Blaming everybody

A right-wing extremist publishes a manifesto promising armed resistance against Muslims, ethnic minorities and "cultural Marxists," blows up the offices of a centre-left government, then guns down literally dozens of young party activists at a nearby summer camp.

Perhaps the only good - if it can be called that - to come out of such a horrific crime is the way Anders Behring Breivik's killing spree drew out the very media narrative which fuelled him, only to stop it dead with an object lesson in media bias.

Within the hour papers around the world had attributed the attacks to the possibly fictional Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, a claim founded solely on a series of tweets by US terrorism expert Will McCants, attributed in turn to a user on an internet forum only he could access.

But journalists jumped on it as it fit the usual story of Muslim terrorists against the West. The BBC's Jorn Madslien seemed unable to conceive of terrorism without Muslims involved. "If the bomb blast in Oslo turns out to be a terror attack," he began his report, "it will mark a 9/11 moment for Norway."

By the time Breivik's name emerged the Sun already had its Saturday edition sorted, with the headline "AL-QAEDA MASSACRE - Norway's 9/11".

Its front-page story warned of a "homegrown al-Qaida convert," while the paper's editorial summed up the lesson for Norway: "The tentacles of al-Qaida, and groups linked to it, spread deep into the heart of Western nations."

The Sun quickly and silently rewrote its editorial once Norwegian police confirmed the killer's identity as a 32-year-old white Christian right-wing nationalist.

Now the acts of terror were "an easy resort for any loner who believes their own personal grievance against the state is justification for indiscriminate violence."

It's easy to single out the Sun as the most egregious example of right-wing Islamophobia, but it's far from the only one.

The idea that this is all founded on - that Islamic extremists are the usual suspects - is utterly false. EuroPol statistics suggest they are responsible for less than one per cent of terrorist plots on the continent.

The new explanation that has sprung up to replace it is equally conflicting and self-serving, fed mostly by those whose own warmongering rhetoric found its way into Breivik's 1500-page handbook for continental fascism.

Consider Canadian demagogue Mark Steyn, who wrote a 2005 Daily Telegraph column predicting "Eurabian civil war" by 2010.

Steyn's 2006 book America Alone is based on the idea that "Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia."

The same Steyn, who made it into Breivik's own manifesto with his claims of "the first welfare-funded jihad in history," wrote in this week's National Review that "any of us who write are obliged to weigh our words, and accept the consequences of them."

And then Steyn insisted he had nothing to answer for. "When a Norwegian man is citing Locke and Burke as a prelude to gunning down dozens of Norwegian teenagers, he is lost in his own psychoses. If Norway responds to this as the left appears to wish, by shrivelling even further the bounds of public discourse, freedom will have a tougher time."

Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips went even further, saying that any suggestion the killings were spurred on by her or others' writing was "frankly itself an opinion in need of treatment."

Breivik had liked one of her articles - which alleged a Labour Party conspiracy "to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British" - so much he included it in full in his manifesto.

The man was either psychotic or a psychopath, she offered by way of explanation. "What he himself says about his own opinions or state of mind therefore does not bear examination."

Of course Breivik is a psychopath - terrorism is psychopathic by definition. But it's a feeble way to dodge the fact that Phillips and those like her were the ones that conjured up these Islamic demons for him.

The right's new story tries to have it both ways. First, Breivik was a crazed man operating in a cultural vacuum - unlike Islamic extremists, who feed off a network of incendiary rhetoric and veiled threats by public figures which must be countered.

Second, Breivik's calculated acts are a warning, an appeal to hear Phillips's "decent people who are boiling with rage at being disenfranchised by an entire political class which seems determined to destroy their civilisation.

"Some of them are so angry they may join political groupings which resort on occasion to thuggery and hooliganism (the BNP, EDL or the anti-globalisation riots all come to mind).

"But violent as some of their behaviour may be, they would not travel to a youth camp, invite the teenagers to gather round and then open fire on them all with dum-dum bullets."

Except when they do. But then they're not ours, it seems.