Showing posts with label Norway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Norway. Show all posts

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Jon Stewart pokes fun at the hypocrisy of the Fox News channel becoming defensive over the Oslo terrorist being labeled a "Christian."

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I LOVED this segment last night, and thought that Stewart did an amazing job of mocking the Fox News talking heads. So of course I felt I needed to share it with you.

I actually almost forgot about it because there was so much going on today. 

However perhaps saving it for last is not so bad as it is a great way to end our day, don't you think?

Oh, and there is SO much more coming tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Stephen Colbert ridicules the coverage of the Oslo terrorist attack by Fox News and other conservative news outlets.

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I thought this was one of Colbert's most brilliant segments ever.

It demonstrated just the right amount of seriousness about the attack themselves before using comedy to mock Fox, and other Murdoch owned media, for using the attacks to fan the flames of Islamic hatred.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Leah Burton does an amazing job of tying the Oslo terrorist to Christian Dominionism.

Yesterday I wrote of the connection that Anders Behring Breivik had to Sarah Palin and the Teabaggers in America. As many of you pointed out the strongest connection could be made between Beivik and the Domonionists, which is true, though I also believe that there are much stronger connections between the Tea Party and the Dominionists than many people seem to realize.

However as I have said in the past, when it comes to writing about Dominionists I ALWAYS defer to my friend Leah Burtion, who is the recognized expert on the subject.

And so I have.

Courtesy of Politicususa:

In regards to dominionist linkages to the bloody slaughter in Norway, here are our findings so far:

a) In particular, with a video manifesto (which has been linked on Youtube until it was pulled there, and which has since shown up on Liveleak) the shooter makes some very specific references that show he has familiarity with, and probably shares terminology with (if not overtly sharing intel with) “Christian patriot” militia groups in the US (including material that has been posted on racist and far-right-wing forums in the US, use of particular catch phrases associated with the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, and others). I’ve just spent nine hours typing up an extensive analysis of the video; he is clearly connected with religious-nationalist groups in Europe and in the US. The degree of references to material originating in the US, in fact, indicate he has been in somewhat regular contact with anti-Muslim racists in the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, rather than obtaining racialist material from racist groups elsewhere in the world.

b) One thing that stands out (if one is unaware of racialist movements in Europe)–most racist activity in Europe so far has been from “odinists” and “Satanists” in the black-metal community (and are largely doing it in a pattern of occasionally bloody attention-whoredom) or from blatantly neo-Nazi groups. A group or person claiming a “Conservative Christian” basis for this, especially in Europe, stands out like a sore thumb; generally (unlike the US) there has not been a tradition of “racist right” churches like Christian Identity that claim to be “Bible-based”.

c) One thing that stands out in the killer’s videos and writings is a certain obsession with the Knights Templar, the Third Crusade, and the idea of setting up what amount to European “Christian Patriot militias” (often using the very same terminology, of note, as “Christian patriot” groups associated with dominionism and the racist right use in the US) to foment a revolution in the same way as planned by “Christian Patriot militias” here in the US.

d) In particular, the killer is a known guest writer on the site “Jihad Watch”, which has had very close linkage with Dominionist groups (including NAR groups). Jihad Watch is sufficiently infamous (and sufficiently tied to Dominionist activity, particularly among the NAR) that it is one of those groups that Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a very careful watch on (and is on verge of listing it formally as a hate site), and writers to that site almost inevitably have ties to NAR groups.

e) There is a known NAR movement in Norway, which is similar in extremism to the US and which has known linkage to NAR extremists in the US, particularly in C. Peter Wagner’s network (in particular, Jan Torp who has known linkage to Sarah Palin via the Wagner NAR network among others); Norway, a relatively religiously conservative country, has been aggressively targeted by the NAR in an effort to establish a bench-head in Scandinavia. (Of note–Wagner’s lineage of NARasites is the most closely connected to the “racist right” along with Christian Reconstructionists; there is clear evidence that Christian Identity groups and NAR groups have traded theological terminology related to domestic terrorism as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s.) I wrote about Torp’s connection to Sarah Palin at God’s Own Party? in November 2008.

It is important to recognize that C. Peter Wagner who we are speaking of is one of the main endorsers of Governor Rick Perry’s “The Response” event in Houston.

Believe it or not this is but a taste of the extensive article that Leah has written making these connections and I urge you to free up the time necessary to read the entire post.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

For those who have been asking if there is a connection between the Oslo terrorist and Sarah Palin, your wish is my command.

In a revelation that should come as no surprise to most of us, Norway terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, is a fan of the American Tea Party, in particular crazed anti-Muslim firebrand Pamela Gellar.

Breivik was a fan of Tea Party darling Pamela Geller's rabid, anti-Islam website Atlas Shrugs, and made frequent comments there. Indeed Breivik's irrational fear and hatred of Islam and marxism, coupled with his Christian fundamentalism, makes him an ideological twin to many of the most dangerous members of the American Tea Party.

For those who were unaware, Gellar has a vicious, anti-Muslim website called Atlas Shrugs, and she is also on the national Advisory Committee of Jews for Sarah:

JewsForSarah is proud to have the dynamic Madame Geller as a member of our national Advisory Board.


Here is Gellar defending her idol on Canadia TV earlier this year.



Yesterday Gellar quickly put up a post condemning Breivak's murderous rampage and quickly going on the defensive:

According to this report, he started planning this attack nine years ago. I wasn't blogging back then.

Gellar misses the point.  It does not matter if the initial spark for his Muslim hatred did not come from the American Tea Party, Sarah Palin, or Gellar herself, there is increasing evidence that their rhetoric added fuel to inflame his hate until he could not longer take it and felt the time was right to act.

And as movie critic Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of "The Undefeated":

"The Undefeated" takes opposition to the Democratic party for granted, and focuses on Republicans and establishment conservatives, who should apparently share the blame. It praises only the Tea Party, and assigns credit to Palin for Tea Party victories in the 2010 elections. As Palin continues to prolong her entry into this year's GOP Presidential primaries, one wonders if Stephen K. Bannon has his money on a third-party bid by Palin as a Tea Party candidate. I suspect that's where his heart lies.

I myself have seen no evidence that Adolph Hitler ever personally murdered a Jew, but whose name is forever linked to the extinction of six million Jewish people?

So to date Sarah Palin placing a bullseye over Gabrielle Gifford's district had NOTHING to do with her being shot, her hate filled rhetoric during the McCain campaign had NOTHING to do with the insane number of death threats against our President, and her participation in the anti-Muslim hate speech coming from the Tea Party had NOTHING to do with what happened in Oslo, Norway.  Is that what we are supposed to believe?

That is quite a number of coincidences, and what is it that Palin believes about coincidences again?

“There are no coincidences” is a favorite maxim.

 I could not have said it better myself.

(I would like to give a hat tip to the anonymous commenter who sent me some of the links I used in this post.  Thank you very much for your help.)

Though there was no connection, Fox News used the Oslo terrorist attacks to fan the flames of anti-Muslim hatred.

In early reporting all anybody knew was that there HAD been a bombing in Norway and a shooting at the youth camp.  Yet that was all Laura Ingraham needed to state unequivocally that, “Two deadly terror attacks in Norway, in what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists,” and then to immediately jump to a pre-recorded Bill O'Reilly interview with the lawyer representing the Islamic Community Center in New York, which prominently featured O'Reilly bullying the man and insinuating that the Muslim people were to blame for 9-11.



We can wait until we are blue in the face for Ingraham, or Fox News, to apologize for their blatant hate mongering but it will never come. This was a purposeful decision to gin up more hatred toward Muslims, and as a byproduct keep Americans supporting the wars overseas which financially benefits Fox News, and which feeds Roger Ailes personal xenophobia concerning the Islamic people.

This morning I wrote:

And hidden in the shadows there can be no doubt that America has its version of an Anders Behring Breivik, just waiting in the wings for that last straw to snap his emotional camel's back, or perhaps for direction from a Right Wing radio host or Fox News talking head, to provide a clue as to which enemy he needs to place in his crosshairs.

Can there be any doubt who Fox News is actively attempting to place in those crosshairs?


And is that not exactly the kind of rhetoric which inspired Anders Behring Breivik to launch his devastating terrorist attack against his own people in the first place?

Breivik had talked admiringly online about conversations he had had with unnamed English Defence League members and the organisation Stop the Islamification of Europe (SIOE) over the success of provocative street actions leading to violence.

"I have on some occasions had discussions with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use certain strategies," he wrote two years ago. "The tactics of the EDL are now to 'lure' an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already."

In other words it appears that the promoters of terrorism that Laura Ingraham, and her bosses, are having such difficulty identifying, may in fact be found staring back at them from the mirror. 


(H/T to Moral Low Ground.)

What was the motivation behind the Oslo killings? And are they destined to happen in America next?

This is pretty chilling stuff folks so you may want to have at the very least a cup of coffee before reading this.

Courtesy of the Foreign Policy blog:

I have just finished reading through what appears to be the 1,518-page manifesto and handbook of the alleged perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack in Norwegian history.

The manifesto, bylined by someone calling himself Andrew Berwick, is entitled "2083: A European Declaration of Independence" and was posted on Stormfront.org, a white supremacist website, and discovered by American blogger Kevin I. Slaughter. [UPDATE: Norwegian TV has confirmed that the author is indeed the Oslo shooter, according to the New York Times.]

In it, "Berwick" declares himself a "Justiciar Knight Commander," a leading member of a "re-founded" Knights Templar group formed at an April 2002 meeting in London. He claims the founding group has 9 members, whom he does not name, and that three other sympathizers were not able to attend the original meeting.

"Our purpose," the document reads, is to "seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda."

In grim, apocalyptic language, it advocates attacks on "traitors" across Europe who are supposedly enabling a Muslim takeover of the continent.

"[W]e should… not exceed (per 2010) aprox. 45 000 dead and 1 million wounded cultural Marxists/multiculturalists in Western Europe," the author writes. "The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come."

The manifesto also provides detailed instructions for everything from making a bomb to raising funds to preparing physically and mentally for what the author describes as a coming three-stage "civil war" between patriotic nationalists and "multiculturalists" who are, wittingly or not, destroying European civilization.

Filled with hateful rantings against Muslims -- whom the author claims are on a trajectory to take over Europe and erase its culture patrimony -- the writing bears a great resemblence to online comments attributed to Anders Breivik, 32, the confessed perpetrator of a massacre that has so far claimed nearly 100 lives.

The author also claims to be Norwegian, and says that English is not his native language. And at the bottom of the document are several pictures of Breivick in different outfits, including the frogman costume pictured above.

There is much more which you can read for yourself by clicking the link above.

This is very frightening information indeed, and I am sure I am not the only one amongst us who immediately thought of Jared Lee Loughner, or Timothy McVeigh, after reading of this tragedy and then wondered if, in this time of vicious political bickering, the very same kind of horrific incident wasn't in America's immediate future as well.

I can tell you with certainty that Frank Schaeffer has very little doubt:

There is a growing movement in America that equates godliness with hatred of our government in fact hatred of our country as fallen and evil because we allow women choice, gays to marry, have a social safety net, and allow immigration from other cultures and non-white races.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the killer wrote:

"Today's Protestant church is a joke," he wrote in an online post in 2009. "Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic."

It seems Anders Behring Breivik longed for a "pure" and ultra conservative religion. He was a man of religious conviction, no liberals with their jeans need apply! Liberals beware.

Norway is just a first taste of what will happen here on a larger scale.

I certainly hope that this time Mr. Schaeffer is incorrect, but I cannot pretend not to see the same gathering storm clouds of which he is speaking.

And for those who have recently questioned why I still bother to call out Sarah Palin on her lies, and reveal to the world just how insane she, and her political points of view, are, this is why. Because the people behind this kind of hatred, and plans for Christofascist domination, are looking for an attractive package behind which they can broadcast their message of hate and divisiveness until the country is so splintered that they can then step in to grab hold of the reins of power.

I have long been convinced that Sarah Palin WAS the vessel that they chose to further their agenda.  But we, with no small amount of help from Palin herself, have managed to damage her credibility to the point that I don't believe they find her useful any longer. By no means am I suggesting that she is not still somebody whose activities should be monitored carefully, because she is.

However there are others like Bachmann and Perry with which we still to contend.  And hidden in the shadows there can be no doubt that America has its version of an Anders Behring Breivik, just waiting in the wings for that last straw to snap his emotional camel's back, or perhaps for direction from a Right Wing radio host or Fox News talking head, to provide a clue as to which enemy he needs to place in his crosshairs.

In other words my friends when it comes to unveiling the dangerous agendas of the lunatic fringe, or shining the light of truth on dark plots of nefarious political operatives, we have really only just begun.

In the immortal words of Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Right Wing extremist murders at least 80 people in Norway.

Anders Behring Breivik, the face of terror
Courtesy of the New York Times:

Norway suffered a pair of devastating attacks on Friday when powerful explosions shook the government center here, killing seven people, and shortly after a gunman stalked youths at an island summer camp for young members of the governing Labor Party, killing at least 80.

The explosions in Oslo, from one or more bombs, turned the tidy Scandinavian capital into a scene reminiscent of terrorist attacks in Baghdad or Oklahoma City, panicking people and blowing out windows of several government buildings, including one housing the office of the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, who was unharmed.

The state television broadcaster, citing the police, said seven people had been killed and at least 15 wounded in the explosions, which they said appeared to be an act of domestic terrorism.

Even as the police locked down a large area of the city after the blasts, a man dressed as a police officer entered the youth camp on the island of Utoya, about 19 miles northwest of Oslo, a Norwegian security official said, and opened fire. “He said it was a routine check in connection with the terror attack in Oslo,” one witness told VG Nett, the Web site of a national newspaper.

Of the at least 80 people killed on the island, some were as young as 16, the police said on national television early Saturday.

Terrified youths jumped into the water to escape. “Kids have started to swim in a panic, and Utoya is far from the mainland,” said Bjorn Jarle Roberg-Larsen, a Labor Party member who spoke by phone with teenagers on the island, which has no bridge to the mainland. “Others are hiding. Those I spoke with don’t want to talk more. They’re scared to death.”

Many could not flee in time.

After the shooting the police seized a 32-year-old Norwegian man on the island, according to the police and Justice Minister Knut Storberget. He was later identified as Anders Behring Breivik and characterized by officials as a right-wing extremist, citing previous writings including on his Facebook page.

I was watching this unfold yesterday on Twitter and via news updates, starting with the bombings in Oslo and culminating with the shootings at the youth camp, and I just kept thinking "Jesus, is it over yet?"

All of those poor children doing nothing but enjoying their day at camp and suddenly they are screaming in terror running for their lives.

Is this guy Norway's Jared Loughner?  Another politically motivated madman, taking out his anger and frustration through terrorist acts directed at innocent bystanders and children? And will Norway respond the same way Arizona did, by refusing to implement more gun control laws to protect their citizens?

So much senseless violence for such petty reasons.