It’s Oklahoma. It’s a tragedy. And yes, I’m going to say this: The island of Utøya will be seen as the terminal point of Europe’s anti-immigration movement.

A suspect in the shootings and the Oslo explosion was arrested. Though police did not release his name, Norwegian national broadcaster NRK identified him as 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik and said police searched his Oslo apartment overnight.

A police official said the suspect appears to have acted alone in both attacks, and that “it seems that this is not linked to any international terrorist organisations”.

UPDATE:

One police spokesman even called him an “ethnic Norwegian Norwegian,” a turn of phrase that Norwegians would describe as “smør på flesk” – i.e., putting butter on bacon, or, as we’d say in English, gilding the lily…

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

27 replies on “Oslo Is Oklahoma”

  2. I wonder if Norway will ratchet up the fear and then invade a country that was in no way involved in the bombing? I could mention some nations that respond in that fashion but I won’t mention names….

  3. @2 no need. Just stop pretending there’s no problem with Muslim extremism, ratchet up domestic surveillance of Muslims, and stop pretending the police can handle the problem all by themselves. It’s worked well in France, lovers of a good wiretap.

  4. From everything i’m seeing and hearing it sounds more like homegrown group since they seemed to be after their prime minister. There’s a shooter at a youth summer camp who was dressed as a cop. Its a summer camp the prime minister usually stops by.

  5. @1, no, really you shouldn’t.

    Where’s Bruce Bawer to tell us it’s the nig-nogs, er, excuse me, Ayrabs? He’s a friend of Savage; let’s get the Full Monty of racist speculation into play before the facts come out.

  7. Charles,
    I just read the NYT story. It definitely is “terroristic” whether domestic or foreign, Islamicist or not. Ultimately, it is tragic. One radical Islamic group claimed responsibility but that is being verified at the moment. Whatever the case, it is shaking Norway all right.

    BTW, I read Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept”. I am convinced especially should this attack be Islamicist that he was prescient in his observations. Many European countries are indeed unsuccessful at inculcating immigrants to become citizens of their respective countries. This has resulted in enclaves of immigrant communities near urban centers that don’t mix in with their host country citizens and has allowed radicalism to flourish. I’ve read many don’t even bother to learn the host country’s language. Charles, this is greatly problematic. At this point, I don’t know enough about what happened in Oslo but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it is related to radical Islamicism. Bloody depressing.
    Stay strong Norway.

  8. @9, Bruce Bawer is a total and utter piece of filth unmitigated by any shred of decency or regard for truth. His book is a farrago of anecdotal baloney, and he’s STILL going around promoting it, and the lies it contains, to this day, using the same handful of incidents.

    According to Bawer, Malmo in Sweden is completely overrun by Muslim terrorists who have imposed total Sharia law and driven out or killed all the brave white people. I’ve been to Malmo. His description isn’t even on the same planet as true.

    According to Bawer, JUST THE OTHER DAY, gays are fleeing Amsterdam in terror due to Muslim attacks. This is also completely untrue. Yes, some racist gay men there have joined forces with the hard right and live quaking in fear in their basement apartments, but they are few in number. The well-known attack anecdotes have not generally been repeated. Amsterdam remains one of the safest cities in the world for everyone, gay or straight.

    I could go on.

    Remember a few years back when some Russian immigrant thugs beat a gay man on Capitol Hill? Bawer’s thesis is this: all the gay people abandoned Capitol Hill afterwards, and Russian thugs control the city now. Does that sound true to you? That’s the kind of crap Bawer says about Europe.

  9. Just saw this on the Guardian: A terror group, Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (the Helpers of the Global Jihad), issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack, according to Will McCants, a terrorism analyst at CNA, a research institute that studies terrorism. The message said the attack was a response to Norwegian forces’ presence in Afghanistan and to unspecified insults to the Prophet Muhammad. “We have warned since the Stockholm raid of more operations,” the group said, apparently referred to a bombing in Sweden in December 2010, according to Mr McCants’ translation. “What you see is only the beginning, and there is more to come.” The claim could not be confirmed.

  11. Fnarf,

    Approximately 1/3 of the persons who presently work in Copenhagen are Swedes who use the The Oresund Bridge (Danish Øresundsbroen, Swedish Öresundsbron, joint hybrid name Øresundsbron) which connects the two metropolitan areas of the Oresund Region: the Danish capital of Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmö. That is where the Swedes are headed each morning, to work. By the way, I’m heading back and spending August in Denmark with my family. Enjoy the rest of summer.

  13. @13, PS — if you get a chance, the little seaside village of Skanor, a short bus ride from Malmo train station, is lovely. There used to be a nice restaurant out on the end of the pier, but I fear that it has burned down. Wikipedia has the charmingly translated story:

    However, “Badhytten” burned down in January 2009, just before major renovations were to be carried out. The police investigation is still ongoing but the common theory is that a fire was the cause.

    Yes, that would seem likely!

  14. Fnarf,

    Thank you. I will tell my brother-in-law, that bridge was one of his projects. And, thanks for the tip, I lived in Denmark for a spell, but I expect that much of it and Sweden has changed. Here’s hoping that Copenhagen has recovered from being flooded earlier this month.

  15. Now I find myself wondering just how close Bruce Bawer and the arrested suspect, Anders Breivik, were. Breivik was a frequent commenter on Bawer’s favorite website, document.no. I’m not suggesting Bawer is complicit; but I am saying that the endless anti-Muslim hate promulgated by the likes of Bawer bears some responsibility for pushing extremist kooks like Breivik to violence. Shooting children in the water as they tried to swim away, in this case.

  16. My parents moved to Israel in 1972 and I’ve been visiting them for over 30 years. People often ask me if I’m not nervous about going to a place with all that war and activities and such. I ask them if I’m not as safe or more so after incidents in Oklahoma City in 1995 with our home-grown terrorist with someone just minding their own business on April 19, 1995 and some self-serving asshole decides he’s going to get back at the government and murder 168 people or some fundamentalist asshole Saudi decides that he’s going to murder 3,000 people in New York. There’s no place that’s safe as can be seen from what’s happened in Madrid, London and elsewhere.

  19. There are multiple places in Norway called Utøya. The island where the shootings happened today is south of Sundvollen in Tyrifjord (actually a lake) in Buskerud. It’s only about 40 km from Oslo via the E16 (ca. 30 minute drive).

  24. I’ve always said that christians are deadly and now we have some proof.

    And since it was the wrong kind of fundamentalism I am sure that the American media won’t spend nearly as much time on this as they would have had it been islamic fundamentalism.

  25. @26 out of curiosity this morning I went to foxnews.com to see how they are spinning this. They are pushing the “he’s a crazy man, woo woo wooo” and although they did mention his right-wing connections they didn’t focus on that (unsurprisingly).

  26. Charles, this should be common sense, but I’ll say it anyway: it’s entirely possible to be in favor of strengthening your country’s immigration policies – being anti-immigration, even – and still be disgusted by the mass murder of innocents. Can you grasp that concept?

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