Norway's homegrown terrorist was fighting against tolerance, multiculturalism

More than 100,000 people gathered in the center of Oslo, Norway, for a vigil after Friday's …As the first reports of the bombing and shootings in Norway rolled in, many were quick to assume that terrorist attacks, which killed at least 76 people, were carried out by al Qaeda.

"Last week, a Norwegian prosecutor filed terror charges against an Iraqi-born cleric for threatening Norwegian politicians with death if he is deported from the Scandinavian country," the Associated Press pointed out. "Terrorism has also been a concern in neighboring Denmark since an uproar over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad six years ago."

"We don't know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today's events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra," The Weekly Standard reported.

"This is a sobering reminder for those who think it's too expensive to wage a war against jihadists," a post on The Wall Street Journal's "Right Turn" blog warned. The writer also quoted a source at the American Enterprise Institute, who told her "...as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating."

But while the shooter was, indeed, a self-described religious extremist, he wasn't Muslim. He wasn't gunning for retribution for the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or marking the upcoming anniversary of 9/11. Norwegian-born, blond-haired, blue-eyed Anders Behring Breivik, 32, targeted his own countrymen, dozens of them children, because he was against immigration and outraged that his country was tolerant of other cultures.

Breivik acknowledged today that he was responsible for the killings but pleaded not guilty, The New York Times reported. "He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary," the lawyer said. "He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution. He wished to attack society and the structure of society." He said that he expected to spend his life in prison, but hoped that a plea of not guilty would give him opportunities to continue to speak to the public indirectly though future court hearings, according to the Associated Press.

Breivik also said that he had been working with two other extremist cells and accused the Labour Party, whose members were targets of the mass shooting, of "treason" for promoting multiculturalism, Judge Kim Heger told CNN.

According to the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies, as of 2010 there were approximately 150,000 Muslims in Norway-only about 4 percent of the population. About 10 percent of the population of Norway is foreign-born.

According to the Associated Press, Breivik spent nine years working on a 1,500-page manifesto, which he published online just before carrying out the attacks. "In order to successfully penetrate the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist media censorship we are forced to employ significantly more brutal and breath taking operations which will result in casualties," he wrote. "In order for the attack to gain an influential effect, assassinations and the use of weapons of mass destruction must be embraced." In the piece, Breivik, who calls himself a Christian Nationalist, also describes how he bought armor, guns, tons of fertilizer and other bomb components, stashed caches of weapons and wiped his computer hard drive.

Breivik said he is a member of the Knights Templar, an order of radical Christians who fought to protect the Holy Land from infidels during the Middle Ages; his manifesto features photographs of him wearing an altered version of a U.S. Marine Corps dress jacket festooned with Knights Templar medals. The order, which was founded by two French knights in 1119 and shuttered sometime in the early 1300s, became part of the pop culture lexicon in 2003 when Dan Brown's bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" was published -though, in his book, the Knights were more concerned with finding the Holy Grail than routing out other religions.

Breivik isn't the first to look to the Templars in order to justify religious extremism and terrorism. Recently, a crime organization in Mexico has taken to calling themselves The Knights Templar, calling on their members to "protect the oppressed, the widow and the orphan" and promote patriotism while carrying out brutal killings, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Though some have called Breivik's attacks an example of why multiculturalism won't work, others feel that his extreme violence has undermined his message.

"How could he just stand there and kill so many innocent people and just seem to think that what he did was OK?" Breivik's father, Jens David Breivik, a former diplomat, told Swedish tabloid Expressen. He said that he hasn't had contact with his son since 1995, but is disgusted by what Breivik has admitted to doing. "He should have taken his own life, too. That's what he should have done."






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