Below is news analysis of the Spanish-language reporting on the massacre by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. This article is from Revista, CAMERA’s Spanish-language Web site.
The Protocols of the Elders of Utoya
Anders Behring Breivik is now sadly famous for his massacre in Oslo and the Island of Utoya. And of course, the media has covered the information, condemning the assassin and trying to analyze the whys of his abominable acts.
There are multiple adjectives which are being attributed to him according to the political orientation of the source. For the secular media, Breivik is a fundamentalist Christian. For the religious media, Breivik is simply a butcher. For the left-wing media, Breivik is a right wing extremist. For the right-wing media, Breivik is a Mason.
There is only one point that the leftists, rightists, secularists and religious agree on: Breivik is a Zionist.
If for the correspondent for Público, openly left-wing publication, behind Breivik’s rampage is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for Democracia Nacional (an ultra right-wing party), what happened in Norway was a “brutal Zionist slaughter“.
For the ultra left-wing Rebelión, “It may well be that in fact, the tentacles of the State of Israel have something to do with this massacre; after all, it won’t have been the first time that they commit such a deed, nor sadly, will it be the last”, while for the Foro Católico “what defines the presumed terrorist is his pro-Zionist ideology”.
Once more, all eyes are on Israel. Surely, it is because the deep anguish which human barbarity lets loose must be rooted in a “known” quantum. And what is “known” sadly, is an old prejudice which has never failed to explain all the evil and calamity in the world, in the garb of political correctness.
Started by Al Jazeera and picked up by delirious experts in conspiracy theories, the anti-Zionist obsession which sees plotting Jews everywhere, has snowballed on the web and among allegedly serious media.
It is true that Breivik openly declared himself pro-Zionist. But he has also claimed to be a great admirer of Japan — a detail that has hardly been noted. Why hasn’t the news media spoken of him as the “pro-Japanese assassin” or the “philo-Japanese terrorist”? Because it would simply be ridiculous — just as ridiculous as it is to underscore his philo-Zionism, in order to find a reason for the horror.
What is quite obvious in this crime is the violent Islamophobia on which this criminal fed. It is an Islamophobia which, according to current studies, is closely related to a Europe in crisis, a Europe which has great problems understanding and relating to otherness.
The attempt to trace the seeds of hatred to Jews is a racist and bigoted process, in and of itself. After all, the political and nationalist roots of hatred need not be attributed to an exotic source; Europe produces more than enough racist and xenophobic hatred to supply itself.
In its proper perspective, the Zionism which certain news media try so hard to vilify and turn into a term of derision, is in reality nothing more than the Jewish national liberation movement which arose in the 19th century. To systematically relate it to massacres, crimes against humanity and all sorts of racist policies is merely a campaign to delegitimize the only Jewish state on the planet, the “Jews” among the nations. And that is exactly what makes “anti-Zionism” just another, more acceptable and more fashionable, version of age-old anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, all psychopaths whose paths are strewn with corpses have had their own strong phobias and philias. But these were never part of the news.
Cho Seung-hui, responsible for the massacre at the University of Virginia, was a Christian-phobic South Korean who, at the same time, compared himself to Jesus Christ. Charles Manson, was a murderous cult leader who loved the Beatles. Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon, was a Christian who was obsessed with the J.D. Salinger novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Timothy McVeigh, who perpetrated the Oklahoma terrorist attack, was a former soldier and an avid reader of militaristic novels. Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold, the two students who opened fire on their classmates at Columbine High School were obsessed with video games and fans of Marilyn Manson.
Did anyone blamed J.D. Salinger for the assassination of Lennon? Did any newspaper headline proclaim, “The Reader Mc Veigh Causes a Massacre in Oklahoma”? Did anyone blame the Beatles for the horrible Manson murders? Of course not. Yet, there has been no hesitation in blaming Zionism for the atrocities committed by Breivik.
Months will go by until forensic psychiatrists come out with a report on Breivik’s mental health. Until then, there will be little more than feverish theories about what spurred his actions. And many of them will probably continue to finger Zionism and Jews as the ones ultimately responsible for the massacre. Under the guise of battling hatred, they will fan the flames of hatred and racism. But while scapegoating Jews may be an established pattern that strikes a familiar chord, it will bring people no closer to getting at the root of the real problem.