The Norway massacre may shape the views of an entire generation. Already, youth parties, both liberal and conservative, are reporting membership surges. {The article treats Norway's Progress Party as a conservative party, which I think is a gross mistake. Good conservatives are needed in this fight just as much as are good liberals.}
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Breivik may have succeeded in drawing attention to his anti-immigration views, Narum said, but his tactics may have made the climate too sensitive for right-wing parties to even raise the issue in the foreseeable future.

The long-term political impact of the attacks remains unclear. "But one way or another, I believe this will have consequences for the whole political climate for quite a long time," Narum said.

... It has seemed to me that Europe has been letting its extreme right wing flourish. The Republican Party in the U.S. was happy to welcome its new Tea Party fringe. ...

There has been, as always after such horrific incidents, a wealth of commentary on their causes and consequences. A prominent theme is the rehashing of the enduring but misplaced view that the radical right in Europe is dangerously neglected. For example, a New York Times report discusses the killings in terms of “a wake-up call for security services” in Europe and the United States which “may have underestimated the threat of domestic radicals” - a view reminiscent of the one that sees the Columbine killings as an indication of the popularity of Marilyn Manson (see Nicholas Kulish, “Norway Attacks Put Spotlight on Rise of Right-Wing Sentiment in Europe”, 23 July 2011).
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In the European media and among law-enforcement agencies too, extreme and radical-right groups have long been the object of great (even disproportionate) attention. Think of the many exposés by undercover journalists who have infiltrated various parties: among them Peter Rensen the (Dutch) Center Democrats, Anne Tristan the (French) Front National, Yaron Svoray the broader German neo-Nazi scene. Think too of the embarrassing federal constitutional court (FCC) case in Germany against the National Democratic Party (NPD), which was abandoned because the party was so infiltrated by the intelligence agencies that the court could no longer distinguish real party leaders from agents and informers.

There has also been strong legal and security action against the radical right in the name of democratic struggle against fascist evil. During the 1980s and 1990s in particular, radical-right politicians - even if they represented legal political parties and were not involved in violence - have been fired from (public) jobs, beaten up by “anti-fascists”, and spied upon by secret services. In addition, extreme-right activists have been given long jail sentences for what are essentially ideological crimes. The Austrian neo-Nazi Gottfried Küssel, for example, was sentenced to eleven years in prison for actively propagating National Socialism; and the punishment of violent extreme rightists for their crimes has often been supplemented by an extra sentence that takes their motivations into account.

In short, the far right has been and is taken very seriously in Europe. It receives exceptional attention in academia and the media, and both the European Union and its individual member-states have developed an extensive legal framework to combat its excesses. True, the diligent enforcement of legislation is lacking in some countries (especially in eastern Europe); but few if any countries are truly “blind in the right eye,” as some on the far left claim.

What I do take seriously is Mudde's observation that Breivik may have been more influenced by the "''Eurabia'” theory of American 'counter-jihadists' such as Bruce Bawer, Bat Ye’or, Pamela Geller, and Robert Spencer." So, yes, I understand "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" We have enough work to do here to expunge these haters from our political dialogue. For that, more speech and more democracy can accomplish the job.

Maybe somebody will be able to say some day that America is again the leading proponent of the ideals of democracy, tolerance, and human rights. That voice has been submerged beneath the cries of fear and revenge of the past decade.

He called on his country to react by more tightly embracing, rather than abandoning, the culture of tolerance that Anders Behring Breivik said he was trying to destroy.

“The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg insisted at a news conference. . . .

Stoltenberg strongly defended the right to speak freely -- even if it includes extremist views such as Breivik’s.

“We have to be very clear to distinguish between extreme views, opinions — that’s completely legal, legitimate to have. What is not legitimate is to try to implement those extreme views by using violence,” he said in English.

The first is the internet and its tendency (alongside many positive effects) to allow people motivated by a cause to develop exclusivist ties and understandings of identity, perhaps becoming more extreme in the process. The easy availability of propaganda on the net and its appeal to those who seek confirmation of their existing views can become part of a reinforcing spiral where the “echo chamber” of certainty is not balanced by any contrary or challenging view. This seems to have been among the processes at work that led to the Norwegian tragedy.

The second is the use of categorisation as a way of defining, limiting - and targeting - sections of the population. Again, Breivik’s “manifesto” and his terrible actions are a dreadful example of where this way of thinking, taken to the extreme, can lead. But it is also prevalent at a policy level, in (for example) European counter-terrorism policies which conceive of individuals and “suspect communities” in homogeneous ways and attribute to them fixed religious, ethnic, or cultural affiliations - without appreciating either the huge varieties that exist within communities or the great changes that individuals undergo.
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The third problem is the mentality that divides the world into two sides, the goodness or purity of one giving it the right to attack and kill the other. Breivik’s outpourings are pervaded by this mentality, and in this they resemble the mindset of al-Qaida and similar groups ostensibly at the opposite side of the spectrum.

This suggests that the real worry should be less particular forms of extremism (European right-wing or Islamist, for example) than the shared phenomenon of homogenising, reductive, and dogmatic forms of thought, built around rigid understandings of identity and enmity, and impermeable to dialogue with anyone outside the lucky tribe.

It is deeply ironic that what could be the most liberating medium for the exchange of information in all of human history could instead be trapping people inside narrow boxes.

Leon Blum was elected 3 times in France at a time anti-Semitism was very fashionable.

Good point. There was also Pierre Mendes-France.

Just asked website Jew or Not Jew for a ruling on Mendes France.

[link]Geller Scrubs Violent Line From Norwegian Islamophobe’s 2007 E-mail,http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/08/01/geller-scrubs-violent-line-from-norwegian-islamophobes-2007-e-mail/[/link]

Pamela Geller, the reigning queen of anti-Muslim hysteria, has been feeling intensifying heat since Anders Breivik’s deadly rampage in Norway – and she’s not handling it well.

Geller was one of several prominent anti-Muslim activists cited by Breivik in the 1,500-word manifesto he posted on the Internet hours before his murderous bomb and shooting attack that left 77 Norwegians, mostly teenagers, dead. When news of the attack first broke, Geller published a post on her Atlas Shrugs website all but gloating that she had presaged Islamic violence in Scandinavia – only to discover, embarrassingly, that the attacker was not a jihadist Muslim but a Norwegian national who admired and studied her own rhetoric. Geller awkwardly backtracked, posting a rambling self-defense asserting that Breivik had only mentioned her by name once – while downplaying that he had cited her blog a dozen times, mentioned her co-founding partner of Stop Islamization of America, Robert Spencer, 64 times, and suggested that Spencer should win the Nobel Peace Prize.Now, one of Geller’s most relentless irritants, blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (LGF), has determined that Geller has deleted the most damning passage from a June 24, 2007, E-mail she received, and posted, from an unidentified Norwegian correspondent bemoaning what he viewed as a surge in Islamic immigration.

The E-mailer begins by presenting the grossly inaccurate statistic that Oslo’s Muslim population in 2007 was 50% and growing. (Norway is estimated by the U.S. government to be 2% Muslim as of July 2011; even if every Norwegian Muslim lived in Oslo proper, the city would still be no more than about 18 percent Muslim). Adding in a medically unsustainable birth rate of 1.2 births per year per Muslim woman, the writer predicts the city would be almost two-thirds Muslim by 2010.

[link]More at the link.,http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/08/01/geller-scrubs-violent-line-from-norwegian-islamophobes-2007-e-mail/[/link]

Geller being concerned that something is “insensitive and inappropriate” is about as believable as the KKK being concerned that the rope for a lynching is too thick. Virtually everything she writes is insensitive and inappropriate.

Uh oh, our good buddy Joey Farah and WND show up in the manifesto.

http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/blog/inde ... s-buddies/

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Where does that leave the American way of life? Where does that leave European Americans that created the U.S. Constitution? Quite frankly, they will be running for their lives with examples like Detroit, Michigan and Los Angeles, California. They will be driven to create enclaves in the interior of the U.S. while this civilization declines.
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As we lose our language, our culture and our “melting pot” of commonality, we face terrific internal disconnects on every level. All tribes compete to dominate in one way or the other. With so many tribes facing off in America, it cannot be a positive ending for any of us.

How do we stop it? How do we save ourselves?

We must engage a total moratorium of all immigration into the United States of America. It’s that simple, that urgent and that mandatory. Without taking action, we will continue down the path of diversity and tolerance until we morph into chaos and violence. If we happen to escape chaos and violence, we will surely become a nation of untrusting, tense and fitful strangers.