Commentary Magazine

Posts For: July 23, 2011

Re: Evil in Norway

| @jpodhoretz 07.23.2011 - 8:54 PM

The news that the monster who killed so many kids at that camp in Norway is some kind of lone extremist with extremely peculiar views—a Christian, pro-Israel, anti-Muslim Freemason whose rantings include mentions of contrary schools of thought that don’t exist, like a “Vienna school”—should come as horrible relief to all of us who assumed in the immediate aftermath that this was an act of Islamist terrorism. Coming so soon before the anniversary of 9/11, the attack seemed to presage something terrible in the offing. What happened, instead, is something both more frightening (loose madman who is, by virtue of his solitary conduct, almost impossible to intercept before he acts) and more reassuring (this was not Mumbai 2.0, or Beslan). As for those, particularly those on the Israeli anti-Zionist left, who took to Twitter seemingly in celebration of the fact that the killer was not an Islamist—as though that calls into question strong action taken against the Islamists who commit the vast majority of such terrorist acts—one can only say that it is very strange and very sad to see what gives some activists pleasure. He is exactly the kind of psychotic ideologue of the Right so many in this country instantly assumed Jared Loughner, the schizophrenic who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was—and this fact seems to have inspired a bizarre score-settling glee.

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