LENIN'S TOMB: That Viking Jihad, again

Saturday, July 23, 2011

That Viking Jihad, again posted by Richard Seymour

So, it turns out that the Norwegian terror suspect who murdered an estimated 91 people, most of whom were kids, was in contact with the EDL, whom he admired and wished to emulate:

The man arrested for yesterday’s murderous attacks in Norway admires Britain’s far right English Defence League and claimed to have held discussions with it.

More than 80 people attending a Labour Youth gathering were shot dead near the Norwegian capital Oslo when a man dressed in a police uniform opened fire.
A car bomb killed seven people earlier the same day outside Norway’s main government building in central Oslo.
Members of the ruling Labour Party were the targets in both cases. The killings have sent shockwaves around the world.
The media and “security experts” rushed to blame Islamic terrorists. But Norwegian police have arrested a Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik.
Breivik posted messages on a Norwegian website expressing his admiration for the English Defence League.
Among rants about Islam and Communism is the following (roughly translated from Norwegian):
“I have on some occasions discussed with SIOE [Stop Islamification Of Europe] and EDL and recommended them to use conscious strategies.
The tactics of the EDL is now out to "entice" an overreaction from Jihad Youth / Extreme-Marxists something they have succeeded several times already. Over The reaction has been repeatedly shown on the news which has booster EDLs ranks high.
This has also benefited BNP. WinWin for both.
But I must say I am very impressed with how quickly they have grown but this has to do with smart tactical choice by management.
EDL is an example and a Norwegian version is the only way to prevent Flash / SOS to harass Norwegian cultural conservatives from other fronts. Creating a Norwegian EDL should be No. 3 on the agenda after we have started up a cultural conservative newspaper with national distribution.
The agenda of the Norwegian cultural conservative movement over the next 5 years are therefore:
1 Newspaper with national distribution
2 Working for the control of several NGOs
3 Norwegian EDL”

There has been a lengthy queue of ostensible experts filing into broadcasting suites and newsrooms - and no doubt policy chambers and intelligence briefing rooms as well - who have maintained until the last hour that this was definitely jihadism. The basis for this was feeble from the beginning. They said it must be the cartoons controversy, or Afghanistan (though Norway is a secondary player in that crusade). They said it must be Mullah Krekar, the small-time Kurdish Islamist, taking revenge for actions taken against him by the Norwegian state. (Ironically, even the meshuggeneh Harry's Place has done better on average than most of the papers.) I don't mind telling you that I think this was wish fulfilment. That is, I think that these pundits and their employers largely would have liked nothing better than for it to be an Islamist attack, because then they have a set of responses that they can energetically put into motion, and a pre-determined narrative around which they can cohere those responses. Far right racists murdering young leftists, on the other hand, is not a subject on which they can rapidly form plausible responses.

Now, readers of this blog will be aware that there have been many, many foiled terror plots by far right activists in the UK alone. This has failed to receive the sort of attention that similar attempts by Islamists would generate. With the spread of fascism across Europe, these people are beginning to receive a degree of ideological and organisational sustenance that they might previously have lacked. It's no good looking to security measures or intelligence-led operations to deal with this problem. It is a political problem, and it has to be combatted politically through the assembly of anti-fascist coalitions capable of frustrating and isolating the organisational bases of fascism in the continent. This is a task that becomes all the more urgent in the high stakes battles over austerity.

Labels: anti-fascism, austerity, fascism, islamism, islamophobia, racism, terror