For many years, a quiz entitled “Al Gore or the Unabomber?” circulated on conservative Web sites. The quiz juxtaposed passages from the former vice president’s eco-manifesto “Earth in the Balance” with quotes from Theodore Kaczynski’s critiques of industrial civilization and asked the reader to guess which writer was which. ...
Enterprising left-wing bloggers have already begun to play a similar game with Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who apparently justified last week’s mass murder of helpless teenage campers with a 1,500-page “compendium” calling for a right-wing revolution against Europe’s ruling class. Judging by the manifesto’s contents, Breivik has roughly the same relationship to the cultural right that Kaczynski had to certain strains of environmentalism. The darkest aspects of his ideology belong strictly to the neo-fascist fringe. But many of his beliefs and arguments echo the rhetoric of mainstream cultural conservatives, in Europe and America alike.
As I've already pointed out, that's truth. And as I could have (and did!) anticipate, a certain far-left Professor, sporting the tiniest of woodys, was quick to 'tar' me with this heinous killer. I've answered him already; but Douthat is easier on the clueless Left than I with my mighty cluebat.
Douthat...
Despite what the Norwegian authorities suggested over the weekend, those beliefs probably aren’t a form of Christian fundamentalism. Breivik’s writings bear no resemblance to the theology of a Jerry Falwell or an Oral Roberts, and his nominal Christianity (“I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he writes at one point) seems to be more of an expression of European identity politics and anti-Islamic chauvinism than any genuine religious fervor.
But it’s fair to call Breivik a right-winger. As Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz put it, the Norwegian killer 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” to be. His compendium quotes repeatedly from conservative writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s filled with attacks on familiar right-wing targets: Secularism and political correctness; the European Union and the sexual revolution; radical Islam and the academic left.
Those 'targets' (watch your descriptors there, Douthat! Wouldn't want Markos Moulitsas to label you as a 'Sarah Palin'!) are perfectly valid. There's been great strife and conflict in Europe and England over the flood of immigrants of Muslim belief; cartoonists have been 'targeted' for poking fun at a particular Prophet who was also a child-rapist; many more people have been killed by Muslims who act badly than by any so-called 'Christian' 'terrorists'.
Douthat...
This means that last week’s tragedy is also a political opportunity for Europe’s left-of-center politicians, should they choose to respond to Breivik’s rampage the way President Bill Clinton responded to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Timothy McVeigh’s connections to Republican politics were several degrees short of tangential, but Clinton successfully linked the heartland terrorist to talk radio and the government shutdown, implying that McVeigh’s crime was part of a broader story of antigovernment conservatism run amok. Judging by Breivik’s manifesto, the Continent’s left-wing parties won’t have to work nearly that hard to connect the Norwegian’s act of terrorism to Europe’s broader rightward turn.
We remember Bill Clinton's reaction, don't we? That party-boob seized on the moment and did nothing more than deepen the chasm forming between Americans, Right and Left. Instead of using that catastrophe to draw people together (as George Bush did after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/01), Bill Clinton gouged at the eyes of Conservative critics. He did not help either side with his antics.
Douthat...
But this doesn’t mean that conservatives need to surrender their convictions. The horror in Norway no more discredits Merkel’s views on Muslim assimilation than Ted Kaczynski’s bombs discredited Al Gore’s views on the dark side of industrialization. On the big picture, Europe’s cultural conservatives are right: Mass immigration really has left the Continent more divided than enriched, Islam and liberal democracy have not yet proven natural bedfellows and the dream of a postnational, postpatriotic European Union governed by a benevolent ruling elite looks more like a folly every day.
That's the bottom line, and Douthat is smart enough to see it.
No matter what the Left comes out with in the coming days, the bottom line is that Muslim extremism and Koranic Kulture is anathema to a settled, peaceful community IF Muslims fail to assimilate (read: 'Lose their Religion'). And a fiery Iman can deftly use the Koran to 'persuade' young Muslim men to do things that it'd be very difficult for a Christian preacher to persuade a young Christian to do.
While I think when I see Mormons riding bicycles in this hot weather, going door-to-door in their white buttoned-down shirts and ties, that 'that's crazy!', I certainly don't have to worry about one of 'em having a strapped-on explosive device.
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