It is raining on the island and the TV team is interviewing a pretty, 18 year old girl in front of her tent about her encounter with one of her great idols, the former prime minister, Gro Harlem Bruntland. Bruntland has just visited the island and the girl borrowed the former national leader her pair of rubber boots so that Norway's first female prime minister would not have to soak her feet in the puddles of rain. Everything is dripping, the girl's thick brown hair, the TV team, the tent, the trees in the background. The girl has a bit of a cold and is wearing flip flops, standing up to her ankles in water, but who cares? It is July and the rain is warm and the girl is euphoric about just having met Gro Harlem Bruntland who has done so much for women in Norway. She is hoarse and can barely articulate how happy she is and it makes her laugh even more.

    

Three hours later, Bano Rashid, 18 years old, is dead.

She was the first victim of the massacre on Utöya to be buried.

It was so hard to understand.



He-whose-name-does-not-deserve-to-be-Googled is on trial today. Strangely; I who is generally a rather bitter and revengeful sort of person feel no anger towards this creature. I understand that many people would like to torture him in various ways but I see no point in it what so ever. I see him as an object.

His appearance helps with that. Many evil criminals get scores of admiring women who declare their love for them by mail. I think we will at large be spared such a spectacle with this prisoner. Most psychopaths have a piercing gaze, mesmerizing to some. He-whose-name-is-unimportant has none of that. He is tall and blond but his eyes look like they have been painted onto a doll made of latex. A hollow man. A vessel that happened to be filled with the stream of lies and half-truths that is spewed out in every corner of the Internet, the shapeless Doomsday Cult that preaches the oncoming destruction of Europe, as if anything could destroy something that has been destroyed so many times before and then rebuilt itself.



The Armageddon is not coming by the way. All that high pitched yelling about Muslims outbreeding the white Europeans; it is nonsense. Families from the Middle East tend to be larger than European ones only in the first generation. Those born in Europe tend to adjust to the society they live in and get much fewer kids then their parents. Apart from a few feeble minded Salafis in cellar mosques, Muslims in Europe are generally more interested in having reasonable amounts of kids that they can provide for rather than taking over the continent.  So you can put the pitch forks and rakes back into the garden shacks and get on with your lives. It was false alarm. Again.



Ali Eshbati, a Swedish political scientist has stated some wise things about the new anti-Muslim right in Europe: Arguing with them about facts is mainly fruitless. Their business strategy is to create fear and paranoia among some parts of the public whose life as already destabilized by various crises, accusing mainstream politicians of being silent about this presumed danger and then take on the role as the only group that is interested in guarding the public from this supposed threat. Thereby they get elected.

To create this fear that is necessary for their political existence, effect is all and intellectual honesty is nil. They systematically lie and exaggerate and thereby, parliamentary debates with them become pointless.  

There is a significant amount of Conservative pundits and talking heads in the Great Land on the Other side of the Puddle that give the image of having swallowed all these horror stories hook line and sink. That encourages the European right wing nut jobs, because if this ordeal with Muslim immigration is so serious that even the Americans care about making TV shows about it, then it really has to be bad, right? I think they have failed to see the context of why for example the Fox news do what they do.

Most of the American fear of a Europe taken over by Islam is probably an internal performance. In those circles, assuming that there are other functioning ways to organize a society than the American version is regarded as unpatriotic, which is for them a sin worse than murder. So Europe, with its welfare states and high taxes, has to fail completely, otherwise the US would not be glorious enough in the eyes and their world would fall apart.



It was these panic scenarios that filled the empty vessel that is now on trial in Oslo. Does that mean that all right wing, anti-Muslim bloggers out there are personally responsible for the death of Bano and the other 76? No. We have free speech in Europe and one should be allowed to hold crazy ideas without being held responsible for all violence that is ever perpetrated by people with similar ideas.

But. For a decade now, a large amount of people, some influential, have been sending a message that can be boiled down to something like:

"We condone any form of violence BUT if no one does something about all these terrible people that infiltrate Europe, the continent will go under."

If enough people keep repeating this for ten years, someone will eventually do something and it will most likely be violent.    

But we have to be allowed to criticize Islam without being accused of…

Yes. But there is a difference between criticizing Islam and wanting to portray the children who play football outside of my window as soldiers of an occupation because they are born in Muslim families. Please understand that.



And to the few who think the mass murderer on Utöya was a hero I would like to say ; if killing unarmed teenagers and children on an island where they could not even run from the gun man is heroic, then I do not even want to know what your cowards look like.
Each one of those teenagers hade more heroism in their left index than this pathetic, empty clown of a man.