Wow. I guess he's never heard of young republicans or any other party youth wing.
If you listen to the whole thing, though, that's among the least offensive things he actually says. He agrees with Geet Wilders and (indirectly) this terrorist in his anti-muslim opinions, suggesting that Muslims are taking over Europe and that multiculturalism is a bad idea. According to Beck, it's not Islam that is evil; just the millions of people who ascribe to it like Ahmadinejad (whatever that means). The "others" should be supported.
He does back-peddle at the end, arguing with the tactics employed by this "madman." But he agrees with his apparent aim.
The stuff that spews from Beck's mouth sounds like that ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Fanning the flames of hatred
George Galloway
morningstaronline.co.uk
5th of August 2011
No-one can claim we have not been warned. Anders Behring Breivik's horrific massacre of scores of young social democrats in Norway stands as an appalling alarm of the filth that is being dredged up from the dark underbelly of European society as it spasms from one crisis to another.
It ought to serve as an urgent call to arms against the fascistic and racist forces that have been gaining ground from one end of the continent to the other. But European governments and elites show precious little sign of heeding the call.
Of course, the outrage and expressions of sympathy for the dead have been near universal. It was left to the likes of the grotesque, pig-like Glenn Beck in the US to pour bile over the victims, sickeningly likening the labour youth camp where they were shot to a "Hitler Youth rally." He may be on the extreme with his barbaric, bestial reaction. But the right-wing forces he speaks for on both sides of the Atlantic share a culpability, and nothing captured it more than the knee-jerk reaction of the right-wing media which defiled the memory of the slain even as they lay dying.
From Rupert Murdoch's Sun to the Greek daily Ta Nea, the immediate and baseless reaction was the same - this was the work of an Islamic extremist, most likely a splinter of al-Qaida and most likely homegrown. We don't know how many hijab-donning women got harassed or how many bearded Middle Eastern and Asian men got beaten in the hours that followed - hours in which the populist rags stuck to their prejudice despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
And this is the heart of the matter - Breivik meticulously planned his murder under his own steam. But he swam in a cesspit of right-wing fanaticism, topped up with the sewage of Islamophobia and racism that is pumped out daily by so much of the political class and their hangers on.
So accepted has that respectable version of racism become that it has penetrated the thinking of many even liberal commentators. Norway and Scandinavia generally have a far right problem so pronounced that it registers in the detective fiction that has become such a popular genre. But it was not only the rabid right that leapt to the conclusion that this monstrous crime must have been connected somehow to Islamism rather than Islamophobic hatred. It was the default position of many commentators.
And now we have the soul-searching, the anguished questioning on rolling news bulletins about how this could possibly happen. But we need look no further than Breivik himself and his 1,500-page manifesto. He cited with approval the English Defence League in Britain, the racist thugs who have gone from city to city trying - and sometimes getting frighteningly close to succeeding - to launch pogroms against Muslim communities. And yet far too often the authorities have treated those communities themselves, and those who have stood with them against the torrent of hatred, as the problem. The steer has come from above.
Earlier this year the government relaunched Prevent, the counter-terrorism initiative of the previous administration. It was replete with dire warnings about "Muslim extremism." It amplified the attacks on civil liberties that have simply ripped up rights that were won half a millennium ago and which survived the state of national emergency forced on this country during the second world war and the 30 years in which violence in the north of Ireland spilled onto the streets of Britain. But it went further and added a new twist.
Resources were to be directed against "non-violent" extremism, based on the refuted thesis that radically questioning the political set-up in Britain or fundamentally opposing our foreign policy and siding with its victims in some sense puts Muslims on a conveyor belt that leads to committing a 9/11 or 7/7. There's much that can be said to demolish the thinking behind this policy, which went hand in hand with David Cameron echoing his European counterparts and declaring in Munich - yes, just a couple of hundred metres away from the site of Hitler's failed Bierkeller putsch in 1923 - that multiculturalism had failed and that diversity was in some sense a seedbed for terrorism.
But after the Norway atrocity, the bankruptcy of this policy should be plain to all. In all its pages - like similar counterterrorism documents in Europe - it does not even mention the threat of violence from the extreme right. This despite the fact that in Britain we had our very own Breivik, the nailbomber David Copeland who targeted the symbols of a diverse and multiethnic Britain a decade ago in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho.
For terrorism had come to mean not the nihilistic violence that can issue from various political ideologies. Rather it came to be synonymous with Islamism. Conversely, Islamic identity and political engagement arising from it came to be seen as tantamount to or a stepping stone towards terrorist violence. So the possibility of far-right terrorism did not even enter the picture. This despite the fact that viciously violent right-wing formations have been growing across Europe.
You don't need to presume some conveyor belt leading from the far-right to murderous violence. The EDL and other groups are explicit in their calls for violence against Muslims, the left, trade unionists and even students who took to the streets at the end of last year against the rise in tuition fees. The links ought to be obvious, because what we are talking about here is simply fascism, a hallmark of which is inchoate violence carefully directed against minorities and all those who stand for greater freedom, civil rights and equality.
How has it come to this, that fascistic forces who inspired the horror in Norway could be allowed to march, threaten and spread poison with nary a peep from the authorities? To answer that I'm afraid we need to look beyond the lunatic fringe and even beyond Cameron's imitation of Margaret Thatcher's infamous "swamping speech" of 1978.
It has become commonplace for otherwise liberal commentators to identify not the far-right, but Europe's embattled 20 million-strong immigrant - often Muslim - minority as the real threat to our freedoms. The fascism they rail against is the perverse neologism "Islamofascism," used almost as a place-saver for Muslims who base their engagement in politics on their faith.
Sure, there are the usual disclaimers - that what they are opposed to is not Muslims per se, but to extremism. But the definition of what is extreme is so elastic that it comes to include the core beliefs of most Muslims. The forces driving this are very deep-seated and we should not expect this tide to be thrown back even by the tragedy in Norway, despite its scale.
Britain and Europe are at a moment of profound crisis and scapegoating is becoming the norm. Where, for 25 years, borders came down within - though they rose ever higher between Europe and the lands to its south and east - they are now being reinstated.
Neither the centre right nor the centre left is capable of identifying the failings of capitalism itself as the reason for this age of austerity and insecurity. Hence the resort to nasty, racialised and false explanations ranging from chauvinist slurs that blame the financial crisis in southern Europe on the supposed laziness of its peoples to the echoes of the anti-semitism of the inter-war years now identifying Muslims as an internal enemy, the fifth column of an external, existential threat.
So even as the condolences poured in to Oslo from other European capitals, the political classes were continuing to pursue the policies and scapegoating that sows the seeds for further horrors. And those commentators who have shamefully helped to create the anti-Muslim climate showed little sign of repentance, but instead vast amounts of sophistry in maintaining that this had nothing to do with them at all.
Despite all that, the awful meaning of last month's massacre is so clear that it is leading many more people to question where we are going. That's something that all progressives and leftists need urgently to build on.
Part of that is ensuring the most unified and massive response to the attempt by the EDL to gather in Tower Hamlets on September 3 and rampage through one of Britain's most diverse areas. Another aspect is drawing together all those considerable strands of opinion - from the trade unions, through Muslim organisations to community and campaign groups - which have tried to resist this slide towards reaction.
The Convention in Defence of Diversity and Against Islamophobia this October deserves the support of all who can see where the constant drip-feed of attacks on Muslims and on our multicultural society is leading us. We have been warned - it's time to gather ourselves and organise into a coherent force that can start to change the balance of public debate.
Mutual respect, valuing diversity and defending the vulnerable are far too important to be left in the hands of an Establishment which, despite its protestations, is not only failing to uphold them but is presiding over the conditions where it is xenophobic extremism that is tolerated in the name of liberalism.
Defending liberal values is far too important to be left to liberals.
------------------
If you've not seen the sort of disgusting bile that some right-wing nutters are saying, read this...
Anders Behring Breivik trial: Six days in the company of a mass murderer As Anders Breivik tried to justify his killing of more than 70 people to an Oslo court, David Blair was sitting a few rows behind him. It was a chilling experience.
David Blair,
The Daily Telegraph
21 Apr 2012
For six hours of testimony, day after day, his tone of voice scarcely altered. Whether Anders Behring Breivik was describing how he shot a teenage girl through the head, or disclosing that he named his rifle “Gungnir” after the magical spear of Odin, he addressed the court in the flat monotone of the failed telephone salesman he once was.
The voice gave little away, but the killer’s eyes, posture and physique spoke volumes. As the days wore on and he became unsettled by the prosecution’s questioning, white specks of dandruff flecked Breivik’s dark jacket, beads of sweat glistened on a face pockmarked by acne, and a motionless comb-over grew more slicked and gleaming.
Sitting a few rows behind him in the Oslo courtroom, I listened to his excruciating account of how he had dispatched his victims on Utoya island with a handgun if they were close by, or using a rifle if they happened to be at longer range. At that moment, I realised that I was near enough to the 33 year-old to have been in the former category. Suddenly, I had some small sense of how the people he killed would have seen him in their last moments: a ball of controlled aggression, with a round, perspiring face, and eyes that never seemed to blink.
Some of those in court alongside me knew exactly how he had appeared during his rampage on July 22 last year. From the moment that Breivik’s trial opened on Monday, court number 250 in Oslo held survivors of his massacre, along with relatives of the 77 people he killed. If I sometimes found it difficult to share a room with this killer, how must they have felt? And how would Norwegians react to a man who, in the words of the indictment, had committed “offences on a scale that has never previously been experienced in our country in modern time?”
In the event, there was none of the raw anger that would have been present had a British Breivik been in the dock of the Old Bailey. No voice was raised to heckle or jeer. No crowd gathered outside the court to flaunt its hatred. Instead, the Norwegians behaved with the forbearance and restraint of an eminently dignified society. They saw no need to parade their revulsion, not even after Breivik had given a minute-by-minute account of exactly what he did on Utoya island when it was filled with 500 camping teenagers.
In the space of an hour and a half, he murdered 67 with a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun, 33 of whom were under the age of 18. The youngest was a girl of only 14. Another two youthful campers drowned when they fled, panic-stricken, into the sea.
Breivik spoke about this for 90 uninterrupted minutes, piling detail on detail: among other things, he described exactly what happens when a high-velocity round strikes the human cranium. As he spoke, a handful of survivors quietly stood up and left the court. A few others wept silent tears. Norwegian television pulled the plug on his more disturbing testimony. But when the session ended, no one cried out for vengeance, no bereaved parent spat or shook a fist as the killer was handcuffed and led away.
And Breivik? I watched him go out of his way to goad his compatriots to seek furious revenge. On the first two days of the trial, he gave the clenched fist salute of the neo-fascist Right before entering the dock. His agonising testimony spared Norwegians nothing of what he had done. Rather, he seemed anxious to rub in the scale of his murderous ambition and to voice disappointment that he had not drawn still more blood.
“The objective was not to kill 69 people on Utoya island, the objective was to kill all of them,” he told the court in flat, unemotional tones. The aim of the gun attack was to “detonate” panic that would cause all his targets to flee into the sea and drown. “The water was the weapon of mass destruction,” he added.
And remorse? Breivik made clear that he felt none. “I stand by what I have done, and I would have done it again,” he said emphatically. The teenagers on the island had been attending a summer camp organised by the Norwegian Labour party. As such, they were “not innocent” but “political activists” and “supporters of multiculturalism”. In his mind, that was enough to make them “legitimate targets”.
Earlier, Breivik had become perhaps the first killer in history to watch CCTV footage of the exact moment when his bomb detonated. This explosion, which took place outside a tower block housing the prime minister’s office, was played to the court over and over again, from every available angle.
We watched as a pedestrian and a motorcyclist approached Breivik’s white van, unaware that it was packed with 950kg of explosives timed to ignite at 3.25pm. They happened to appear on the scene at 3.23pm and 3.24pm respectively. Both were beside the vehicle when the bomb exploded: the camera showed them being swallowed by a billowing inferno of smoke and flame. Was Breivik shaken by watching the consequence of his actions? Not in the slightest. His only reaction was to declare himself “disappointed” that his bomb had not toppled the building altogether.
Breivik had worked out exactly where he would need to position his device in order to achieve that goal. By a quirk of fate, that particular parking space had been taken when he arrived at 3.18pm. In a tone of complaint – one of the few occasions when his voice conveyed emotion – Breivik said that he was left with no choice but to park his vehicle at a “sub-optimal” angle, directing the bomb blast away from its target and reducing its force by about 30 per cent. “I considered that attack to be a failure,” said Breivik.
Before he spoke, I had walked over to the spot where the blast happened in the heart of Oslo. It did not take long: the tower block he managed to wreck, claiming eight lives, is barely 200 yards from the court where he appeared every day. Today, this shattered building remains sealed off by wooden fencing, while all around, the gaping windows of neighbouring offices are boarded up. None the less, the bomb did not come up to Breivik’s expectations, and so he went to Utoya and carried out the massacre. He made clear that had the bombing “succeeded”, he would not have shot the teenagers on the island.
The clear implication of his testimony was that he was forced to conduct the massacre by the supposed failure of his bomb. And the device did not kill as many as he had hoped because someone had been inconsiderate enough to take his parking space.
As I sat behind him, noting down his words, I found Breivik’s attitude towards his responsibility for what he had done the most unsettling element of all. At every stage, he argued that others had forced him to take lives, as if he had not chosen to become a killer. In his mind, the rest of Norway had left him with no option. Why did he think of targeting the teenagers on Utoya to begin with? “The natural consequence of prime ministers building walls around themselves means you must focus on those below them,” he explained.
And why a gun attack? Well, said Breivik, he had planned to detonate three car bombs, two of them weighing a tonne, but finding the required quantity of ammonium nitrate had proved impossible. “The Norwegian authorities make it impossible to get hold of explosives, making it impossible for political activists to make bombs and forcing them to go for gun-based attacks.” And why did he shoot so many teenagers? In a rare flash of self-awareness, Breivik conceded this had been “horrendous”. But he quietly explained that his victims had failed to oblige him by fleeing into the sea en masse: “So I had to shoot them,” he concluded.
In his own mind, Breivik had been forced to murder scores of youthful party activists by a prime minister who insisted on protecting himself; by a government that tried to deny its citizens the means to make bombs; and by the teenagers themselves, because they had declined to behave as he anticipated. In his depraved thoughts, they had died through their own fault.
Breivik said all this while sitting in the dock: no one stands in a Norwegian court. When he was relaxed, he reclined in his chair, left hand in a trouser pocket, right hand twirling a pen. When he was pensive, he leaned forwards, both hands on the desk in front of him, occasionally taking notes in order to hide his nerves.
His sweating, glowering persona contrasted vividly with that of his principal inquisitor, Inga Bejer Engh, the elegant chief prosecutor. She never raised her voice or betrayed a hint of fury. Her style of cross-examination was courteous and inquiring, almost conversational, utterly different from the bruising encounter that would have happened in the Old Bailey.
Yet she tied Breivik in knots with consummate skill. His guard was clearly lowered by the fact that his questioner was a woman. Once, he even tried to be charming. Asked about his education, he smiled and said that he should have printed off a fake diploma for himself (his only successful business venture was peddling forged certificates over the internet). Later, Ms Engh’s iron self-control lapsed, for a moment, into exasperation. The killer would constantly refer to what he grandly called his “compendium” – several thousand pages of rambling paranoia, most of it cut and pasted from the internet, serving as the ideological basis for his actions. Once, he called it a “draft”, and remarked that he was still deciding if he believed in all it contained.
“So you killed 77 people without being entirely sure whether you agreed with the compendium or not?” expostulated Ms Engh. “Let me explain,” replied Breivik. “Yes, do!” said the prosecutor. As for this work, Breivik admitted that “50-60 per cent” was copied from the internet. And what was the principal source for his world view? The killer’s answer to this was emphatic: “Wikipedia,” he said. “The English articles there contained a lot of information.” How had he found out how to make a bomb? “Everything is on the internet,” said Breivik. “Everything. You need to know what you’re looking for, but you can find it.”
The world has always had its Breiviks – in the 19th century, lone anarchists tried to inflict carnage on European capitals. But today, a Breivik need only sit in his bedroom to discover everything he needs to know about killing human beings, while immersing himself in a world of fantasy courtesy of virtual reality computer games – and imbibing his selected facts from Wikipedia.
In 1907, Joseph Conrad wrote in The Secret Agent about an anarchist roaming London with a bomb. Then, it was much harder to find out how to make a device, and developing poisonous ideas required a willingness to read books. Today, the bar is set much lower for Breiviks. Every capital probably contains a lone and monotone Breivik, crouched over a bedroom computer.
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