The Crusades Come To Norway

The immediate, and not entirely unjustified rush to judgment on the mass murders in Norway last week concluded that the murderer was probably an Islamic terrorist. That quickly turned out not to be the truth. Once it was determined that the terrorist was not a Muslim, it quickly became the duty of the mainstream media to paint him as a fundamentalist crusading Christian.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) has recently taken to the House podium to derail the current hearings on Islamic radicalization in the West by demanding equal treatment be given to Christians. And now she suddenly finds herself surrounded by leftist secularist media hastening to prove that she is correct by pointing the finger at Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian Christian terrorist.

The problem with their case is that mountains of evidence are emerging that seem to show that Breivik is as much a Christian as Timothy McVeigh, or the Aryan Church, or Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of the American Atheist movement. But that does not comport with the mainstream media view of conservatives, Christians, and constitutionalists. They are almost entirely anti-gun, and believe that only government, and lots of it, can save people from Christian terrorists. They forget, of course, that the socialist welfare state of Norway is officially Lutheran. But that's another story.

On a nearly weekly basis, another plot or attempted terror attack directly linked to Muslim extremism is presented to us. Yet the mainstream media can't see that a seemingly endless series of Islamic plots is not the same thing as an isolated attack by a lone wolf murderer with the most tenuous of connections to mainline Christianity. They can always identify the "Christian" terrorist, but haven't yet been able to find a single terrorist whose Muslim beliefs spurred an attack. This murderer did rail against radical multiculturalism, and frankly I think that is a perfectly valid argument. That doesn't mean that my fellow Christians and I are going to start murdering people from cultures different from ours.

Breivik wrote a 1500 page manifesto prior to his rampage. He hates Muslims, all right. But he hates pretty much all humans who make up modern society. A huge portion of his manifesto was lifted almost verbatim from the ramblings of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. If this was a Christian crusader out to do in the poor, innocent Muslims, why were almost none of the victims followers of Islam? In fact, most were Christians or secularists, and the camp he attacked was organized by the Norwegian socialists.

Breivik helped the media out by calling himself a "cultural conservative Christian." Well, if I call myself a Muslim mullah, does that make me one? In fact, the media had to perform an act of willful blindness not to mention that he also identifies himself in the manifesto as an agnostic who is not sure whether there is a God or not. I'm picturing him in his fundamentalist Christian church reciting the Apostle's Creed: "I believe that there might or might not be a God Almighty, maker of some things and not of others, and in Jesus Christ who might or might not be our Lord, if he existed at all." Even the liberal revisionist Christians aren't that wishy-washy.

Norway, unlike the uncivilized United States, does not have the death penalty. It's impossible to know at this stage what sentence he will receive if convicted, but the worst he would suffer is twenty-one years which amounts to three months for each of the seventy-six humans he cold-bloodedly murdered. He will dance out a free man because of the overly-generous officially religious-socialist government's views on punishment.

The mainstream media are not only playing footsy with the "good Muslim" lobby, but they are also exploiting the tragedy for its anti-gun agenda. Clearly, this madman should not have had a gun, but that's hardly proof that anti-gun laws do a damned bit of good. In fact, Norway already has some of the most restrictive gun-control laws in the western world. Horror-stricken youngsters at the camp described Breivik as calmly taking his time while murdering children like "shooting fish in a barrel." It took nearly an hour for the Norwegian police to arrive at the camp while the young people were being murdered en masse and screaming in terror.

What if two or three of the camp counselors or adult supervisors had been armed and trained in the use of guns? How many lives would have been saved? As with almost every similar argument for gun-control in America, the Norwegian logic about gun ownership is exactly backward. An unarmed citizenry is a vulnerable citizenry, both against madmen and oppressive governments.

And as an aside, I have to ask how many of the Islamic terrorists who have murdered or attempted to murder innocent civilians first shouted "Allahu Akbar," then pulled the trigger, pushed the button, or aimed the airplane at a skyscraper? My guess would be pretty close to 100%, including our recent Muslim conscientious objector who planned to outdo the Fort Hood murderer. Yet the mainstream media refuse to see any connection between the religion and the act.

On the other hand, a very close-mouthed Norwegian mass murderer said nothing as he coldly blew up a government building and shot sixty-eight campers, let alone "you are all dying in the name of Christ." But that doesn't stop the same media from forcefully declaring the murderer to be a fundamentalist Christian. The New York Times made it a banner headline. Sheila Jackson Lee must be having a good chuckle in private.

Note: The illustration is Crusader Rabbit, sans his best friend and fellow warrior for good, Rags the Tiger. They are the nearly-unknown predecessors to the wildly-popular Rocky and Bullwinkle. As a Christian crusader, Breivik is about as real as the rabbit.