Radical Christian Terrorist

Complied from reportage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wikipedia, Reuters, Herald Sun, The Australian, BBC, Sydney Morning Herald, stuff.co.nz, others

  I. "Atrocious but necessary"

The New York Times keeps calling it "the bigest massacre by a single gunman in modern times." As if there might have ever been a bigger one before then. It was the biggest massacre by a single gunman, ever.

The death toll has been revised, from 93 down to 76. For a surreal moment, I'm euphoric, as if 17 innocent people had been miraculously resurrected from death. It passes quickly. Many remain unaccounted for--how many, police have declined to reveal. An additional 96 are reported wounded, many of them critically. The death toll may yet climb.

Two hundred thousand mourners, "a wave of good will," washed over the streets of Oslo. The city is said to be "filled with love." Flowers, candles, Norwegian flags, wreathes, photos, and other tributes to the victims soon blanketed the city cathedral. "It would be easy to be angry at this time," said a survivor of the massacre. The perpetrator, Anders Brievik, "wants anger and he wants attention. He's a small person. I don't want to give him the attention."

Brievik, meanwhile, stands charged under Norway's terrorist laws. Police are considering a further charge of crimes against humanity. From his jail cell, in isolation and on suicide watch, Brievik requested a public hearing, and permission to appear in a miliatry uniform. The judge denied both requests. According to his lawyer, the defendent admits to the "factual circumstances" of both the bombing and shooting. But he will also plead "not guilty." He had been trying, as he explained, to save Norway and western Europe from "cultural Marxism and Muslim domination." His actions had been "atrocious but necessary."

II. The Perpetrator

Anders Behring Brievik was born in 1979, the son of a civil servant and a nurse. His parents, who both identified politically as left-of-center, divorced when he was one. He has one sibling, a sister, with whom he appears once to have been very close. He was raised in a middle class neighborhood, primarily by his mother. He blames a "super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing" for "feminizing" him, "to a certain extent."

His best childhood friend, for many years, was a Pakistani. "He resented everything about Norway and Norwegians (me being the exception)," Brievik recalled. "I have known a lot of Muslims over the years which triggered my interest in Islam."

As he aged, Brievik's stance on Islam hardened. He began to resent the ever-increasing influx of immigrants into Norway and western Europe, particularly from Muslim countries: Iraq, Eretria, Afganistan, Somalia. He "latched onto reports of attacks against ethnic Norwegian men and rapes of ethnic Norwegian women by immigrant gangs." For several years he was affliated by with Norway's populist, anti-tax, anti-immigrant "Progress Party," but quit in 2007 to protest its move to the center and the mainstream.

Brievik traced his radicalization to the NATO bombing campaign of Serbia in 1999. "(A)uthorized by criminal western European and American leaders," he saw the war as the betrayal of fellow Christians for the sake of Muslims. It was proof that "a core of Cultural Communist elites" had stealthily seized political power, in order to "destroy western civilization, European traditions, national solidarity, and Christianity."

III. Conflagration

The bomb was allegedly made from the same mix of fertilizer and fuel as the one that Timothy McVeigh used to destroy a federal building in Oklahoma city (1995). Last Friday, at half past three in the afternoon, it exploded out of the trunk of a Volkswagen, parked near the Prime Minister's office in Oslo. An entire complex of government buildings shook on its foundations. Shockwaves ripped open walls and blew out thousands of windows, showering the street below with glass and debris. Fires broke out all over the place. The blast, mistaken by many for thunder, had been heard for miles.

Through the haze of dust and smoke that settled over the complex, survivors described a scene of people "screaming and crying, running around with blood coming out of wounds, covered with blood." If July hadn't been such a popular vacation month for government employees, the bomb would have probably claimed may more lives. As it was, eight were killed in the blast. Already it was the worst act of violence in Norway since World War II.

It wasn't over.

IV. Utoya

About an hour and a half later, just as the first, confused reports of the Oslo bombing filtered through the media, a man in a police uniform stepped off the public ferry onto the tiny, wood-covered island of Utoya, 25 miles north of Oslo, where hundreds of people, mostly teenagers, had recently converged to attend the Norwegian Labor Party's annual youth summer camp. The presumed policeman signaled and motioned to gather a crowd. He anounced that he had been sent to assure their safety after the terrorist attack, and that he had important information. When he had an audience, he reached into his duffle bag, pulled out an automatic weapon, and began firing hollow point bullets.

"I heard screams," said one survivor. "I heard people begging for their lives and I heard shots. He just blew them away...I was certain I was going to die."

For ninety minutes, Anders Brievik murdered with impunity. "He seemed to be enjoying it," said one survivor. "He walked around the island as if he had absolute power." There was nowhere to go. Utoya is accessible only by boat. There was no way for everyone to hide. Utoya had become a 26 acre death-trap. Breivik shot campers in the back as they stampeded away. He shot them as they fled into the lake. (Some of the missing may have drowned.) He shot them as they madly tried to scramble up trees, as they flung themselves desperately down a steep rocky slope. "I'll kill you all," Brievik was heard to say, repeatedly. He dumped extra rounds into fallen bodies to make sure of killing anyone feigning death.

One of the victims, Gunnar Linaker, had been on the phone with his father when it started. "He said to me, 'Dad, Dad, someone is shooting, and he hung up." His father later described him as "a calm, big teddy bear with lots of humor and lots of love."  Gunnar was 23. Most of the casualties were younger.

A fifteen year old survivor told later of hiding behind a rock that Brievik was standing on. "I could hear him breathing," she said.

For ninety minutes, Brievik murdered with impunity.

The official rescue operation was a travesty of unprepardness. One of the first to die was a security guard, a 51-year old former police officer. He hadn't been armed; even active officers rarely carry guns in Norway. As the people on the island frantically called special services from their cells, they were ordered off the line unless calling about the bombing. Undoubtedly this had been the assassin's intention; the bomb had been, in part, a diversion.

SWAT units weren't dispatched until 50 minutes after the first calls for help. With no helicopter on standby, it took the team of 10 commandos 20 minutes to drive to the shore of lake Tyrifjorden. It took them another 20 to commandeer boats. One almost sank with the weight of their arsenal; they had to bail water the whole way across. When they finally stormed the island, they didn't fire a shot. They found Brievik awaiting them in a posture of surrender, standing with his hands behind his head, weapons on the ground.

"I'm finished," he said calmly. He'd just slaughtered sixty eight innocent human beings--mostly teenagers.

He still had plenty of ammunition. He'd been planning this for years.

Hours before the first explosion, Brievik emailed hundred of copies of an online manifesto. At over 1,500 pages, it's more than twice as long as Mein Kampf, and it carries the title September 11th 2083: A European Declaration of Indenpendence. It's been described as "part political discussion, part confessional and part action plan." An English forensics psychologist has already described it as "one of the scariest documents I've ever read."

"We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe," it says, "hereby declare a preemptive war on all the cultural Marxists/multicultural elites of Western Europe. ...We know who you are, where you live and we are coming for you..."