The New Quislings

How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam

Bruce Bawer

• Publisher: Broadside Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780062188694
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The New Quislings

I

On the morning of Friday, July 22, 2011, I was in a friend’s house in the United States chatting on Skype with my partner in Norway. “Oh my God,” he suddenly said. “There’s been an explosion in Oslo.”

He had a newspaper website open. I went at once to the same site and saw a giant headline and a horrific picture. I immediately opened the website of Norwegian state television, NRK, and began to watch its live coverage online.

The images of devastation were staggering. A government building, one of the tallest structures in Oslo, had sustained major damage, and the streets around it were filled with debris. There were reports of casualties, though the numbers were, as yet, unknown. The explosion had been so powerful that windows had been blown out of stores and offices blocks away.

I was stunned. The government building that had been damaged was right down the street from where I had, until recently, lived. I had passed it almost every day for years, either on foot or on a bus. It was numbing to see Oslo, my longtime home, suffering a fate so similar to that which my native city, New York, had suffered in 2001.

The first thing I did was to contact my friends in Oslo, to ensure they were all okay. They were, although a couple of them had been very close to the explosion when it took place, and several of them had felt the power of the blast, even from some distance away.

Then I began to look at every Norwegian news website I could think of, and watched NRK, Norwegian TV2, CNN, and Al Jazeera online. (I didn’t have a TV at hand.) Within an hour, it was confirmed that the explosion had been the result of a bombing. Initial reports said that it bore all the earmarks of a jihadist attack. Nobody publicly disputed this conclusion.

Then, suddenly, came reports of another event. Shots had been fired a half hour or so west of Oslo, on an island called Utøya, where the annual summer camp for Workers Youth League—the Labor Party youth organization—was under way. The first details were sketchy. Young campers on the island, apparently, were telephoning their parents and begging them frantically to call the police. A gunman, they said, was shooting their friends down in cold blood. When he had first come ashore, wielding a huge gun, he had pretended to be a cop, come to safeguard them in the wake of the explosion in Oslo. Then he had started firing at unarmed teenagers. According to an article by Åsne Seierstad published weeks later in Newsweek, he “shout[ed] ‘Hurray!’ ‘Bull’s-eye!’ or ‘Got you!’ as he slew his victims.” Kids were running, hiding in the woods, hysterical, in shock. There was nobody there with a gun to protect them, and no easy means of getting off the island. One minute they had been living in a pastoral idyll: the next minute they had been plunged into a nightmare. And they had no idea why it was happening.

Since I had lived in Norway for many years and had written a great deal about Islam, my inbox soon began to fill with emails from editors asking me to write about this atrocity. I agreed to submit pieces both to the Pajamas Media (now PJMedia) website and to the Wall Street Journal opinion page. I began working on the Pajamas piece while listening to the Norwegian news and crying incessantly.

I had already finished a draft when the news came that the attacks were not, after all, the work of jihadists. Instead, the perpetrator was an ethnic Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed that his actions were motivated by anti-jihadist sentiment.

In the piece I ended up sending to Pajamas Media I noted that one Norwegian newspaper had observed that the July 22 death toll was higher than at Columbine and Virginia Tech combined. “The Norwegian media,” I pointed out,

have always reported on mass murders by lone gunmen in the U.S. as if they were things that could never happen in Norway: rather, they were symptoms of a sick society that Norwegians could never possibly understand. In Norway, they use the term “amerikanske tilstander”—American conditions. It never means anything good. Yesterday’s nightmare, from a Norwegian perspective, was the most American of American conditions.

I also wrote that while virtually everybody had assumed at first that the attacks in Oslo were the work of jihadists, “it would’ve been just plain dumb for Islamists to make an enemy of Norway,” given that the Norwegian government and cultural elite had been making friendly gestures for years to even the most extreme elements of Islam: they’d treated their Jews shabbily, coddled resident terrorist Mullah Krekar, squelched domestic criticism of Islam, dropped Muslim riots down the memory hole, and openly supported terrorist groups. I concluded the piece as follows:

. . . it is deeply depressing to see this evil, twisted creature become the face of Islam criticism in Norway. Norwegian television journalists who in the first hours of the crisis were palpably uncomfortable about the prospect of having to talk about Islamic terrorism are now eagerly discussing the dangers of “Islamophobia” and “conservative ideology” and are drawing connections between the madness and fanaticism of Breivik and the platform of the Progress Party. Yesterday’s events, then, represent a double tragedy for Norway. Not only has it lost almost one hundred people, including dozens of young people, in a senseless rampage of violence. But I fear that legitimate criticism of Islam, which remains a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West, has been profoundly discredited, in the eyes of many Norwegians, by association with this murderous lunatic.

As the day wore on, it quickly emerged that Breivik had been an avid reader of a website called document.no, where he had posted a number of comments.

There are a couple of major websites that regularly address Norway’s immigration and integration policy and its attendant problems. One of them is rights.no, the site of Human Rights Service, a small Oslo-based think tank for which I have worked on and off for several years as a writer, editor, translator, and consultant. Their focus is on the rights of women and girls in Norway and Europe, especially in Muslim communities, and their mission is to develop proposals for new laws and government programs. HRS’s information director, Hege Storhaug, has appeared countless times on Norwegian TV debate programs, and has become a very familiar—and polarizing—figure; while many ordinary citizens have relished her bluntness about the failures of Norwegian immigration and integration policies, members of the cultural elite have tended to balk at her blithe violation of long-standing boundaries as to what can and cannot be said. For years, multiculturalists who frown on any mention of Muslim community problems have savaged HRS as racist and “Islamophobic” and have battled to remove its government funding. HRS’s website features regular news commentaries in Norwegian and English by Hege and managing director Rita Karlsen; it has also published original articles about Islam, immigration, and integration by contributors from around the world, such as Robert Redeker in France and Henryk Broder in Germany.

Another website that addresses immigration and related issues is document.no, edited by my friend Hans Rustad. Unlike HRS’s website, document.no is not connected to any larger organization, and its focus is not on the rights of Muslim women and girls (although this is certainly among its concerns) but on the threat that unreconstructed Islam and failed immigration and integration policies pose to the West. Like rights.no, it is a serious, intelligent, and respectable site that respects the facts and has never dealt in vulgar Muslim-bashing. Unlike HRS’s website, it allows readers to post comments on its articles.

When I looked at document.no, I found that Hans, in reaction to the atrocities, had already compiled all of the comments Breivik had ever posted on the site, forming a useful package for the edification of journalists and anyone else who was interested. The first thing I did was to search Breivik’s comments, which had been posted between 2007 and 2009, for my name. It came up three times.

On September 14, 2009, apropos of the need to form an alliance between anti-jihadists and cultural conservatives, Breivik had written: “Bawer is probably not the right person to work as a bridge-builder. He is a liberal anti-jihadist and not a cultural conservative in many areas. I have my suspicions that he is TOO paranoid (I am thinking of his homosexual orientation). It can seem that he fears that ‘cultural conservatives’ will become a threat to homosexuals in the future. He refuses therefore to take the opportunity to influence this in a positive direction. This seems entirely irrational.”

On October 31, 2009, Breivik wrote that several things needed to be done in the next twenty years to prevent the Islamization of Norway, among them: “Initiate a collaboration with the conservative forces in the Norwegian church. I know that the libertarian forces in the European anti-jihad movement (Bruce Bawer among others, and some other libertarians) will have a problem with this, but conservative forces in the church are in fact one of our best allies. Our main opponents must not be jihadists but the jihadists’ facilitators—namely the multiculturalists.” And on November 6, 2009, he wrote: “It is tragicomic that an important NGO like Human-Etisk Forbund [the Norwegian Humanist Association] has been taken over by a cultural Marxist when it should be run by a liberal anti-jihadist like Bruce Bawer.”

To discover that this murderer knew who I was and had read my work filled me with a feeling that is hard to describe. As a professional writer for almost three decades, I have met or received communications from hundreds if not thousands of my readers, and while most of them have been very nice, there has always been a sprinkling of nuts. When you’re a writer you never know who may be reading you. You get used to the idea. But this was new territory for me. I was chilled—sickened.

It was interesting to note that, while Breivik preferred me to a “cultural Marxist,” he still found me too liberal for his tastes.

As many people on the left don’t realize, there is a very broad range of views among the critics of Islam.

Still, until Breivik came along, it had all been about debate. The violence had all been on the side of the jihadists—the major right-wing extremists of our time—and guilt had stained their apologists on the left. Now the tables were turned. Someone who claimed to be, broadly speaking, on my side—the anti-jihadist side—had committed a massive atrocity.

Then it emerged that Breivik had written a 1,500-page manifesto which he had e-mailed to hundreds of recipients only moments before setting out on his murder spree. It was online. I found it easily. At the outset, Breivik summed up his argument:

. . . the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural self-confidence (nationalism). Most people are still terrified of nationalistic political doctrines thinking that if we ever embrace these principles again, new “Hitler’s” will suddenly pop up and initiate global Armageddon. . . . Needless to say; the growing numbers of nationalists in W. Europe are systematically being ridiculed, silenced and persecuted by the current cultural Marxist/multiculturalist political establishments. This has been a continuous ongoing process which started in 1945. This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic colonization is increasing annually. This book presents the only solutions to our current problems.

The book made for exceedingly creepy reading. Well, not the first half—the first half was, in large part, a surprisingly sane-sounding take on modern society and politics. Had the killer actually written this? If so, I thought after skimming through it, he was a very well-read and thoughtful mass murderer indeed. Later, a closer perusal revealed that much of the book consisted of texts that Breivik had borrowed from various writers. Indeed, in a passage I had missed on my first read-through, Breivik acknowledged that he had “written approximately half of the compendium myself” and that the rest was “a compilation of works from several courageous individuals throughout the world.” Many of these borrowed works were credited to their authors; others were not.

The book’s first few pages, for example, which linked political correctness to “cultural Marxism,” turned out to be the text of a 2004 Free Congress Foundation pamphlet titled Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology, by William Lind. This led off an introductory section in which Breivik went on to discuss the domination of Western Europe by political correctness; trace the development of PC to the rise of critical theory and the Frankfurt School of philosophers (each of whom he profiled at some length); and describe the assault on Western values by Jacques Derrida and radical feminism.

Then came Book One, about “our falsified history.” He covered the current whitewashing of the history of Islam, served up some of the basics of Islam (sharia law, jihad, al-taqiyya, Koranic abrogation, dhimmitude), and quoted passages about Islamic history and theology from Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Serge Trifkovic, and Bat Ye’or. He recounted the history of the Hindu Kush; the Crusades; the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide (here he included an article by Andrew G. Bostom); the fall of Christian Lebanon; the defeat of the “first Islamic wave” by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732 (here he quoted dozens of historians); and the defeat of the “second Islamic wave” at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. He cut-and-pasted an article by Baron Bodissey about Crusader heroes and one by the pseudonymous Norwegian essayist “Fjordman” on Western versus Islamic science; wrote about Bosnian history (quoting at length from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Time-Life book about the Balkans, and other sources); and reprinted a speech by Bat Ye’or about Yugoslavia and an article by Daniel Pipes titled “Palestine for the Syrians?”

In Book Two, about “Europe’s current problems,” Breivik moved from history to the present day. He wrote about jihad in today’s Muslim and Western world. The section included many complete essays by “Fjordman” about such topics as media bias, the relative birthrates of native Europeans and Muslims, the role of the European Union, the United Nations, and feminism in aiding the Islamization of the West, the unreliability of moderate Muslims, Europe’s demographic crisis, the capitulation of Europe to sharia law, and Norway’s anti-discrimination act.

Which brought us to the halfway point of the manifesto—and to Book Three, “A Declaration of Pre-Emptive War.” It was thoroughly, and stunningly, different from everything that had preceded it. It was, quite explicitly, the work of a madman. There was no smooth transition, either. One minute Breivik was writing seriously—or cobbling together the work of other people who had written seriously—about various strains of modern Western thought and their consequences for liberal democracy and individual freedom.

The next minute he was talking about killing people.

Yes, that was what the second half was about. Killing people. Where to get weapons and ammo. Where to acquire body armor. How to commit acts of terrorism. How many people to kill.

Breivik claimed to be part of a movement—a revival of the medieval Knights Templar—that had re-formed that band of brothers with the goal of saving Europe from its fate. And how would they save it? By killing—killing on a massive scale. And not by killing Muslims, but by killing the members of Norway’s left-wing political class and, even more monstrously, their children. For his chief enemy was not Muslims themselves—it was the socialist politicians whose multiculturalism had shaped the immigration and integration policies of modern Norway (and of modern Western Europe as a whole) and their comrades-in-arms, the left-wing academics, journalists, authors, and others who had abetted what he saw as their treason.

This second half of his manifesto, then, was addressed in particular to his fellow Knights, with an eye to preparing them to commit violence against the multiculturalist enemy....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• The New Quislings
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher