultant — they have exactly what they wanted. A new jihad group has been created expressly for the occasion, and it releases a statement on the internet claiming responsibility for the bomb in Oslo.

Shortly after the explosion, the text messages begin coming in from the tiny island of Utøya. At that point, Al Qaeda makes a quick reassessment. The new jihad group is disappeared. The claim of responsibility is withdrawn. They realize they have been played.

The horrific dénouement of our novel unfolds in the woods and on the shorelines of the island, tracked by a news helicopter while the police continue not to arrive. Mr. Breivik — wearing the police uniform he acquired through his underworld contacts — systematically kills a large number of what would have been the next generation of Labour Party leaders. In his solitary and exhilarating moments of power, he obliterates his peers, those he was told he would never be good enough to join. When the police finally do show up an hour and a half later, Mr. Breivik puts down his weapon and calmly surrenders. Later, when he arrives in custody at Oslo police headquarters, he looks exhausted but satisfied. Some would say he appears happy.

In the immediate aftermath, American and Norwegian officials hastily shred papers and conceal Mr. Breivik’s connections with Norwegian and American intelligence. Certain employees are urgently reassigned to positions in other countries. Possibilities of a conspiracy or accomplices for Mr. Breivik are officially played down.

The epilogue of our fictional narrative depicts a scene several weeks later, as Anders Behring Breivik helpfully reenacts his crime on Utøya for police investigators. He’s still cheerful. He’s still happy.

His life’s purpose has been fulfilled: no abusive stepfather (who happens to be a member of the Labour Party) will ever hit him again, beating the boy into helplessness while yelling that Anders will never be good enough.

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The Breivik Portfolio is a contrived fictional account. My hypothetical story covers the major known facts of July 22, 2011 in Oslo and on the island of Utøya. More competently imagined narratives may do a better job or present a fuller explanation of the events leading up to Black Friday.

However, no theory involving a “lone wolf far-right psychopath” can ever tie up the major loose ends dangling from this too-perfect list of enemies, the same enemies so quickly and thoroughly targeted in the wake of that massacre. Only a setup — even a partial setup, or a setup gone wrong — can account for the uncanny fit of Anders Behring Breivik’s preferred reading material.

The unfolding of events after July 22 leads a reasonable person inexorably to this conclusion: a setup failed.

“Wait a, minute, Baron!” you say. “How can you possibly say that? The reaction against anti-sharia writers was intense, and large chunks of the Norwegian Counterjihad reportedly shut themselves down voluntarily. From the point of view of those who would destroy us, how can you call this a failure?”

To which I respond: “Sweden, being the most politically correct country in Europe, is a bellwether.”

Immediately after the massacre, the reaction against the Sweden Democrats was overwhelming, and the party was thought by many to have been put out of business. Yet recent polls give SD 6% of the vote, which is remarkable under the circumstances, and higher than it received at the last election. So it would seem that only the elite oligarchs in the government and the media turned their ferocity against the Sweden Democrats — and those elites were already committed enemies of the party; no changes there. Ordinary Swedes were not fooled by the smokescreen billowing over the events in Oslo.

The biggest piece of evidence remains the number of new readers who sought out Counterjihad essays and articles in the aftermath of the massacre. I can vouch for the increased Gates of Vienna traffic, which was unprecedented. The number of new readers at Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs — much larger sites than ours — must have been astronomical.

Do you really believe the architects of this setup intended that hundreds of thousands — perhaps even millions — of new visitors would read the archives at Jihad Watch? I don’t.

Anders Behring Breivik


No, the setup contrived by our fictional conspirators was a monstrous FAIL, a snafu of governmental proportions. Anders Behring Breivik got away from everyone who had planned to use him for their own purposes, even those happy to see a fertilizer bomb explode in downtown Oslo.

Everyone underestimated him, because no one knew his real motive or intentions. They thought they could use him, but he used them instead. Mr. Breivik, whatever else he may be, showed himself to be brilliant, dedicated, focused, and single-minded at Utøya. On that horrific Friday afternoon he accomplished his core mission.

The ripples of what he did continue outwards even now. The consequences will spread and return unpredictably for years to come. Singular historical events share that commonality: ask those who failed to prevent the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.



Previously in the Breivik Portfolio:

2011   Aug   11   Part One: The American Connection
        16   Part Two: The Chechen Connection
        22   Part Three: The OIC Connection

Stormy Weather

Rembrandt Van Rijn: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Summer Fundraiser, Day 7

Have you noticed that every fundraiser has its own rhythm and rhyme, its own character? These variations are due at least partially to the weather, i.e., the weather outside the window, and my own personal and quite variable meteorology. [The term used for used for exacerbations of fibromyalgia symptoms is apt. They’re called “flares”, as indeed they are.]

Tip jarThus, during this here particular bleg, we’ve had earthquakes, a hurricane, and a severe fibromyalgia flare of several days’ duration. The hurricane — Irene, I believe her name was — passed on to hassle Rhode Island, Vermont, and points north. We hope it’s another few years again until the next earth tremor, while this flare seems to be easing. I think.

But then there are the… um…. “discussions”… exacerbations of the marital sort at Schloss Bodissey. Chesterton noted that fairy tales end with the formula “and they lived happily ever after.” But he was quick to point out those fairy tales never ended “…peacefully ever after.” Chesterton claimed that a real marriage had real contention, and this contention was to be welcomed.



Thank heavens he said that. We don’t throw chairs or dishes around, per Chesterton’s idea, but on occasion we’ve both been known to heft a weighty thought and aim it in the direction of our beloved’s head. It’s true: the Baron is sometimes a tad unreasonable. In this case, it’s all rather tenuous, but we reached a compromise by deciding to seek reader input here.

As you know, we don’t accept paid advertising. Not only is it distracting, but the main page takes longer to load with ads stuck in there. On the other hand, we do put up notices for books written by our colleagues. Thus, Norman Berdichevsky’s The Left is Seldom Right and Rebecca Bynum’s Allah is Dead. Several readers have purchased these books, and asked if we received any payment as a result. The short answer is “no”. The longer answer is those books are up there as a favor, but that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t sign on as Amazon affiliates, or whatever you call it when you put up book ads.

I’d like to find out from Amazon if we can do just that, limiting it to one or two books of our choice, which would change from time to time. The books would only be there if we’d read them (some people send us their books), or if they were books we’d like to read if we still bought books.

However, the Baron says putting up these changing book notices would violate our contract with readers, the one we made three years ago that said no advertising. But we’re advertising already with those two book covers up there, aren’t we? What we’re doing is a covert advert.

So, dear readers, what do you say? Should we have “real” Amazon links to the books — i.e., with whatever pittance might be due — or should we stick to the original contract: no paid ads, period?

Let us know what you think. It’s not often one gets to take sides in a marital “discussion” without ending up surrounded by fragments of crockery. Honest, we just want your opinion.

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Wading through in their wellies, today’s donors splashed in from:

Stateside: California, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, and Virginia

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK

Thanks for everyone’s patience in waiting for the acknowledgement for their gifts. If this flare is like the others, it’s receding, and I’ll be picking up speed.



The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the donate button. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/28/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/28/2011The French government has announced that it will cut €12 billion from the budget over an unspecified period. It emphasized that it was not forced into this austerity, but chose to act prudently, unlike “Italy, Spain and Portugal, not to mention Greece”.

Meanwhile, Portugal has decided to tackle its fiscal crisis by levying a temporary tax of 3% on the richest people in the country.

In other news, the Shi’ite terror group Hezbollah has reaffirmed its support for the Syrian regime’s crackdown on civil unrest.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Gaia, Insubria, Kitman, Nilk, Rembrandt, Steen, Takuan Seiyo, 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.

Camp of the Saints: The Fall Guy

Lampedusa refugees #28


Now that the Qadaffi regime in Libya has collapsed, Italian leaders are openly discussing the fact that Col. Gheddafi deliberately engineered this year’s flood of immigrants into Italy, as punishment for Italian participation in the NATO air war against Libya. The issue is being talked up in anticipation of a future war crimes trial of the former dictator when he is finally captured and brought to justice.

I’ll have more details on the Gadafi question later in this post, but first let’s look at the new arrivals in Italy. Since my last report, an additional 257 culture-enrichers have landed on the island of Lampedusa. This brings the year-to-date total of illegal Mediterranean immigrants into Italy to just under 54,000, which is not enough of an uptick to warrant a revision of the Cultural Enrichment Thermometer.

A group of 155 migrants arrived last Wednesday from Tunisia:

Another 155 Tunisian Migrants Arrive on Lampedusa

(AGI) Palermo — Migrants continue to arrive on Lampedusa as the immigration influx from Tunisia heightened in the past few days while it slackened from Libya. Other 155 Tunisians arrived on the island last night on three boats with 9,57 and 89 persons on board, sighted by the Coast Guard and the Financial Police.

102 more landed on Friday, apparently a mixture from both Libya and Tunisia:

Italy: Party of 102 Migrants Lands at Lampedusa

(AGI) Rome — A total of 102 migrants landed on the island of Lampedusa yesterday evening (Aug 26), the Italian Coast Guard reports.

The party included 3 Tunisians.

Earlier in the week a group of culture-enrichers in a camp in southern Sicily staged yet another ruction in an attempt to escape. Some of the rioters were successful, and are still at large:

Migrant Uprising in Pozzallo: 50 Escape: 5 Officers Hurt

(AGI) Ragusa — There was an uprising at the first aid post in Pozzallo last night as hundreds of migrants tried to escape.

Fifteen or so officers attempted to quell the rioting refugees.

Sixteen escapees were tracked down, but another fifty or so are still missing and a police search is ongoing. Thirteen migrants have been arrested and charged with causing damage and obstruction. Five police officers have been hurt.

Now for a closer look at the war crimes case against Col. Moammar Qheddafi, the Man of Many Spellings. First, this brief note from ANSAmed, which reports the acknowledgement by the Libyan ambassador to Italy of something that everyone already knew:

Libya: Gaddur: Gaddafi Led Illegal Immigration

(ANSAmed) — Rome, August 26 — Gaddafi himself was responsible for the flow of illegal migrants from Libya to Lampedusa, as punishment for Italy’s participation in the UN-decided intervention. So said Libyan ambassador to Italy Abdulhafed Gaddur in a radio interview.

Gaddur confirmed in programme ‘Radio anch’io’ on Radio Uno what was earlier said by Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini regarding Gaddafi’s use of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa as “human bombs” against Italy.

“He was in charge” of immigration from Libya, said Gaddur.

“He led the flow of illegal immigration. He said he wanted to colour Lampedusa ‘black’, sending many Africans ‘so that the Italians would understand what it means to participate in the enforcement of the no-fly zone’. I confirm that Gaddafi himself organised this flow of illegal migration…. He was the one who gave the orders.” Gaddur added that he believes at least a thousand migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean in an attempt to reach Italy from Libya.

The Daily Telegraph has a more detailed account, basing its report on statements made by officials of the Italian government:

Libya: Col Gaddafi ‘Directed Tens of Thousands of Refugees Towards Italy as Human Bombs’

Col Gaddafi directed tens of thousands of refugees towards Italy as “human bombs” with the intention of turning the tiny island of Lampedusa into a “migrant hell”, the Italian government has said.

Col Gaddafi directed tens of thousands of refugees towards Italy as “human bombs” with the intention of turning the tiny island of Lampedusa into a “migrant hell”, the Italian government said yesterday.

The Libyan leader deliberately unleashed the floodgates of African immigrants desperate to reach Europe, as punishment for what he saw as Italy’s betrayal and its participation in the Nato-led air campaign.

He largely succeeded in his objective — nearly 50,000 migrants have arrived on Lampedusa since the beginning of the year, putting a huge strain on the tiny island’s resources.

They came from Libya but also Tunisia, after that country’s regime was toppled in a popular revolt which marked the start of the Arab Spring.

Hundreds were forced to live in a makeshift shanty camp, sleeping in the scrub under sheets of plastic stretched over driftwood, on what islanders dubbed “the hill of shame”.

“Italy has proof of orders given by Col Gaddafi to turn Lampedusa into hell,” said Franco Frattini, the foreign minister.

“There is proof Gaddafi gave the order to send thousands of desperate people on boats, in order to throw the island into chaos,” he said.

“We have terrible messages (in our possession) and they will be made public soon,” Mr Frattini said in an interview with Avvenire, a Catholic newspaper.

Hafez Gaddour, Libya’s ambassador in Italy, who defected from the regime in February, told Rai radio that Gaddafi controlled illegal immigration “in person, saying that he wanted to turn Lampedusa black with Africans,” to punish Italy for its role in the Nato campaign. The migrants would act as “human bombs”, he said.

The “weaponization” of sub-Saharan refugees by Col. Qaddafi was public knowledge long before the Arab Spring began. As reported in this space on several occasions, the Colonel extorted more money from the EU by threatening to open the immigration floodgates.

The Telegraph touches briefly on this history of Libyan extortion:

African refugees and economic migrants have for years tried to reach Lampedusa by sea in search of a new life in Europe.

The flow was blocked after Italy signed an accord with Libya providing for joint patrols in the Mediterranean.

That agreement collapsed when the Libyan revolt broke out earlier this year and relations soured between Col Gaddafi and Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, who had previously had a close rapport.

There had long been suspicions — reported by The Daily Telegraph in April — that the Gaddafi regime was encouraging refugees to flee to Lampedusa as revenge for Italy’s support for military action.

The following day the Italian government upped the ante by proposing to charge Col. Gadafi with crimes against humanity for his use of illegal immigrants as weapons:

Frattini: Use of Migrants a Crime Against Humanity

(ANSAmed) — Rome, August 26 — The despatching of immigrants, headed for the coasts of Lampedusa, many of whom died in the Sicily Channel, could be held against Colonel Gaddafi as “an accusation he has to face. In my opinion, we are close to a new crime against humanity”. Italy’s Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, has been speaking in Bertinoro (Forli’-Cesena) today.

Gaddafi’s idea of transforming Lampedusa into a kind of ‘hell’, Mr Frattini noted, “there is proof of this, there is evidence gathered by the TNC, which I have spoken to Prime Minister Jibril about. He will make them public”.

According to Mr Frattini, “it was Gaddafi himself who repeatedly threatened to send an invasion of refugees as a weapon of vengeance against Europe and not just against Italy.

Unfortunately he did it, unfortunately thousands of refugees died at sea” Mr Frattini argued.

For her part, Italy will assist Libya and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa to tackle the migrant emergency in North African countries where, as some estimates have it, one and a half million people are attempting to reach Europe, Mr Frattini said in a radio interview.

“The recipe is to aid immigrants of sub-Saharan Africa in their areas of origin, to bring development to their countries of origin and to help a country like Libya, which is not a country of origin for immigration, but is a country of transit, to tackle this phenomenon”.

“We have already done this with Tunisia, when in February an enormous flux of people were escaping the Tunisian revolution, and Italy quickly sent its intervention to the temporary camp, even evacuating hundreds of people to their countries of origin to help them in the places they were born. The recipe is not to create great encampments here in Italy, where there are not enough jobs to go round, there is not possibility of welcoming them”.

Note: Mr Frattini is now using the revised, higher figure for the total number of immigrants, as recommended by this blog a couple of weeks ago:

“Up to now we have managed the 50,000 people who have arrived since January. We have done this with humanity, distinguishing between those who had a right to refugee status, who will remain, and those who were illegal economic migrants, who we accompanied to Tunisia, helping Tunisia to find a job for them.

But the management of migration is a European issue, not a matter for Lampedusa, for Sicily or for Italy”. [emphasis added]

Finally, a slightly different account from ANSA:

Italy: Gaddafi Used Refugees as ‘Human Bombs’

Strongman wanted ‘inferno’ on Lampedusa, says Frattini

(ANSA) — Rome, August 26 — Besieged Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi diverted massive amounts of migrants to Italy as an attempted reprisal for Italy’s involvement in NATO-led air strikes in Libya, Italian Foreign Minister and the Libyan ambassador to Italy said on Friday.

“I confirm that Gaddafi himself organized this flow of illegal migration,” said Abdulhafed Gaddur on Italian radio. “He was the one who gave the orders”.

Since the start of the year, some 50,000 migrants and refugees from North Africa, first from Tunisia and then from Libya, have arrived on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, which quickly overburdened local facilities.

A deal with Gaddafi to turn migrants back before they neared Italian waters had limited the flow of migrants until the Libyan uprising earlier this year brought down strict border controls, and Italy’s involvement in a NATO intervention soured a once friendly relationship between Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and Gaddafi.

“[Gaddafi] said he wanted to turn Lampedusa black,” said Gaddur, referring to the fact that many of the exiles were migrants to Libya from Sub-Saharan Africa. Gaddafi said he wanted to use them as “human bombs,” Gaddur added.

Gaddur said he suspected that one thousand people died in their attempts to reach Italian shores.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said that further evidence of Gaddafi’s orders would soon be made public.

As the Gaddafi regime nears its end, Frattini responded to suspicions that Italy and France were more interested in Libya’s resources than the best interests of the country itself, which is a former Italian colony.

“There’s no race to see who gets there first,” said Frattini on Italian radio.

“We’re doing what we’ve always done: confirming the friendship between the Italian people and the Libyan people,” he added.

The foreign minister also said that Italy’s military role in Libya will continue even after Gaddafi is found, “as long as the circumstances require,” highlighting that the transitional government will have the final say.

He also underlined Italy’s “decades-long” ties with Libya, including mutual political and economic interests, which he said will continue now that the transitional council has promised to honor trade agreements with Italy.

Once Gaddafi’s closest European ally, Italy has investments in Libya stretching from multibillion-euro defense and construction contracts to oilfields that supply the Italian oil giant Eni, representatives of which have been working with Libyan insurgents in Benghazi to reactivate oil installations shut down by the military conflict.

When NATO began its air war against Libya a few months ago, Col. Ghaddafi was offered safe passage out of Libya to the retirement home of his choice, in one of the usual places exiled dictators go, such as Uganda. But the Colonel remained defiant. He refused to go, and said he would fight to the bitter end.

Well, the bitter end is here. Now he’s being set up as the fall guy, and it looks like his only remaining choice is between a war crimes tribunal in the Hague and a JDAM.



Hat tips: C. Cantoni, Insubria, and Steen.

For previous posts about the Mediterranean refugee crisis, see The Camp of the Saints Archive.

Trouble at Sea

John Constable: The Sea near Brighton

Summer Fundraiser, Day Six

Well, as you can see, we made it through the ravages of Hurricane Irene relatively unscathed. The parapets at Schloss Bodissey were not dilapidated of even a single stone.

Tip jarThe electricity only flickered once, for less than a second, when a particularly strong gust of wind hit. We had just over an inch of rain. The satellite internet connection went out a few times during heavy showers, but never for long.

Of course, we haven’t tried to go out yet, so it’s still possible that a tree is lying across the driveway. But we’ll deal with that when we come to it.

Dymphna is still under the weather, which is why she has been unable to contribute another fundraising post to our week of blegging, and also why she is way behind in her thank-you notes. For those who have yet to receive one: as the flashing signs on Interstate 64 in Hampton said this morning, “Expect Delays”.

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Points further east in the Old Dominion and North Carolina fared much worse than we did. I wouldn’t want to have been one of the hardy souls who declined to heed the evacuation order and stayed in Beaufort, Ocracoke, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, or Sands End.



Parts of Tidewater received up to sixteen inches of rain. Williamsburg and Newport News must have been a single continuous lake by late this afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people are without power.

Big trouble went back out to sea when Hurricane Irene crossed back into the Atlantic at Kill Devil Hills and then headed across towards the Eastern Shore, just outside the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The last time I checked the map, it was making its way alongside the Chincoteague end of Assateague Island, not far offshore. I dread to think of how much beach will be left at the National Seashore swimming area after this one.

New Jersey and New York are getting walloped by the rain right now, and the eye of the storm will be upon them before long. Tomorrow morning in Manhattan will be pretty sodden.

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Many thanks to all the brave people who sent their contributions out into the gale today. The following locations were represented:

Stateside: California, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, and Virginia

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the UK

Your kindness — and the cheerful notes that accompanied most of your gifts — are greatly appreciated.



The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the donate button. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/27/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/27/2011Now that the regime of Muamar Ghedafi has collapsed, new reports from Tripoli indicate that the former dictator’s adopted daughter, Hana Gaddafi, is still alive. Ms. Qaddafi was said to have been killed as an infant during the bombing of Tripoli by the U.S. Air Force in 1986, and has been commemorated as a martyr ever since. But new evidence has appeared detailing the young woman’s employment and recent places of residence in Tripoli, supporting the assertion that her death was a fiction created for propaganda purposes.

In other news, Palestinian members will soon be granted the status of “partners for democracy” in the Council of Europe, and will be seated in the COE parliament.

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

Thanks to An EDL buck, C. Cantoni, Diana West, Insubria, JP, KGS, Kitman, Nilk, Rembrandt, Steen, 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.

Losing Our Senses

Oslo riots


Those of us who follow the progress of Islamization on both sides of the Atlantic have observed in recent months the remarkable successes realized by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in achieving its agenda. By focusing on “Islamophobia”, the OIC has skillfully pushed all the available guilt buttons on government officials, academics, and the media. The fear of being seen as racist or intolerant trumps everything else. Getting with the OIC program is the path of least resistance — follow it, and you are guaranteed to feel good about yourself. Even better, you are less likely to be sued by CAIR.

The latest strategy launched by the Obama administration is to pull back from effective counter-terrorism intelligence in local law enforcement, and concentrate on “community policing” instead. In Muslim communities, this means engaging the help of local Muslim leaders in fighting “violent extremism”, rather than doing the necessary undercover work to discover dangerous networks using traditional intelligence models.

“Hello there, Mr. Fox! Would you kindly help us find the violent extremist in the henhouse?”

The concept of “violent extremism” is the height of absurdity. Extreme what? Extreme heavy metal music, maybe? Extreme Shintoism? How about extreme vegetarianism?

Without a substantive to modify, the adjective “extreme” is worse than incoherent — it is without linguistic or semantic meaning. This is the depth to which our official policy-making has sunk.

In an article entitled “Losing Malmö”, published in today’s NRO, Andrew C. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and author of The Grand Jihad, takes a look at these and other aspects of the fight against Islamic terrorism in Europe and the United States. Some excerpts are below:

Do you remember the jihadist terror campaign that ravaged Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city? Do you recall the bombings, the suicide-hijackings, and the random assassinations that finally coerced the city to surrender to Islamization?

No? Funny, I don’t remember them either. Yet there is no question that Malmö has surrendered. Large enclaves of the city, like similar enclaves throughout Western Europe, have earned the dread label “no-go zone.” They are unsafe for non-Muslims, particularly women who do not conform to Islamist conventions of dress and social interaction. They are especially perilous for police, firefighters, and emergency-medical technicians.

Why would a community discourage the so-called first-responders? After all, the top priority of law-enforcement officers is to assist crime victims. In an Islamic enclave, a high percentage of these will be Muslims. And obviously, the fire department and the ambulances are dispatched to save lives — here, Muslim lives. Yet, the community is hostile. The police and other emergency personnel are viewed as agents of the non-Muslim state. Their presumptuousness in entering the Islamic enclave and acting under the color of Swedish law is taken as an affront to Islamic sovereignty.

[…]

There is a simple reason why this has happened to Malmö, and why it is happening in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, etc. The European Union forced on its member states the same approach to their swelling Muslim populations that the Obama administration is now trying to strong-arm American cities and states into adopting. It is a suicide theory, holding that the only threat to our security is “violent extremism.”

Violent extremism, the theory goes, is wanton and irrational. Therefore, it is mere coincidence that today’s violent extremists are almost uniformly Muslims. Indeed, the big thinkers settled on the antiseptic term “violent extremism” specifically to avoid the word “terrorism,” which, owing to the inconvenience that Islamic scripture adjures Muslims to “strike terror into the hearts” of their perceived enemies, would give violent extremism an Islamic connotation that is to be studiously avoided, no matter how accurate it may be.

With violent extremism as their guide, policymakers instruct security agencies that there is no need to scrutinize any strain of Islamic ideology for the purpose of divining what Islamists want. In fact, the theory continues, because violence is wanton, while Islam is peaceful, violence must perforce be anti-Islamic, and thus Islamists must be just as offended by it as anyone else. Consequently, since by some strange quirk of fate the violent extremists seem to be coming out of the Islamic community, the best strategy is to befriend Islamist leaders and consult them about how we can conduct investigations without causing offense.

[…]

If we cared to look for the root cause of what’s happening in Europe — happening primarily without “violent extremism” — the answer is very simple: Islamist leaders have adopted a strategy of voluntary apartheid in their quest to Islamize the West.

The strategy has been championed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Its chief jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, urges Muslims to relocate to Europe, Australia, and North America. There, they should live among other Muslims, conduct their affairs in accordance with sharia (the law of Islam), and pressure Western governments to accept the primacy of sharia in Muslim enclaves — enclaves that will grow and spread and connect. By convincing “Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith — ideologically, legislatively, and ethically,” Qaradawi reasons that Muslims would “traverse an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state.”

Equally adamant is the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the bloc of governments from the world’s Islamic countries. The OIC purports to speak as a sovereign on behalf of the Muslim ummah. In 2010, it released its now annual report on — what else? — Islamophobia. The report conjures an imaginary tidal wave of anti-Muslim bias while overlooking both the predominance of Muslims in global “violent extremism” and the West’s pandemic of official solicitude toward Islamic leaders. “Muslims should not be marginalized or attempted to be assimilated, but should be accommodated,” the report proclaimed. “Accommodation is the best strategy for integration.”

The best strategy for whom? Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, goes even farther, inveighing that “assimilation is a crime against humanity.” With progressives in charge and see-no-Islam in vogue, Erdogan remains the West’s favorite “moderate” Islamist, despite the fact that he rejects the term “moderate Islam” as an insult. “Islam is Islam,” he snaps, “and that’s it.” Meanwhile, he warns Germany’s leaders not to pressure their large immigrant population of Turkish Muslims to become German. The message to Muslims is clear: Integrate? Yes. Assimilate? Never.

[…]

The Obama administration has arrived at a counterterrorism policy it publicly calls “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” It has its roots in the Homeland Security Department’s “Countering Violent Extremism” working group.

In 2010, the working group issued its recommendations. The group “felt” it was essential to “delink” law enforcement’s “crime reduction efforts” from studies on “radicalization” in the Islamic community. Law enforcement needs to be more “sensitive,” the working group suggested, to damaging community “perceptions” that can arise from “enforcement actions and intelligence gathering.” Nothing is more important, the group argued, than developing strong relationships between police and communities, and those relationships can be wounded if people “perceive that they are viewed as incubators of violent extremism.” Instead, police should take their lead from “members of the community” who “should be invited to provide training to government personnel.”

And who was in that working group, offering advice that is now federal policy? Among others, it included top officials of such Islamist groups as the Islamic Association of North America (an organization shown to be complicit in the Muslim Brotherhood—led conspiracy to finance Hamas, proved by the Justice Department in a 2008 prosecution), Muslim academics, the president of the Muslim Bar Association of New York, and the president of the ultra-leftist Southern Poverty Law Center…

Read the rest at NRO.

“Democracy is Hypocrisy”

Cultural Enrichment News

Muslim immigrants to Scandinavia are treated well when they arrive in their new homes. Their hosts hope that Nordic generosity will be reciprocated when the time comes — as it inevitably must — that the immigrants become the majority in their adoptive countries. This sentiment was even stated publicly by Jens Orback, the Democracy Minister in a previous Swedish government, who said: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”

Unfortunately for Scandinavia, Muslims are notorious for biting the hand that feeds them. In any Western society where they become numerous enough, they eventually begin to agitate, complain, vandalize, attack, and sabotage the social and political mechanisms of their host society.

In this latest incident, culture-enrichers in Denmark sabotaged the election campaign of one of their own, a Social Democrat named Yildiz Akdogan. Our Danish correspondent TB sends a translated article about the incident, and includes this introductory note:

Here’s a little story from the new, enriched Denmark. It really looks like the Socialists are going to win the election. But now it seems that their newly-imported buddies are a little more than just easy votes. The Role Model Muslim Immigrant of the Social Democrats has had a little setback in her campaign.

And his translation from Ekstrabladet:

Election Posters exposed to religious vandalism

MP’s election posters in Tingbjerg defaced with racist stickers.

Yildiz Akdogan poster

The sticker says: “Lawmaking belongs to Allah. Democracy is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy go to hell.”

The text below the picture says: “Yildiz Akdogan, member of parliament for the Social Democrats since 2007, had her election posters in Copenhagen defaced.”

The IT spokesperson for the Social Democrats, Yildiz Akdogan, was on the street last night to put up election posters. But already on her way home, at half past two in the morning, she discovered that her election posters had been vandalized.

Large stickers with hateful quotes that condemn democracy had been placed over her face and name. The vandalism targeted only election posters for Yildiz Akdogan in Tingbjerg, Nørrebro and in her constituency in Brønshøj.

The chairman of the Social Democrats at City Hall, Jesper Christensen, has reported the vandalism to the police as an instance of politically motivated vandalism.

“I’m obviously very sad. It is hard work getting all these posters up. But in addition I am also very angry, because I think this is an attack against democracy,” Yildiz Akdogan says to Newspaq.

She now awaits the outcome of the police investigation, but will continue undeterred with her campaign.



For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

Under the Weather

Winslow Homer: The Gulf Stream

Summer Fundraiser, Day 5

It was supposed to be Dymphna’s turn to do the fundraiser post tonight. However, as she says, she is “under the weather.”

And so are we all here in Central Virginia, or at least we expect to be within about twelve hours or so. Hurricane Irene is scheduled to come ashore in a little while, and its belts of rain will be affecting us by the middle of Saturday.

According to the most recent projections, Irene will make landfall somewhere between Emerald Isle and Beaufort on the coast of North Carolina, most likely at Atlantic Beach or Morehead City. After that it will scurry up the coast, picking up speed as it passes just offshore of Virginia Beach, and then right along the coast of the Eastern Shore, raking Assateague Island, Ocean City, and the Delaware Dunes. After crossing New Jersey, it looks like it will miss Manhattan by a hair and nail Long Island.

Tip jarThe damage may not be as bad as was originally expected, however. The hurricane dropped to a Category Two, and will be Category One by the time it hits the beaches. Since it is coming in further east than Isabel did (September, 2003), I suspect that Schloss Bodissey will emerge relatively unscathed.

But just in case: be aware that we live in a very rural area, in the midst of a lot of things called “trees”, many of them hovering over the co-op power lines. They’re just waiting for the moment when ice or snow or wind or lightning gives them an excuse to come crashing down, depriving thousands of us hicks of our electricity supply. Irene is their main chance.



So, if the lights go out here tomorrow, you’ll know why. I’ll post a final notice before the UPS gives out, if I can. Isabel knocked out our power for three days, but I don’t think this one will be as bad.

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The following far-flung locations donated to our storm-wrack’d refuge on Friday:

Stateside: Arizona, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia

Near Abroad: Canada

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Many, many thanks to all of the generous people who contributed.

God willing and the Creek don’t rise, I’ll be reporting in again this time tomorrow. Watch this space.



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Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/26/2011

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/26/2011A suicide bomber in the Nigerian capital Abuja exploded his car at the main building of the UN compound, killing at least 18 people. The Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the blast.

Meanwhile, in Libya, rebel forces supported by NATO are attacking Moammar Gheddafi’s hometown Sirte, where the former dictator is believed to have holed up, along with Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber.

In other news, a consortium of the most wealthy citizens in France has petitioned the government to raise their taxes, in order to help pay off the country’s debts.

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

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, CSP, Diana West, JP, Kitman, Nilk, Rembrandt, 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.

“The Jews Are Paying You”

Paris Dipersico is a young Canadian author. Raised in a Muslim home, he wrote a memoir entitled Wake Up Call to give an account of his experiences and take a hard look at Islam.

For his temerity he was abducted and assaulted by two Muslims, who were certain that he must be in the pay of “the Jews” to write such blasphemies.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:


ESW: Europe is Changing

Last night our Austrian correspondent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was one of the podium speakers at a panel discussion organized under the auspices of Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party). The topic of discussion was “Europe is changing: Are there possibilities for a consensus with Islam(ism) or will there be a decline of our society and values?”

The other panelists on the podium were:

  • Prof. Dr. Jeroen Bons, Professor at the University of Utrecht
  • Dr. Ralf Stein, Jurist
  • Christian Höbart, MP and FPÖ youth leader
  • Prof. Dr. Herbert Eisenstein, Arabist and scholar of Islam at the University of Vienna; member of the FPÖ

A video of Elisabeth’s remarks is below the jump, followed by a transcript. As you will discover from her talk, the fact that she was convicted of “denigrating the religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” has not silenced Elisabeth’s voice, nor stopped her from speaking out in public on the dangers of Islamization in Austria.

Many thanks to Kitman for subtitling and uploading this video:





Transcript:

Tonight we are talking about a changing Europe

and I will keep short because I am convinced

that we have a lot to talk about

but I will now present my most important points

First of all I want to say that I completely agree

That Europe is changing

a change that I personally, in view of the future,

do not agree with.

Europe is changing, European society is changing

from a free society to one that is based on Sharia law.

You will ask how I come to this conclusion with the 500,000 Muslims

who have lived in Austria for more than 10 years

but it doesn’t need 500,000 Muslims

even 50,000 or 100,000 are sufficient

to mount the pressure that we are all feeling and seeing.

We live in a democracy with the principle of separation of church and state.

The teachings of Islam, however, do not recognize this separation

Quite on the contrary. And different to Christianity and Judaism.

This Islamic concept is called Din wa daula,

the unity of church and state,

of politics and religion in Islam.

Its teachings include a complete system for world, state, economy and society,

and this system is based on solely on the Quran and the Sunna,

the way of the prophet, which includes everything he ever said or did.

Sharia, for those of you who do not know this yet,

is the Islamic law,

and what is so insidious about this Islamic law is that it concerns not only Muslims,

because in that case I would have very few concerns about this Islamic law,

but that Sharia concerns Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

In this way any interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims are regulated and encoded.

And I will not submit to Sharia,

Because only the Austrian laws, and not Sharia, are relevant.

Islam is not religion that is private.

If it were, I would not be sitting here,

and I would have absolutely no problems with Islam

However, the problem that we have with Islam

is that its values are entering our society,

and not in the way of parliamentary discourse,

but with outside pressure.

I will describe this pressure in more detail during the second round.

I will give you examples,

and I hope to answer my critics with the help of these examples

who keep insisting that

there is no Islamization.

Islam as such excludes any tolerance and compromise

This is found in its teachings.

There is no tolerance, and Islam’s principle of tolerance

Is completely different from the one we know.

This means that essentially we have to learn a new language.

Tolerance in Islam is not the tolerance we know.

There is no religious and theoretical pluralism,

and this is contrary to our Western way of life.

Any questioning or criticism of Islam itself

is considered Islamophobia,

and, as you are aware from my situation and that of Susanne Winter,

is criminally prosecuted, not only in Austria.

We are all aware that this is also happening in the Netherlands with Geert Wilders.

We know that this has happened in Finland with a member of parliament,

Jussi Halla-aho,

and that this is the case in many countries, that criticizing Islam is demonized.

Many people are wishing … people who perhaps do not yet know

so much about Islam, would wish

for a sort of reformation in Islam.

Many people are calling for an Islamic Martin Luther.

and generally this would be a good idea, that one would say,

let’s take out those verses from the Quran

that today are no longer applicable.

That in this case not much will remain from the Quran is a different story,

but this is not my problem

I must disappoint you now unfortunately, because as of now there

definitely be no Islamic Martin Luther,

because of a concept called the “Gates of Ijtihad”.

I assume my colleague Mr. Eisenstein could tell you a lot about the “Gates of Ijtihad”,

Which have been closed since the 10th century.

You will ask what Ijtihad means;

I will explain this briefly,

and then you will understand that there will not be

an Islamic Martin Luther.

Ijtihad means including reasoning, i.e.

human deliberation, in answering

questions of Islamic jurisprudence by scholars.

This means that there are no new findings

and I am saying this in an unscientific way, and I ask for your correction is I am wrong,

I am not an Islamic scholar,

but since the Gates of Ijtihad are closed,

there are no new findings to be found,

and that scholars teach on the basis of what has already been found.

Can one say this in this unscholarly way?

Because these Gates of Ijtihad are closed, and have been since the 10th century,

As long as these gates are closed, there will be no reformation.

I deeply regret this. I really wish for it.

It is very important that you are aware of this concept.

Finally I will tell you about three important points

that I want to be taken care of.

What needs to be done?

The most important point regarding Austria

is the Law on Islam of 1912, which must finally be applied by politics and politicians.

We have a law, everybody refers to it,

Politicians, non-politicians,

but in my opinion, a law — again non-scientifically postulated —

is a toothless one if we do not apply it.

The Law on Islam is applied only when we finally know,

we sitting here tonight, the public authorities, politicians:

What are the teachings of Islam which are binding for Muslims

Are these teachings compatible with our laws?

This means: are they in line with our legal system?

Until this very day

the Austrian authorities, since 1912,

do not officially know the contents of Islam

This must change

This is also a call on the politicians

to finally become active.

What I would wish for in Europe

is for Islam-critics to no longer be defamed and vilified,

because if we no longer tolerate criticism,

then we are killing open discourse.

And this open discourse is crucial for democracy [to function]

If we have no open discourse, we can just pack up democracy.

We must be able to discuss the contents of a religion

If we refrain from that — I repeat myself here — there is no democracy.

And finally, let me return to the Gates of Ijtihad.

The Gates of Ijtihad must be reopened.

I cannot do that, neither can any of you, but Muslims must do that themselves.

Since I am not a Muslim, I have no right to do that.

I invite all Muslims to open the Gates of Ijtihad right now.

Thank you very much.



For previous posts on the “hate speech” prosecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, see Elisabeth’s Voice: The Archives.

CAIR Objects to 9-11 Worksheets in High School

From a CAIR email alert (which is also posted on the CAIR-Chicago website):

CAIR-Chicago Meets With School About Anti-Muslim Worksheets

CAIR-Chicago Staff Attorney Rabya Khan met with officials at a Chicago-area high school on Monday, August 15th, regarding a complaint CAIR-Chicago received by a parent alleging that the high school’s social studies class is distributing misleading worksheets on Islam. The worksheets in question, produced by a California based educational resource company, teaches students that the religion of Islam is oppressive towards women, inherently violent, and played an important role in harboring slavery.

One of the readings contains verses from the Quran which are quoted out-of-context wrongly giving the impression that women are considered inferior to men. A corresponding worksheet then asks: “The Qur’an stresses the equality of all believers. Yet many say its views about men and women definitely give men more power. How does the top passage here from the Qu’ran support this view?” The reading is accompanied by a photo of two women in burqa, a full-body covering worn by only a minority of Muslim women worldwide. The inauthentic translation, imagery, and presentation of information leads students to a biased conclusion about the status of men and women in Islam.

Another reading implies that slavery was an encouraged practice in Islam, and then the corresponding worksheet states “Slavery was common in Islam; however, it took several very different forms. […] Prepare a brief talk to the class on what you learn about these two forms of slavery. Title your talk, “Slavery’s Many Forms in the Islamic World.”“ Wrongly suggesting some sort of link between slavery and Islam. In reality, the Qu’ran strongly condemned slavery and offered enticing rewards to those who freed slaves. Prophet Muhammad himself freed numerous slaves and the situation for slaves greatly improved with the advent of Islam.

In the textbook “The Rise of the Modern Middle East”, lesson titles include “Islam and Islamic Radicalism”. The parent who brought these reading materials to CAIR-Chicago’s attention expressed concern that that over emphasis on the small number of radical Muslims in the world will reinforce stereotypes that link Islam and terrorism and that students will not receive a balanced understanding of Islam and Muslims.

Rabya Khan met with school officials to convey the importance of presenting balanced perspectives and not perpetuating stereotypes. CAIR-Chicago has requested that the school remove the worksheets, and not use them again or any similar worksheets. Rabya also provided a resource list of organizations that can conduct workshops on Islam, including CAIR-Chicago, and is compiling a list of educational resource companies with balanced materials on Islam and Muslims.

Hat tip: Nilk.

CAIR Objects to 9-11 Coloring Book

These are the notes from a CAIR video about the organization’s objections to a children’s coloring book that depicts the perpetrators of 9-11 as Muslim terrorists. The video itself, a news story from Michigan, is below the jump:

(WXYZ) – On the brink of the 10th anniversary of September 11th a new children’s ‘graphic coloring novel’ has emerged.

We want to know; is it appropriate for kids?

According to the publisher, the book entitled ‘We Shall Never Forget 9/11 — The Kids’ Book of Freedom’ is “designed to be a tool that parents can use to help teach children about the facts surrounding 9/11.”

The book opens on September 11, 2011 with a picture of Osama Bin Laden as he plots the US attacks. It ends nearly 10 years later with the raid of Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and his death.

Several pages show both American military and Muslims with guns. The final page of the story shows a bullet flying toward Bin Laden before his death.

Publishers say the book ‘demonstrates honesty, reverence, integrity and good character,’ with ‘a historic and educational perspective.’

7 Action News showed the coloring book to the Executive Director for the Council on American-Islamic relations. He calls the book disgusting because it portrays all Muslims as radicals when indeed American Muslims had nothing to do with 9-11 and they were victims as well as first responders that day.

“This publisher is doing a disservice to innocent young minds by showing this type of nonsense. In every single reference to Muslims has to do with radical, extremists, and depictions of people being terrorists,” said Dawud Walid.

Spokesperson for the publisher, Wayne Bell, released a statement to Action News about the use of Osama Bin Laden and said:

“Because they see the man, Osama Bin Laden, get shot in black and white, that provides closure for them.”



Hat tip: Nilk.