Breivik’s Islamophobic Inspirations in the United States

Although Anders Behring Breivik justifies his horrible massacre last Friday by citing the multicultural polices supposedly imposed by several European governments in his 1,500-page manifesto, among his sources of intellectual inspiration one finds some of the most famous American Islamophobes, like Robert Spencer or Pam Geller.

Specifically, as The New York Times informs, Breivik cites Spencer up to 64 times in his writings. Spencer is the author of the website www.jihadwatch.org and co-founder of the organization “Stop Islamization of America.”

Moreover, he is the author of some 10 books exploring the dangers of Islam and of the arrival of Muslim immigrants to the United States. Among the best-sellers is “The Truth About Muhammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.”

Spencer often works in tandem with Geller, author of the blog Atlas Shrugs and of declarations as inflammatory as one that qualifies Islam as the “most … genocidal [ideology] in the world.” Together, they launched a campaign against the construction of a mosque near ground zero in New York and another campaign with ads on buses urging Muslims to abandon “the falsity of Islam.”

The other American Islamophobic source admired by Breivik is the blog The Gates of Vienna, a reference to the siege of the Austrian capital by Ottoman troops in 1683. Indeed, this historical date is what led Breivik to predict that, in 2083, on the 400th anniversary of the siege, there will be a civil war in Europe that will “cleanse” Europe of all Islamic influence.

Faced with accusations that single him out as the intellectual instigator of the massacre, Spencer defended himself on his web page with this argument: “Charles Manson thought he heard instructions to kill in the Beatles song ‘Helter Skelter’ and committed mass murder. There were no instructions to kill in the song. … Nor is there, for any sane person, any inspiration for harming anyone in my work.”

Of course, one cannot attribute the masterminding of an attack to someone because their writings have influenced someone else to commit a violent act, unless the texts cite the use of aggression as a method. But now, Spencer should recognize that his statements and those of other Islamophobes, unfortunately very popular with a certain part of American society, serve as a breeding ground that may lead to violence.

The comparison with the Beatles song is not valid, because there were no shared ideological positions between the Fab Four and Manson, but there are between Spencer and Breivik, whom no one has shown so far to be really mentally unbalanced and not simply a fanatic.

When a person is stigmatized simply because of membership in a group, whether it is ethnic or religious, the conditions are generated by which some person or group takes the logic a step further and commits a violent act.

As anti-terrorism expert Marc Sagemen says in The New York Times, Spencer and company have provided “the infrastructure” from which Breivik emerged. Hateful Islamophobic rhetoric always has a cost.