Justin Raimondo

Anders Behring Breivik and the Axis of Hate

Suggestions that the “counter-jihadist” ideology spread by such websites as Frontpagemag.com, run by neocon David Horowitz, and the affiliated “Jihad Watch,” inspired – and provoked – the Norway killer Anders Behring Breivik have been met with cries of outrage by the neoconservative Right. This is hardly surprising: confronted with the sight of someone who put their hateful and inherently violent ideology into practice, what else are they supposed to do? There is, however, a superficially reasonable case to be made against drawing any larger lesson from the Norwegian tragedy. As Gene Healy, a vice president of the Cato Institute, put it:

“In general, invoking the ideological meanderings of psychopaths is a stalking horse for narrowing permissible dissent. Former New York Times columnist Frank Rich provided a classic in the genre with his February 2010 piece ‘The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged,’ in which he railed against the dangerous climate of anti-government rhetoric and warned that a ‘tax protester’ who flew a plane into an Internal Revenue Service building in February may be a dark harbinger of Tea Party terrorism to come. (No such luck, Frank.)

“But blaming Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner, or Al Gore for the Unabomber makes about as much sense as blaming Martin Scorsese and Jodie Foster for inciting John Hinckley. There’s little to be learned from the acts of ‘the obsessed and deranged.’ But these incidents ought to teach us not to use tragedy to score partisan points.”

All of which is true – up to a point. This is generally true, but in the case of Breivik, however, what Healy misses is the specific content of the ideas expounded in the killer’s online manifesto [.pdf], and the video which summarizes his stance. For what Breivik and the counter-jihadists are saying is that Islam is at war with the West – and that a “culture of appeasement” prevalent on our side of the barricades is delivering us to the Enemy. If you go through the material published by Robert Spencer, who is quoted in some 64 instances by Breivik, one central idea leaps out at you: we are at war with the one billion Muslims on the planet Earth. Not that we should be at war, or will be at war – the battle, in Spencer’s view, has already commenced, not on account of anything we in the West have done, but because Islamic doctrine is inherently violent and expansionist. Likewise, Pamela Geller, his collaborator in “Stop the Islamization of America” – and its European affiliate, which Breivik supported – denies the very existence of moderates in the Muslim camp.

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Stephen Lendman

South Korean farmers shout slogans during a rally against
the U.S.-South Korea FTA, Free Trade Agreement in Seoul.

Corporate predators seek cheap labor worldwide in countries like China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Haiti, Jordan, and many others. Employed in global sweatshops, they work up to 90 or more hours a week for sub-poverty wages under horrific conditions, enduring harassment, beatings, sexual abuse and rape.

According to the group Sweatshop Watch:

"A sweatshop is a workplace that violates the law and where workers are subject to:

● extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or long hours;
● poor working conditions, such as health and safety hazards;
● arbitrary discipline, such as verbal or physical abuse, or
● fear and intimidation when they speak out, organize, or attempt to form a union."

It's mainly a women's rights issue as 90% of the workforce is female, between the ages of 15 - 25.

The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (IGLHR) "investigates and exposes human and labor rights abuses committed by (transnational) corporations producing goods in the developing world."

Two June reports discussed hellish conditions in Jordanian garment factories, where workers are ruthlessly exploited and abused. According to IGLHR's Charles Kernaghan, they're:

"stripped of their passports, forced to work (up to) grueling 99 and a half hour work weeks (minimally 78 hours), while being shortchanged of their rightful wages, housed in overcrowded, primitive dorms infested with bedbugs (with no heat or hot water), and subjected to verbal and physical abuse."

In addition, "the food is awful." It's always the same, low quality, and never enough. For breakfast, it's two pieces of stale bread, lentil soup and tea. Lunch is rice and "old chicken." For dinner, women prefer preparing their own meals in their dorm, using an electric hotplate.

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Wayne Madsen

Israel’s most secret and tried-and-true weapon is the “false flag” terrorist attack.

State-sponsored terrorism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective [and] is employed by governments -- or more often by factions within governments -- against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups.”

On July 22, a bomb, said to be an Oklahoma City-type explosive device, crafted with fertilizer and diesel fuel, blew up in downtown Oslo, Norway, in the heart of the government district. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed in a Norwegian police uniform opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utøya in Tyri fjord. Access to the island was by boat only. Over 100 people were killed in the twin terror attacks.

Almost immediately, the world’s corporate media began pushing the story that those who were responsible for the blast and mass shooting were associated with “Al Qaeda” and other radical Islamist groups. CNN’s Washington, DC chief anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby and a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, began his late afternoon program by pointing to “Al Qaeda” and radical Islamists as the chief culprits for the terrorist attacks in Norway.

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