Norway attacks shine light on right-wing extremism in Europe
Incidents serve as wake-up call for security services that may have underestimated threat of domestic radicals.
By NICHOLAS KULISH
The New York Times
BERLIN — The attacks in Oslo on Friday have riveted new attention on right-wing extremists not just in Norway but across Europe, where opposition to Muslim immigrants, globalization, the power of the European Union and the drive toward multiculturalism has proven a potent political force and, in a few cases, a spur to violence.
The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.
Story: Norway police free detainees, no link to attacks
“I’m not surprised when things like the bombing in Norway happen, because you will always find people who feel more radical means are necessary,” said Joerg Forbrig, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who has studied far-right issues in Europe. “It literally is something that can happen in a number of places and there are broader problems behind it.”
Last November a Swedish man was arrested in the southern city of Malmö in connection with more than a dozen unsolved shootings of immigrants, including one fatality. The shootings, nine of which took place between June and October 2010, appeared to be the work of an isolated individual. More broadly in Sweden, though, the far-right Sweden Democrats experienced new success at the polls. The party entered Parliament for the first time after winning 5.7 percent of the vote in the general election last September.
The bombing and shootings in Oslo also have served as a wake-up call for security services in Europe and the United States that in recent years have become so focused on Islamic terrorists that they may have underestimated the threat of domestic radicals, including those upset by what they see as the influence of Islam.
Video: Norway in mourning, searching for answers (on this page)
In the United States the deadly attacks have reawakened memories of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, where a right-wing extremist, Timothy J. McVeigh, used a fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal government building, killing 168 people. That deadly act had long since been overshadowed by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
According to Mr. Forbrig, isolated right-wing groups in Europe would rise up and then quickly disappear from the ’60s into the ’90s. But in recent years far-right statements have appeared to lose much of their post-World War II taboo even among some prominent political parties.
A combination of increased migration from abroad and largely unrestricted movement of people within an enlarged European Union, such as the persecuted Roma minority, helped lay the groundwork for a nationalist, at times starkly chauvinist, revival.
Groups are gaining traction from Hungary to Italy, but it is particularly apparent in northern European countries that long have had liberal immigration policies. The rapid arrival of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants, many of them Muslims, led to a significant backlash in places like Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party has 25 out of 179 seats in Parliament, and the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom won 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 general election.
Mr. Wilders famously compared the Koran, the holy book of Islam, to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Both the Danish and Dutch right-wing parties are backing precarious minority governments while not directly participating by having ministers, and inching toward mainstream acceptance in the process.
End of multiculturalism?
Friday’s attacks were swiftly condemned by leaders from across the political spectrum in Europe. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly sharp in speaking out against what she called an “appalling crime.” The sort of hatred that could fuel such an action, she said, went against “freedom, respect and the belief in peaceful coexistence.”
Story: Cops: Norway gunman claims he acted alone
Yet some of the primary motivations cited by the suspect in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, are now mainstream issues. Mrs. Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain all recently declared an end to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel told fellow Christian Democrats last October, though stressing that immigrants were welcome in Germany.
Perhaps the most surprising about-turn came in Britain, a country that has long considered itself among the most immigrant-friendly in Europe until a series of coordinated bomb attacks in London six years ago. In one of his most noticed speeches, Mr. Cameron told the Munich security conference in February that the country’s decades-old policy of multiculturalism had encouraged “segregated communities” where Islamic extremism can thrive.
France, a fiercely secularist state where all religion is banned from the public sphere, was long isolated and berated for its staunch opposition to the laissez-faire of multiculturalism. Girls who show up in public schools there with the Muslim headscarf are suspended, as are teachers or any other employees in the public sector.
If Mr. Sarkozy appeared to soften his understanding of official secularism, or “laïcité” earlier in his political career, even toying with the idea of affirmative action, he has recently scrambled to backtrack. He held a nationwide debate on “national identity” last year and earlier this year banned Muslim full-face veils like niqab, as well as the burqa.
That hasn’t stopped the far-right National Front, now led by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of its founder, to surge in opinion polls, with some surveys predicting that she might make it into next year’s presidential runoff. She compared Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation, and decries the European Union and the euro.
Earlier this month the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported that neo-Nazis were attacking the offices of the far-left Left Party with increasing frequency. In the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, statistics showed that there were 30 such attacks in the first half of 2011 compared to 44 attacks in all of 2010.
Story: Norway survivor: 'I heard people begging for their lives'
Watchful eye on extremists
Due to its Nazi past, Germany keeps a watchful eye on right-wing extremists, and the parties of the far right have a hard time gaining traction, with no representatives in Parliament. In Finland, the True Finns, a populist nationalist party founded in 1995, became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19 percent of the vote in April. And Norway’s Progress Party, a right-wing populist party, is the second largest in the country, winning 23 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary election in September 2009.
“The Norwegian right-wing groups have always been disorganized, haven’t had charismatic leaders or the kind of well-organized groups with financial support that you see in Sweden,” said Kari Helene Partapuoli, director of the Norwegian Center against Racism. “But in the last two or three years our organization and other antifascist networks have warned of an increased temperature of debate and that violent groups had been established.”
But neither does Norway exist in a vacuum. Its right-wing scene is connected to the rest of Europe through the Internet forums where hate speech proliferates and through right-wing demonstrations that draw an international mix of participants.
“This may be the act of a lone, mad, paranoid individual,” said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin who studies rightist extremism, referring to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian charged in connection with the killings, “but the far-right milieu creates an atmosphere that can lead such people down that path of violence.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43871088...ew_york_times/
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One event does not a trend make.
But read this article and others and see the common elements. Hatred against government, multiculturalism and note the other right-wing ingredients. See anything interesting?
The vicious rightwing here has the same concerns. They kill US for those concerns! Remember the Oklahoma bombing?
The government a few months ago here publicized a report that indicated, after research, that rightwing cretins were our most important domestic crime concern. Conservatives, predictably, grew 'angry'. How dare you sully our ideologies as being hateful and dangerous, they said. The report was squelched.
We don't govern here for everyone and let the facts be discussed no matter who gets burned. No, we put our finger in the air and see if there are any objections to the truth. If there are, we water-down the truth or delete it.
And who owns the best methods of spreading propaganda? Why conservatives, of course.
There is no opposition party in this country to fight against right-wing threats. Whores all, for the most part.
It's over folks. Remember to look over your shoulder when you go out. The 'patriots' are coming.
Why We Should Worry About Right-Wing Terror Attacks Like Norway's in the US
Sunday 24 July 2011
by: Frank Schaeffer, AlterNet | News Analysis
The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.
In my new book "Sex, Mom and God"
I predicted just such an action. I predicted that right wing Christians will unleash terror here in America too. I predict that they will copy Islamic extremists, and may eventually even make common cause with them.
There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.
According to the Guardian
newspaper, the killer wrote:
"Today's Protestant church is a joke," he wrote in an online post in 2009. "Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic."
It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a "pure" and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.
Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.
A History of Violent Action
There is a history to the far right, religious right extremism on the rise today, extremism so extreme that in its congressional manifestation it is risking the good faith and credit of the US in the debt calling fiasco. The Tea Party activists also want purity of doctrine.
My family was part of the far right/violent right's rise in the 1970s and 80s when we helped create the "pro-life" movement come into existence that in the end spawned the killers of abortion providers. These killers were literally doing what we'd called for.
The terror unleashed on Norway - and the terror now unleashed by the Tea Party through Congress as it holds our economy hostage to extremist "economic" theories that want to destroy our ability to function -- is the sort of white, Christian; far right terror America can expect more of.
The "Christian Brotherhood"
Call this the ultimate "Tea Party" type "answer" to secularism, modernity, and above all our hated government. Call this the Christian Brotherhood. From far right congress people, to far right gun-toting terror in Norway and here at home, our own Western version of the Taliban is on the rise.
Foreigners, visitors from another planet and Americans living in a bubble of reasonable or educated people might not know this but the reality is that the debt ceiling confrontation is by, for and the result of America's evangelical Christian control of the Republican Party.
It is the ultimate expression of an alternate reality, one that has the mistrust of the US government as its bedrock "faith," second only to faith in Jesus.
To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics -- people like Michele Bachmann -- don't want to work within our system, they want to bring it down along the lines of so-called Christian "Reconstruction." (See my book for a full account of what this is.)
In the scorched-earth era of the "health care reform debates" of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren't the evil government. The right even decided that it was "normal" for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies -- even for military operations ("contractors"), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.
Private "Facts"
The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.
They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!
"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"
"Amtrak must make a profit!"
There is an indirect but deadly connection between the "intellectual" fig-leaf providers/leaders like my late father and periodic upheavals like the loony American Right's sometimes-violent reaction to the election of Barack Obama, killings in Norway and what the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party is about to do to us in forcing a default on our loans, and thus destroying the US economy in a way bin Laden could only have dreamed of doing.
No, your average member of some moronic gun toting Michigan militia is not reading books by my late father Francis Schaeffer where he called for the overthrow of the government because of Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion. Nor have they heard of people like Robert George. And the killer in Norway may or may not have read my father's books.
But Michele Bachmann is reading my father's books. And she was trained in far right Reconstructionist theory at the Oral Roberts law school by one of Dad's followers.
Bachmann says she got into politics because of reading my father's work. And she is one of his extremist followers.
NH GOP Politician to Unions: "Better Not F#%k with Me," or I'll Shoot
Lynne Ferrari Blankenbeker, a Republican lawmaker in the New Hampshire Legislature, has taken union-bashing to a whole new level.
In a July 21 email obtained by Mother Jones, the New Hampshire state representative wrote to fellow legislators about a recent training stint with the Army at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. A military veteran who has served in the Middle East, Blankenbeker described learning to drive an Army Humvee wearing night-vision goggles. She also trained as a gunner, and had to this to say:
Today I got to be the gunner which was fun. The .50 cal is quite a gun! I was never ascared of the unions but they better not F#%k with me again!!! Just saying.
Blankenbeker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Blankenbeker's relationship with unions in New Hampshire is a contentious one. The two-term representative, who represents parts of the city of Concord and says she's "generally against big government," has voted in support of right-to-work legislation, a direct affront to organized labor in the Granite State. Blankenbeker's legislative record reads like a union organizer's worst nightmare: She's backed lowering student drop-out age, opposed a minimum wage increase, and supported slashing taxes on business profits.
The president of the State Employees' Association, an affiliate of the national Service Employees' International Union, called for Blankenbeker's resignation just three months into the legislature's session for her anti-union votes. And SEA even set up a website, FireLynne.org, to push for Blankenbeker's ouster. "Your votes hurt the people who make our economy run," the site says. "We're tired of politicians making scapegoats of middle-class workers, like those who teach our children, plow our streets, and protect us during fires and emergencies."
Kurt Ehrenberg, political and legislative director with the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, said Blankenbeker's remark was "not surprising but unfortunate." He went on, "Rep. Blankenbeker has been part of this unprecedented assault on the New Hampshire middle class and working families."
Her union-threatening email isn't the first time Blankenbeker has stirred controversy with her remarks. In May, after President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, Blankenbeker said there was a "possibility" that the Al Qaeda leader remained alive, joining a small band of "deathers" in questioning the terrorist leader's killing in Pakistan.
Nor is it the first time this year a political figure was caught threatening violence at unions and their supporters. During the mass protests in Madison, Wisconsin, in February, a deputy attorney general in Indiana named Jeff Cox wrote on Twitter that police should "use live ammunition" on protesters occupying the Wisconsin state capitol in protest of Republican Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union bill. Mother Jones broke the story of Cox's controversial tweet on a Wednesday morning; by Wednesday afternoon, Cox had been fired.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/07/...-new-hampshire
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Years ago, there were 'some' moderates in the repub party. No more. It is a religious right-wing zealots home now.
The requirement to become a repub now is an IQ lower than your age. And vicious hatred toward anyone else but those of your own kind.
Lawsuit filed against New York same sex marriage law
NEW YORK — A group of religious leaders filed a lawsuit Monday against a newly approved gay marriage law in New York state and hundreds of same-sex unions celebrated over the weekend.
New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms filed the lawsuit in state court in Livingston County where one of the plaintiffs, Reverend Jason McGuire, lives.
The lawsuit says it seeks to "preserve not only marriage as the union of one woman to one man, but also our constitutional liberties" which were allegedly violated by the voting procedures in the state assembly during approval of the law.
The group states that it was founded in 1982 by pastors "concerned about religious liberties and moral values in New York State."
New York City officials said 659 same-sex couples were married Sunday and that others who received their licenses will be wed in the coming weeks.
The state legislature voted June 24 to allow gay marriage, making it the sixth and most important US state to give the green light.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheRa...3/3zRyUpo3UOs/
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Time to read this - again.
God is not great : how religion poisons everything
Christopher Hitchens