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The Man Who Hated Women

Shocker: Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is a racist and a misogynist, and his shooting rampage was inspired by his hatred of women, Muslims, and brown people. He uses a lot of the same tropes as Men’s Rights activists. He was encouraged by anti-Islam bloggers in the United States who routinely warn of the “Islamicization” of the West, including Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.

It is unfair to say that websites like Spencer’s caused the violence in Norway. But I think this quote is pretty right-on:

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.”

Some further reading:

Missing: The ‘Right’ Babies
Norway Killer’s Hatred of Women


23 thoughts on The Man Who Hated Women

  1. For a while there I routinely read Pamela Geller, mainly to laugh at her. I found it difficult to believe that anyone would take this self-aggrandizing and endlessly self-promoting blowhard seriously.

    Now I have taken a different approach altogether.

  2. Well, yes, exactly true.

    Push forward to note: Gunmen killing kids in classrooms and flying small aircraft into buildings are features and not bugs of the system. Making people feel less secure is desired, and desired for amplifying the guard labor of the authoritarians in the masses. Panopticon in the West, replacing basijis and their like.

    The only reason *this* particular attack might be undesirable is that it might make collective action more feasible in the context of crafted noise and intimidation. This would mean actual social ramifications for anyone who spouts elimination rhetoric, like lowered promotion prospects, nonadmittance to good schools, high status women being unavailable, or it could even direct attention to the basic ideological nature of the media architecture and make demands for changes that would reduce elite control of society.

    I think it’s very important to grok just how much people identify with aggressors. It takes *alot*, including direct, non psychologically displaceable pain in order for people to truly renounce violent tactics. It’s why it’s so hard to control bullying in schools, so on and so forth. It takes a very determined/non-lazy school administration to do so.

  3. I thought he said he did this to kill Muslims, I didn’t hear about a specific target on women.

  4. Azalea, obviously he didn’t do it to kill Muslims since he targeted Norwegian government officials and youths. He’s anti-Muslim and the policies in Norway (and Europe for that matter) that support immigration.

  5. FashionablyEvil: I’m not generally a fan of William Saletan, but I thought his analysis on Slate was pretty good.

    I liked that article as well, but I have a small disagreement with his conclusion. I think it’s worth distinguishing between simply belonging to the same group as someone who perpetrates violence (whether you actively denounce them or simply say nothing) and belonging to the same group as someone who perpetrates violence AND making statements that support or encourage their violent acts.

    A white westerner saying that all muslims are violent and determined destroy our way of life is, to me, a far cry from simply being muslim and not saying anything when other muslims perpetrate violence, whether or not they claim they are doing it in the name of Islam. I don’t think the former is directly to blame for the violent acts of those who share their beliefs, but I do think they’re sufficiently complicit in the atmosphere that fostered the violence to discuss the indirect link between the two.

  6. To remain silent in the face of abuse is to side with the abuser. We can waste time parsing whether that’s “as bad as” actually egging on the abuser, or we can stop sitting silent in the face of abuse and start speaking out.

  7. Vigée: obviously he didn’t do it to kill Muslims since he targeted Norwegian government officials and youths

    Some of whom are Muslims, and immigrants of colour or children of immigrants of colour.

  8. Azalea:
    I thought he said he did this to kill Muslims, I didn’t hear about a specific target on women.

    One article I read suggested that there had been accounts stating his very first target at the camp was a woman, but it was an unsourced statement. Given his relatively thoroughness and that the overall point according to his manifesto was quantity and not specific individuals, it’s hard to say what his target selection process was. I remember reading at least one survivor account where he said he begged for his life and actually spared, but he does not know why (and I believe this particular individual was a white male). I think it might be possible that Breivik, consciously or otherwise, preferred to target girls and people of colour at the camp, but it’s impossible to say for certain. His manifesto certainly reveals enormous hatred and disdain for women and people of colour in general. The title of this post is an oversimplification, I think.

  9. Jadey: One article I read suggested that there had been accounts stating his very first target at the camp was a woman, but it was an unsourced statement.

    In fact, it was the Daily Beast article the link to which Jill provided in this post. Sorry, I’ve read so much on this I’m losing track of what I found where.

  10. Right, obviously, but the stated targets were not Muslims in particular. He did not do it to expressly kill Muslims as Azalea said, but in order to draw attention to his manifesto.

    Jadey: Some of whom are Muslims, and immigrants of colour or children of immigrants of colour.

  11. “Some of whom are Muslims, and immigrants of colour or children of immigrants of colour.”

    Sure, but the PMs office and a leading political party’s youth group aren’t the sort of environments that would be particularly welcoming for muslims/immigrants (or women for that matter). I’m not saying there weren’t any od these groups there; but those environments strike me as being where wealthy white males would be over-represented. I’m not saying he didn’t hate women/muslims/immigrates, but the actual attack seems focused on the traditional power structure.

    1. Azalea: Well *he* has said that was his reason but what does he know.
      http://news.yahoo.com/norway-suspect-deems-killings-atrocious-needed-013354792.html

      I’m also unclear on where you’re getting that he was trying to kill Muslims. It seems that he was trying to kill people who favored more liberal immigration policies, which he opposes because of his anti-Muslim views. He’s an Islamophobe and a bigot to be sure, but these shootings were targeting people with particular political views, not necessarily religious ones.

  12. james:
    “Some of whom are Muslims, and immigrants of colour or children of immigrants of colour.”

    Sure, but the PMs office and a leading political party’s youth group aren’t the sort of environments that would be particularly welcoming for muslims/immigrants (or women for that matter). I’m not saying there weren’t any od these groups there; but those environments strike me as being where wealthy white males would be over-represented. I’m not saying he didn’t hate women/muslims/immigrates, but the actual attack seems focused on the traditional power structure.

    Organized by the youth wing of the ruling Labor Party, the camp has become a kind of multicultural incubator in recent years. Many of the victims in Friday’s shooting were the children of immigrants from Africa and Asia who have begun to stake out a greater role for themselves in Norwegian society.

    Regarding his purpose in the shootings, it was apparently, according to his manifesto and court statements so far (as relayed by the judge and his defense), more about making a revolutionary statement to the government to force them to change than about just killing people specifically – one of the things that he has said is that it was “gruesome, but necessary”. (Whether or not he is being truthful about how he felt about the killings remains to be seen.) Hence the specific label of political terrorist, and not just a spree/serial killer.

  13. Ack, that was vague. More clearly:

    He wants Muslims out of Norway, but he wants the government to do it, and these particular attacks were his way of demonstrating the consequences of their current policies so as to motivate them to change their policies. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if during his killing spree he had a preferential bias to shoot at the female and POC youth, given his feelings toward them, although clearly he was also trying to kill as many people as possible (but did deliberately spare at least one person’s life).

  14. I may be drunk right now but hes a sick fuck and i hope justice comes to him. hes a fucking terrroist no matterwhat else anyone else calls him and deserves to be treated as as such.

  15. james:
    “Some of whom are Muslims, and immigrants of colour or children of immigrants of colour.”

    Sure, but the PMs office and a leading political party’s youth group aren’t the sort of environments that would be particularly welcoming for muslims/immigrants (or women for that matter). I’m not saying there weren’t any od these groups there; but those environments strike me as being where wealthy white males would be over-represented. I’m not saying he didn’t hate women/muslims/immigrates, but the actual attack seems focused on the traditional power structure.

    In Stoltenberg’s cabinet there’s actually a slight majority of women. Don’t know about his staff, but given Labour parties’ general preference in the Nordic countries, it should be close to equitable.

  16. This thread is very quiet compared to last week’s, where rising Islamophobic sentiment in Europe was being dismissed as ‘a few people being assholes’ and Muslims having ‘privilege thrash’.

    For far too long, the antics of the far right has been dismissed as ‘lone wolves’ and their viewpoints given succor in various media outlets. Last year, we even had the leaders of two European countries with large Muslim populations declare that multiculturalism had failed. The events in Norway are horrific, but I can’t say they are hugely shocking.

  17. Just read this pretty interesting article at Mother Jones about how, despite the popularity of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series, people tend to gloss over one of the central themes of it, which is the rise of right-wing and neo-Nazi violence in Sweden. According to this article, Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement has long been larger and more organized than that of Norway, but Norway had been catching up.

    Larsson was quite serious about fighting this movement during his journalism career, and lived under police protection due to serious death threats. Attempts were made on his colleagues who exposed the movement.

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