Saturday, July 23, 2011

Kinda like Amy Winehouse's views on rehab (just say no, no, no)

This was a good op-ed headline:
Sarah Palin's Views on Abstinence Lead to Second Grandchild
... Link fixed (thx, WTBAL).

... Breivik, the Norwegian murderer, apparently posted a long manifesto online before his attacks:
Titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” it equates liberalism and multiculturalism with “cultural Marxism,” which the document says is destroying European Christian civilization.
Pity he wasn't American; instead of killing dozens of kids of liberal parents, he could've just been elected to the House in 2010 and devoted himself to destroying the American economy.

... The Islamophobic U.S. bloggers whom Breivik quoted in his manifesto are crying "foul" on anyone's comparing their beliefs with Breivik's.
Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and a consultant on terrorism, said it would be unfair to attribute Mr. Breivik’s violence to the writers who helped shape his world view. But at the same time, he said the counterjihad writers do argue that the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged. Well, they and their writings are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.”

“This rhetoric,” he added, “is not cost-free.”
One blogger had no problem identifying the real culprit:
Pamela Geller, an outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”

“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.
What a beautifully simple and efficient belief system.

The article suggests that the U.S., like Norway, has focused its preventive efforts on Islamic terrorism to the point that we could well be overlooking a few Breiviks ourselves.

(We are annoyed that one of these hatemongers styles himself "Baron Bodissey" after a Jack Vance character whose enormously compendious book Life supplies Vance with the occasional epigraph in the Demon Princes series.)

(Also, Breivik plagiarized the Unabomber manifesto. I hope that composition teachers around the world are using him as an example.)

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