ike every other citizen of Oslo,
I have walked in the streets and buildings that have been blown away. I
have even spent time on the island where young political activists were
massacred. I share the fear and pain of my country. But the question is
always why, and this violence was not blind.
The terror of Norway has not come from Islamic
extremists. Nor has it come from the far left even though both these
groups have been accused time after time of being the inner threat to
our “way of living”. Up to and including the terrifying hours in the
afternoon of July 22, the little terror my country has experienced has
come from the far right.
For decades political violence in this country has been
almost the sole preserve of neo-Nazis and other racist groups. During
the 1970s they bombed left-wing bookstores and a May Day demonstration.
In the 1980s two neo-Nazis were executed because they were suspected of
betraying the group. In the past two decades two non-white Norwegian
boys have died as a result of racist attacks. No foreign group has
killed or hurt people on Norwegian territory since the second world war
except for the Israeli security force, Mossad, which targeted and killed
an innocent man by mistake in Lillehammer in 1973.
But even with this history, when this devastating terror
hit us, we instantly suspected the Islamic world. It was the jihadis. It
had to be. It was immediately denounced as an attack on Norway, on our
way of life. In the streets of Oslo, young women wearing hijabs and
Arab-looking men were harassed as soon as the news broke.
Small wonder. For at least 10 years we have been told
that terror comes from the east. That an Arab is suspicious, that all
Muslims are tainted. We regularly see people of colour being examined in
private rooms in airport security; we have endless debates on the limits
of “our” tolerance. As the Islamic world has become the Other, we have
begun to think that what differentiates “us” from “them” is the ability
to slaughter civilians in cold blood.
There is, of course, another reason why everybody looked
for al-Qaeda. Norway has been part of the war in Afghanistan for 10
years, we took part in the Iraq war for some time and we are eager
bombers of Tripoli. There is a limit to how long you can partake in war
before war reaches you.
But although we all knew it, the war was rarely
mentioned when the terrorist hit us. Our first response was rooted in
irrationality: it had to be “them”. I felt it myself. I feared that the
war we took abroad had come to Norway. And what then? What would happen
to our society? To tolerance, public debate and most of all to our
settled immigrants and their Norwegian-born children?
It was not thus. Once again the heart of darkness lies
buried deep within ourselves. The terrorist was a white Nordic male; not
a Muslim but a Muslim-hater.
As soon as this was established, the slaughter was
discussed as the deed of a madman; it was no longer seen as primarily an
attack on our society. The rhetoric changed, the headlines of the
newspapers shifted their focus. Nobody talks about war any more. When
“terrorist” is used, it is most certainly singular, not plural – a
particular individual rather than an undefined group which is easily
generalised to include sympathisers and anyone else you fancy. The
terrible act is now officially a national tragedy. The question is:
would it have been thus if the killer was a madman with an Islamic
background?
I also believe that the killer was mad. To hunt down and
execute teenagers on an island for an hour, you surely must have taken
leave of your senses. But just as 9/11 or the bombing of the subway in
London, this is madness with both a clinical and a political cause.
Anyone who has glanced at the web pages of racist groups
or followed the online debates of Norwegian newspapers will have seen
the rage with which Islamophobia is being spread; the poisonous hatred
with which anonymous writers sting anti-racist liberals and the left is
only too visible. The July 22 terrorist has participated in many such
debates. He has been an active member of one of the biggest Norwegian
political parties, the populist right party until 2006. He left them and
sought his ideology instead among the community of anti-Islamist groups
on the Internet.
When the world believed this to be an act of
international Islamist terrorism, state leaders, from Obama to Cameron,
all stated that they would stand by Norway in our struggle. Which
struggle will that be now? All western leaders have the same problem
within their own borders. Will they now wage war on home-grown
right-wing extremism? On Islamophobia and racism?
Some hours after the bomb blast, the Norwegian prime
minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said that our answer to the attack should be
more democracy and more openness. Compared to Bush’s response to the
attacks of 9/11, there is good reason to be proud of this. But in the
aftermath of the most dreadful experience in Norway since the second
world war, I would like to go further. We need to use this incident to
strike a blow to the intolerance, racism and hatred that is growing not
just in Norway, nor even only in Scandinavia, but throughout Europe.
