Norwegian public figures respond to terrorist attacks

Helge Hoibraaten, a professor of philosophy from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), said the massacre was an attack “on the heart of the Norwegian state and its most important political party by a radical conservative adherent of the idea of an integral West or, to be more exact, of Abendland.”

Hoibraaten said the attack had powerful symbolic meaning and explained: “For the place of the bomb was the place of Einar Garhardsen, the prime minister of the country in the years 1945 to 1965, or most of those years, always as the head of the social democratic Labor Party. The attack would have had more chance of killing politicians if it had been performed at another time. But the main objective was to afterwards kill the youth elite of the party spending summer holiday on an island not far from the capital. The terrorist succeeded with [this] completely, and it also meant killing many representatives of minority [groups in] Norway and, hence, of the multicultural condition of Norway.”

He also recalled that Anders Breivik, the gunman, had posted a 1,500-page manifesto online to defend his murderous act, which Hoibraaten noted was staged just after former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland had given a speech on the island and one day before the current prime minister was to speak the next day. “These two were, thus, not the physical aim of the attack on the party, but only the youth. His ideas revolve around an integral notion of culture which he thinks is at the point of being lost in the multicultural turn of Europe. The culture he dreams of is the old one where men were men and strong, and women were women and submissive, among other things. He is against the rights revolution of liberal modernity, and when he claims the status of original Europeans for his supporters, it is an ironic twist on the idea of rights to original peoples like the Inuit, Sami (Lapps) and Indians. He thinks Europe was reduced to such a status by the threat from and the influence of Islam, which has nearly won, according to him, in Norway through the social democratic party. Therefore, this party has to be severely punished and the thing [to do] is to kill too many rather than too few."

The professor also noted that the attacker's court statement that the “the killings were gruesome, but necessary” indicated that he adhered to a brand of cultural conservatism which is much more radical than any idea of cultural radicalism. “It presupposes a violent return to a past in which the West, in the sense of the Abendland, not NATO or the EU, attains power through its Christian Temple Knights in a new war on Islam. His idea of Christianity is a fairly un-Christian mishmash of ideas of strength, not forgiveness.”

Hoibraaten underlined the attacker's theological incompatibility with fundamental notions of Christianity saying: “There is no trace of the incarnation, in which God becomes merciful through incarnating himself in Christ, i.e., a finite human being who can suffer like other finite human beings. It is that Christ who says, ‘Love thine enemies,' whereas in the history of Christianity [there] has also [been] a strong tendency to think of Christ as the victorious Christ who returned to the right side of God. The Victorious Christ was used to justify war and violence [against] the Muslim world, among other things. The ‘weak' Christianity of Christ the incarnated, suffering on the cross, can be paralleled with what the terrorist calls ‘cultural Marxism,' by which he [principally] means the Jewish School of thinkers called the Frankfurt School.”

Shoaib Sultan, the secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Norway, said Breivik seemed to be motivated by “a festering hatred for multicultural society and Islam.”

Sultan said he hoped the attack will contribute to more constructive debates and discussions on multiculturalism and that “pure hatred [will be] rejected even more strongly.”

Sultan said he was shocked by the attack, but was not surprised that it had come from a homegrown terrorist. “In an article a few years back, which I wrote with Oyvind Strommenn, we pointed towards the far right as a source for terror which was overlooked. Unfortunately, we were right,” he said.

He also said he did not believe the attack will change Europeans' prejudices against Muslims. “The people who see Muslims as a threat usually overlook facts. … Hatred is not rational. But for many people who are in the middle […], hopefully [the attack] will force them to rethink the rhetoric.”

He said the fallout from the attack in terms of the influence far-right groups have on European society would be more uncertainty and anxiety among most people. “But I think society at large will reject this hateful discourse,” he added.

Sultan said the attack did not diminish al-Qaeda as a threat by itself, but was likely to force people to rethink stereotypes. He also expressed his opinion that the Norwegian government has handled the attack in the right way, saying it believes that “more openness and more democracy” are the only remedies.

But why did the attack target Norwegians and not Muslims? According to Sultan: “They attack the society because it enabled Muslims to come. Also, many Muslims were attacked and hurt in this as well. Muslims today are an [integral] part of the Norwegian society; we cannot talk about Muslims and Norwegians as mutually exclusive entities.”

Sultan said he hoped that the Norwegian society will rise again and become an even better and more inclusive one than before the tragedy.