Oslo bombing suspect Anders Behring Breivik thought to be an extremist right wing Christian fundamentalist
Oh, Lord No:
At least 84 people died when a gunman opened fire at an island youth camp in Norway, hours after a deadly bombing in the capital, Oslo, police say.
Police have charged a 32-year-old Norwegian man over both attacks.
The man dressed as a police officer was arrested on tiny Utoeya island after an hour-long shooting spree. The search for other possible victims continues.
The Oslo bombing killed at least seven. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said the attacks were “like a nightmare”.
Mr Stoltenberg, whose offices were among those badly hit by the blast, described the attacks as a national tragedy and said civil servants were among the dead in Oslo.
“Never since the Second World War has our country been hit by a crime on this scale,” he told a news conference in Oslo.
He added that he was due to have been on Utoeya – “a youth paradise turned into a hell” – a few hours after the attacks began. Many others were injured there as well as those who died.
Mr Stoltenberg said he knew some of the dead in the Oslo attack. “Beyond that I cannot give further details while the police carry out their investigation.”
He said it was too early too comment on a possible motive for the attacks. No group has said it carried them out.
The suspect is reported by local media to have had links with right-wing extremists. Police named him as Anders Behring Breivik. His Oslo apartment was searched overnight.
The BBC’s Richard Galpin, near the island, says that Norway has had problems with neo-Nazi groups in the past but the assumption was that such groups had been largely eliminated and did not pose a significant threat.
Police say they are investigating whether the attacks were the work of one man or whether he had help.
“At Utoeya, the water is still being searched for more victims,” deputy police chief Roger Andresen told reporters.
“We have no more information than… what has been found on [his] own websites, which is that it goes towards the right and that it is, so to speak, Christian fundamentalist.”
And:
Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old suspect in Friday’s attacks in Norway, held right-wing views, say police.
Police chief Sveinung Sponheim said his internet postings “suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views”.
“But whether that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen,” he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
Little is currently known about him apart from what has appeared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter – and these entries appear to have been set up just days ago.
On the Facebook page attributed to him, he describes himself as a Christian and a conservative. The Facebook page is no longer available but it also listed interests such as body-building and freemasonry.
UPDATE: Joe over at Harry’s Place has put together some background information on Behring Breivik.
Tags: Christianity, News
July 23rd, 2011 at 9:52 am
A general point: people who are anti muslim tend to hang around the looney fringes of christian fundamentalism. The arguments they use against Muslims are exactly the same ones I used to hear my grandparents use against catholics:
1. They are trying to take over by having larger families.
2. They are controlled from some foreign land and not truly British.
On a general note I am unaware of any evangelical friends who vote anything other than conservative. A right wing political position is now synonymous with evangelicalism. This was not always the case. If evangelicalism has shifted slightly to the right it means that the further right fringes have gone towards fascism.
July 23rd, 2011 at 10:09 am
Father, I lift to you all those that have died in Oslo.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace.
+Amen.
July 23rd, 2011 at 10:39 am
In my experience, in Scandinavia and Britain nationalist identifying as a Christian do not necessarily mean Christian in any real religious way. E.g. extremely secular supporters of the British Nationalist Party identifying as cultural Christians. Of course, this may not be the case here as I am not aware of personal statements either way.
July 23rd, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Gordon,
You’re theo-political analyst is wrong and falls into the polarization trap that has/is being propagated across Europe and the West, and that is anyone that is in opposition to islam or the progressive liberal politics of both the mainstream left and right is automatically criminalised as a racist or a fascist, even better if they can also be slandered as the looney fringes of christian fundamentalism.
I fear that the atrocities in Norway will be used to further crush any open and democratic debate in Europe around the left/right progressive project.
There must be a political maturity to give voice to political opinions that do not share the progressive musclar liberal agenda that has engulfed Europe in political violence and bloodshed perpetrated by musclar liberal and islamo-political factions.
July 23rd, 2011 at 3:07 pm
The question is: if people like this are identifying with evangelical Christianity, what does this say about the way evangelical Christianity is presenting itself?
July 23rd, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Gordon,
Evangelical Christianity???
That is your assumption.
July 24th, 2011 at 1:48 am
A number of valid points being made at Biased BBC
July 24th, 2011 at 6:46 am
People like that aren’t identifying with Evangelical Christianity
July 24th, 2011 at 9:44 am
Well he did. We can only go by his words. I have reflected on this here:
http://www.ecalpemos.org/2011/07/anders-breivik-wake-up-call-to-church.html
July 24th, 2011 at 9:53 am
Where?
July 24th, 2011 at 10:16 am
I think you’re making a few category errors. For example, you equate fundamentalism with evangelicalism. You equate visiting fundamentalist boards with being a fundamentalist.
While living around Leeds I had my fair share of discussions with some very anti-Islamic people that would use fundamentalist anti-Islamic resources (Allah is a moon god and what not), without identifying as a Christian beyond the mentality of “I was born in the UK meaning I am a Christian, you are a foreign Muslim. ” For them Christianity was part of their cultural heritage and set to distinguish them from the Muslims they disliked. When you think about it, this is exactly what we would expect from an obsessive nationalist.
On the other hand, I have met with confessing Christians using the same sort of arguments in debate but with very different intentions.
Throw this into the world of the Internet and all sorts of things happen. On some Christian-Muslim Facebook groups there would be Christians with non-religious people using the group as an anti-Islamic platform. Another example is how some Christians use the Faith Freedom forum (a secular anti-religious forum) to compile arguments to use against Muslims despite not sharing the Atheist worldview of the site. And generic groups such as SIOE bring all these crazies together.
To equate this with a standard definition of evangelical Christianity doesn’t seem to fit.
Of course, I could be wrong but it would take some clear evidence to determine where he stood/stands.
Edit: Okay, well this new to me evidence shows him to appeal to Christianity. So not necessarily in the same field as those I described above.
http://www.premiercommunity.org.uk/forum/topics/surprise-the-norwegian-mass?xg_source=msg_forum_disc
July 24th, 2011 at 1:12 pm
This is surely not about the consequences of religious belief, good or bad. This man appears to be someone intensely frustrated by his lack of power to change things and have his voice heard. This was probably an act to change all that and to be seen as a person of substance, and a hero to those he sought to impress. What psychological label gets attached to this man remains to be seen, but it seems clear that these were not the acts of a sane person. Giving him a religious label does not help.
July 24th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Preliminary having looked at some of his background there are some interesting religious and political anomalies and contradictions that ‘Flag up’???
July 24th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
@Goy, yeah it’s not a terribly clear picture is it…
July 25th, 2011 at 11:55 am
I posted on this topic yesterday. However, over the course of the day, I read and listened to bits and pieces on the news and the web and came to the conclusion that as is increasingly the case with 24 hours news and the drive to fill the airwaves and bandwidth, that a good deal of this ‘news’ has resulted in mere speculation and hot air. Indeed much of what we consume from the peddlers of ‘news’ can hardly be called ‘news’; it is just sound and vision, light and noise, to fill the screen. I would even go as far saying a sizable portion of what passes for ‘news’ these days is a subtle form of pornography, devised to feed our appetite for emotional masturbation – ‘getting off’ on the triumphs, anger or misery of others. So in the end I took down my post as I had a sneaky feeling that at least part of my own comment and speculation was resting on some very shaky foundations.
I also felt more than a twinge of guilt at that familiar human ability of taking something remote and trying to make it personal by placing it within my own frame reference and using it as cadaver to dissect for my own intellectual interest and preoccupations. Hence I think in the above only Caral nears the mark of what needs to be said at this time. There is something unwholesome in religious circles that mention of this man’s religious beliefs (or lack of same) immediately transforms a tragedy that is incomprehensible in its magnitude and wickedness – where it sounds as if religion was a lesser or insignificant element in the pernicious whole – into something for discussion from a religious perspective. More than 90 people have died – and died in horrific and terrifying circumstances and what has this resulted in for many of us bloggers on the topic of religion… ‘What does this mean for us?’. I don’t think now is the time to have this discussion… I don’t think now is the time for point scoring and boring our fellow parishioners with what we think about something that is beyond comprehension…
Let’s just wait and see what part religion played in these terrible events, but for now, I think it is time to grieve and for the ignorant to be silent – for until more comes to light about these wicked deeds, we are all ignorant.
P.
July 25th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
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