Off the deep end

So much is being written so quickly about a Norwegian whose name I don’t care to remember it is very difficult to keep up. But if you have time for only one piece, for the moment I’d recommend Spencer Ackerman’s.  I don’t like the title, so I won’t repeat it, but it does a good job of showing the parallels between extremist thoughts on both sides of the Western/Muslim divide.  And the accompanying video expounding the Norwegian’s appeal for a new crusade against multiculturalism and Islam is worth browsing. Also worth a mention, Blake Hounshell’s quick account of what the Norwegian killer was trying to accomplish.  And if you are a glutton for punishment, try Reidar Visser,  who has the virtue of commenting also on the Norwegian political context.

There will be a temptation to treat the Norwegian incident as a one-off, pretty much the way we’ve treated Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City attack.  Isn’t most terrorism today Islamic?  The answer is no, as demonstrated in Islam 101’s now aging post from January 2010 on terrorism in the U.S. and Europe.  In Europe, most terrorism is associated with separatists (Basque, Corsican and Irish principally).  In the U.S., it appears Latino, leftist and Jewish terrorist incidents were more numerous than Islamic ones, at least until 2005.

Nevertheless, Jennifer Rubin–having already made the mistake of suggesting that Al Qaeda was responsible for the Norwegian events–acknowledges that mistake and goes on to compound it:  

That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.

 

I can agree that “we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West,” but many of them come from nationalists, racists, and Islamophobes, something the American right is loath to acknowledge. It might cut altogether too close to the bone.

The happy fact is that a privileged elite is being dethroned from power in many countries by people who don’t think power, privilege or even citizenship should derive from the color of one’s skin, gender, sexuality, position on abortion rights or the vehemence of one’s devotion to Christianity.  There are losers in that process of democratization.  Some of them are going to go off the deep end.  We need to be far more attentive to the violent risks they pose than we have been so far.