Ten years ago, I was among those who called for a broader reckoning with the right-wing extremist and Islamophobic ideology behind the July 22 terror attacks. Another white Norwegian right-wing extremist also tried to attack a mosque in Bærum outside of Oslo in August 2019, but was stopped by worshippers. The idea of a direct attack on the Muslim community, which he had abandoned fearing it would generate public sympathy for Norwegian Muslims, would resonate with an Australian terrorist who shot 51 people attending prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019. While no war broke out, his terrorism certainly inspired others. In this, he looked up to the Bosnian Serb war criminals who committed genocide against the Bosniak Muslim population. The perpetrator’s ultimate goal had been to unleash a continent-wide civil war in Europe which would lead to the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. The perpetrator held his diplomat father’s social-democratic Labour Party responsible for the “breach” that had made it possible for Muslims to settle in Norway in the first place. The fact that it was actually the social-democratic Labour Party that engineered the 1975 parliamentary Immigration Stop policy, which amid white trade union panic over the arrival of Muslim labour migrants sought to halt “non-Western labour migration” to Norway, did not matter to him. And that political elites in power, from the EU bureaucrats in Brussels to Norwegian social democrats, had secretly been working hand-in-hand with Muslim countries in order to achieve this very objective. He came to believe that Norway’s small population of Muslims who had come to Norway in the 1960s and 1970s as labour migrants from countries like Pakistan, Turkey and Morocco, were actually an “Islamic fifth column” hellbent on turning Norway into an Islamic state. The conspiratorial “Eurabia” writings of Norwegian far-right blogger Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen (aka Fjordman) and his ideological predecessor, Swiss-Israeli doyenne of the “counter-jihadist” ideology Gisele Littmann (aka Bat Ye’or) had convinced the perpetrator that Norway and Europe as a whole could only be “saved” from civilisational decline if they were ethnically cleansed of Muslims by means of violence and terror. ![]() After a 10-year stint as a member of the populist right-wing Progress Party, he had self-radicalised in the online swamp of far-right, racist websites. The perpetrator, a déclassé son of a senior Norwegian social democrat diplomat who had left him in the hands of a single mother with psychological problems, bore particular resentment for this group. ![]() Those were politically motivated attacks on a particular group of Norwegians – namely Norwegian social democrats, and more specifically the Norwegian Labour Party, which was then in power, and its youth organisation, the AUF. The post-July 22 political rhetoric was dominated by a unifying message that those were attacks on all “Norwegians” and on “Norwegian democracy”, but this claim was not entirely true. Norwegian society has to confront the reality that led to the terror attack so this tragedy never repeats. ![]() ![]() Then, he proceeded to the small island of Utøya, some 60km from the capital, where he massacred 69 people, most of them teenagers attending the annual summer camp of the social-democratic Labour Party Youth (AUF), in a shooting spree that lasted well over an hour.Ī decade after the events of July 22, 2011, the question of a true reckoning with what happened on that day remains unsettled. On July 22, 2011, a white Norwegian right-wing extremist set off a bomb that killed eight people at Government Headquarters in Oslo. Last week, Norway marked 10 years since the darkest day in its recent history.
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