THE
ROVING EYE Al-Qaeda's Christian
mirror By Pepe Escobar
Imagine if Anders Behring Breivik, the
32-year-old pale, blond, blue-eyed, 100%
Norwegian, gun-crazy ultra right-wing Christian
fundamentalist responsible for the car bombing in
Oslo and the meticulous targeted assassinations at
the island of Utoya that killed 93 people, was a
Muslim immigrant.
One does not even have
to imagine it - as the concentric Western circles
of the Islamophobia industry immediately
attributed the massacre in Norway to "al-Qaeda",
until facts got in the way.
Wait a minute.
"Targeted assassinations?" It had to cross the
killer's mind that if the Barack Obama
administration could do it - in AfPak, Iraq,
Yemen, Somalia, all in the name of Western
civilization - there's
nothing to prevent a cool Scandinavian from
exercising the same rights on his own soil.
The overlapping strands of al-Qaeda
ideology can be examined in detail in volumes such
as Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words, edited by
Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, and
published in English by Harvard University Press.
Lone Breivik also concocted his own hefty,
1,500-page hate manifesto [1], titled 2083: A
European Declaration of Independence, where he
equally thrashes liberalism, multiculturalism and
"cultural Marxism", which are allegedly destroying
European Christian civilization.
As much
as al-Qaeda - under the ideological guidance of
now leader Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri - embarked on
defensive (and occasionally offensive) jihad
against Christians and Jews, Breivik calls for no
less than a Christian jihad to defend Europe from
yet another Muslim invasion.
The return
of the Christian crusaders What reveals
that Breivik is no lone freak is that the ideology
behind the manifesto overwhelmingly condemns not
only Islam per se, Muslim immigration in Europe,
and multiculturalism, but also all the neo-Nazi,
racial supremacist rants against these "evils".
Breivik, the mass bomber who loves crappy
Eurovision songs and the US cop show The
Shield, and owns legitimate licenses for a
Glock pistol, an automatic rifle and a shotgun is
a typical convert of the new, slightly more
sophisticated pan-European ultra-right narrative -
according to which the battle for the soul of
Europe will be fought on cultural grounds.
After a brief visit to Denmark and
southern Sweden in the autumn of 2010, I had
already touched on these broader themes in Letter
from Islamophobistan (Asia Times Online,
October 22, 2010).
Breivik goes one step
ahead by weaponizing the new thinking - according
to which it's not a question of Muslims being
biologically inferior to the Christian West; the
problem is the tenets of Islam are absolutely
incompatible with the West.
It's all about
culture. "They" don't share "our values" and our
way of life. As a shrewd public relations move,
this culturalist explanation is bound to attract
even moderate Europeans.
Breivik and his
ilk blame Western parliamentary democracy as a
whole - political correctness included - for
allowing Muslims in Europe to establish themselves
as Trojan horses. Everything and everyone is a
threat - from al-Qaeda to the bureaucratic
European Union (EU) and the multicultural United
Nations (UN). Breivik and his kind are
Huntingtonesque all the way - fearing a clash of
civilizations right at home.
No wonder the
next logical step was for Breivik to become a
modern-day version of the Knights Templars
extolled in his rambling manifesto - and thus set
an example. The Knights' agenda; to "seize
political and military control of Western European
countries and implement a cultural conservative
political agenda".
"Al-Qaeda" - or the
nebula of franchises and copycats commonly bundled
as "al-Qaeda" - does not have the resources to
attack Europe, and this is not the priority
anyway; the priority is AfPak, Central Asia and
India, as detailed by al-Qaeda's military
commander Ilyas Kashmiri. But the priority of
Christian fundamentalist terror is definitely
Europe. And the attacks will come via loners such
as Breivik as well as organized groups.
Western progressives must be on red alert.
Taboos will have to be smashed - especially by
identifying the contorted but most of the time
crude strategies employed by ultra-right Christian
fundamentalism and Zionists to foment Islamophobia
in the West. For instance, both Islamophobes
and hardcore Zionists see the Israeli subjugation
of Palestine as Israel defending itself in a clash
of civilizations. Model disciple Breivik hails
notorious American Islamophobes such as Pam Geller
and Daniel Pipes as much as he abhors Norwegian
support for an independent, sovereign Palestinian
state.
Breivik wrote, "It's very
hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists
different from each other. They are all supporters
of hate-ideologies. Not all Muslims, Nazis and
Marxists are conservative; most of them are
moderate. But does it matter?"
It doesn't;
fascism is an equal-opportunity seducer. There
will be blood - a lot more blood, as Europe
confronts its own heart of darkness. Beware the
return - en masse - of the pale blue-eyed
Christian crusader.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
