RUTHFULLY YOURS

The prominent journalist Sven Egil Omdal, a former leader of the Norwegian Union of Journalists, has warned in the regional daily Stavanger Aftenblad against my dangerous critical views on Islam. At the same time, he thinks we should look into economic factors and social exclusion of Muslim immigrants in order to explain radicalization in ghettos, and not focus on Islamic ideas or culture. According to such socialist thinking, jihad is seen as caused by European and Western xenophobia, oppression and racism rather than the Islamic mentality.

For some strange reason, this theory has never been able to explain why Islamic expansionist aggression started about a thousand years before European colonialism, and long before the USA or Israel existed as countries.

Symptomatically, Mr. Omdal criticized the supposedly inhumane acts of American special forces who in 2011 killed the Islamic terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, after his terror network had murdered thousands of American civilians. At the same time, Omdal does not hesitate in defining society’s “enemies” as Islamophobes on the political Right, who in his view held “responsibility” for creating the basis for Breivik’s massacre.

If you follow this line of thinking, Islamic terrorism is caused by poverty and oppression, whereas non-Muslim terrorism is caused by evil ideologies. But is this view correct? Does Islamic terrorism really have absolutely nothing to do with Islamic doctrines? And if we are to look for underlying problems causing radicalization in the Islamic world, should we not also look at real problems causing potential radicalization in the West?

Omdal has previously compared Israel to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. No, not Israel’s jihadist enemies in Iran or elsewhere who openly advocate genocide, nor Hamas which does the same, but rather Israelis who might conceivably defend themselves against those who publicly brag about their nation’s coming annihilation.

Serious studies have time and again documented that Islamic jihadist terrorists often have above average education and income. In 2011, a secret MI5 file was leaked which indicated that two-thirds of terror suspects in Britain are from middle-class backgrounds. Those who become suicide bombers are often highly educated. The security service stated that most Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers have a large number of friends.

Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, had conducted an earlier analysis of 500 members of the Islamic terror organization al-Qaida which revealed that the majority of them were well-educated, upwardly mobile men in their twenties from a middle-class background. The recruits also tended to come from the wealthier Arab countries. The common stereotype of Islamic terrorism as a product of poor men is clearly wrong, Sageman indicated.

The perpetrators of the attacks on September 11^th 2001 that killed thousands of unarmed civilians largely came from Saudi Arabia, a very wealthy oil country which has never been under European colonial rule but is itself the cradle of one of the world’s most brutal imperial traditions, as noted by the gifted author V. S. Naipaul.

Mohamed Atta has been identified by the FBI as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center in New York City during the September 11, 2001 attacks. Atta was trained as an architect and pursued a master’s degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology. As a student in Germany, he was described as quiet and polite. This strategy of using religious deception, smiling at the infidels while plotting to kill them, is a common feature of many would-be Jihadists in Western countries.

The medical doctor Bilal Abdullah, a British-born Muslim of Iraqi descent, has been sentenced to life in prison for plans to use car bombs to murder as many people as possible in London, England and Glasgow, Scotland. He is said to be a “religious extremist and a bigot” who promotes violent Jihad against non-Muslims. This does not square with the Hippocratic Oath of “never do harm to anyone,” but then Hippocrates was a part of the European tradition.

The Koran (3:110) teaches Muslims – Arabs in particular – that they are “the best of peoples,” far better than non-Muslims in every conceivable way. They have a God-given right to impose their rule on the rest of humanity, by force of necessary. Their claim to be “hurt” is mainly the complaint of a people who see themselves as a divinely ordained “master race” who have been tricked out of their rightful rule and privileges solely because of scheming Jews, Crusaders, Americans, Europeans, Hindus or other evil infidels.

Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate number of the inmates in many Western jails. That is not because of “discrimination.” The free-thinking psychologist and writer Nicolai Sennels, who worked with Muslims in Denmark that had been convicted of serious crimes, reports how these inmates rarely feel any personal responsibility for what they have done. They usually see themselves as innocent victims of outside forces. In their own minds, these Muslims never do anything wrong, but many wrongs are imposed upon them by others.

The TV host, columnist and author Michael Coren covered a 9/11 vigil in Toronto, Canada, in 2012. At the same time, Muslim protesters clashed with the police in Sydney, Australia during a wave of unrest against an obscure movie that mocked Islam. They carried slogans such as “Behead all those who insult the Prophet.”

As Coren remarked about this threatening Muslim crowd, “We are supposed to be free to speak our minds. The issue here is not the movie but the Islamic reaction to the movie. Remember, the same week this tiny film was made public, the internationally celebrated Venice Film Festival gave an award to a movie showing a naked woman masturbating with a crucifix. The Christian response was an e-mail.” Most of these Muslims seemed to have the latest iPhones, iPads or other electronic gadgets. Coren did not see any signs of poverty among them.

As the author Ibn Warraq has repeatedly stated, the root cause of Islamic terrorism is Islam’s teachings and the example of Muhammad and his companions as described in traditional sources. Those who claim that Islamic terrorism is caused by poverty and oppression are parroting Marxist dogma, where violence is caused by “oppression.”

Sven Egil Omdal was suspiciously quiet during the international Islamic riots in September 2012, with their attacks on Western embassies and calls for beheading those who insult Islam. Was all of this really caused by poverty? By contrast, the same month he interviewed the pro-multicultural author Carsten Jensen in Denmark about where to put the external “responsibility” for Breivik’s ideas. As was to be expected, hardly a single critical word was uttered about the largest and fastest mass migrations in recorded human history. Instead, the two men focused only on the supposedly irrational and hateful reaction of native Europeans against their own displacement.

Interestingly, although he was normally against the death penalty, Carsten Jensen was of the opinion that he might be willing to reconsider his stance in the exceptional individual case of Breivik, given the latter’s immense cruelty and total lack of remorse. Yet, although he considered ABB to be unique, the author indicated that he grew out of a fertile soil of right-wing extremism and the hateful, anti-Islamic xenophobia of the Danish People’s Party, whose long-time leader Pia Kjærsgaard in 2012 stepped down in favor of Kristian Thulesen Dahl.

It is unclear what kind of “hate” the DPP has been spreading, however. The party’s former MP Søren Krarup has been one of the country’s sharpest conservative and Christian intellectuals for decades. The priest Jesper Langballe, who was Member of Parliament for the DPP from 2001 to 2011, is renowned for talking about serious subjects with a great sense of humor. Should any mention of problems caused by mass immigration be a social taboo?

Yet unless these organizations are willing to engage in a thorough self-criticism and change their ways, Carsten Jensen averred that groups which are critical of Islam, multiculturalism and mass immigration “share a responsibility” for the massacre at Utøya with Breivik. The author took it for granted that Anders Behring Breivik is a rational but evil person who committed his atrocities based on a certain ideological world view.

This is not beyond dispute. It is conceivable that Breivik’s twisted, unbalanced and borderline insane mind, filled with medieval knights and a strange fetish for self-made uniforms, was at least as much motivated by family issues and problems in his private life, which he wrapped in an ideological mantle to justify his misdeeds.

However, if we assume that Anders Behring Breivik was at least partly affected by the undercurrents of fear and quiet anger that are present in nearly all Western nations now, which seems likely, then we must also admit that these undercurrents have been fueled by the policies of mass immigration promoted for decades by the Western ruling elites, including opinion-shapers such as Sven Egil Omdal and Carsten Jensen in the mass media.

Consequently, one might claim with considerable justification that Breivik’s radicalization was to some extent facilitated by the extreme immigration policies promoted by the ruling multicultural establishment. If that is indeed the case then Western multiculturalists, too, need to engage in some healthy self-criticism regarding the rapidly rising tensions caused by their dangerous polices and failed ideological experiments.

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