Right-wing blogger Jennifer Rubin initially blamed Islamic ‘jihadists’ for the Norway massacre. Eric Alterman asks why the Washington Post gives her a platform for bigotry.
If you haven’t seen Jon Stewart’s hilarious Wednesday night report on the aftermath of the Norway massacre, you’re only hurting yourself. He brilliantly skewers the protests of Fox News and the right over the bigotry of the media’s identifying the accused shooter as a “Christian extremist.” There are numerous layers of hypocrisy to peel away, and each one is funnier than the last: It’s bigoted to call Breivik a Christian just because he calls himself one, but the Fort Hood shooter is definitely a Muslim terrorist because he called himself one. Christians in this country are the victims of relentless bigotry by the left, but anyone else who complains of bigotry is playing the victim card. Et cetera and so forth.
A mass murderer hoped his outrageous act of brutality would force us all to take sides against one another. The best response would be to deepen our commitment to mutual respect.
While Norwegian police look into island shooter Anders Breivik’s claims that he has links to two additional “cells,” Interpol is investigating his claim that he is part of an international network dedicated to fighting an Islamic takeover of Europe. He claims he attended an organizing meeting in London. Interpol is taking the claim seriously enough that they’ve asked Scotland Yard for backup personnel to pursue the hunt. The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia reports some important details.
Ross Douthat, conservative-in-residence on the New York Times’ Op-Ed, makes an important cautionary point in his Sunday July 24 column, “A Right-Wing Monster,” about the surge of progressive comment citing the Norway massacre as an indictment of the New Right of Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy (and the House Republicans and Yisrael Beiteinu, I might add) with their anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-multiculturalist ideology. That’s no more legitimate, Douthat argues, than tying the environmental terrorism of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski to Al Gore: