A Failure to Communicate

The rush to judge who must have been behind the Norwegian tragedy leaves cable news – and the anti-Islamic blogosphere – with egg on its face.

Friday's horrific terror attacks in Norway have shattered that nation's typical calm, but also cast a serious pall over insta-pundits who jumped on cable news channels to assure everybody that the attack was carried out by Muslim extremists. Of course, that turned out to be patently false, as The Guardian's Charlie Brooker notes, wondering if the chyrons beneath the so-called security “experts” ought to say “guessers” instead. After wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News, CNN and the like on Friday, much of it suggesting it was an “al-Qaida-like” attack, “The next morning I switched on the news and the al-Qaida talk had been largely dispensed with, and the pundits were now experts on far-right extremism,” says Brooker, “as though they'd been on a course and qualified for a diploma overnight.” Of course, don't expect any of the networks, or guessers, to apologize for tarring Islam with Norway's worst attack since the Second World War. All we can hope is that they maybe, maybe learned not to jump to such damning conclusions the next time an attack like this happens. But we wouldn't bet on it.

William Saletan of Slate looks into Anders Behring Breivik's love of the right-wing, anti-Islamic blogosphere (Breivik basically copied and pasted whole postings into his 1,500-page manifesto) and questions what, if any, culpability they share in the attacks. After all, if bloggers such as Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs have spent much of their professional lives pursing guilt-by-association charges against imams and other peaceable Muslims, shouldn't their logic dictate that they've played no small part in the massacres? Of course, no one in their right mind, and certainly not Saletan, would do that, partly because the principle “that no one should be held responsible for another person's sins [is] the moral core of the struggle against terrorism.” Saletan just wishes that “those bloggers, and the politicians who echo them, would show Muslims the same courtesy.”

Over in the Toronto Star, Rosie DiManno urges us all to not look to deeply into Breivik, his motivations, or any claims he makes about a network of like-minded terrorists. “It seems, from what’s come out so far, the pathology of one,” writes DiManno. “And there’s nothing, nothing, to defend against the unknown one.” (Have fun sleeping tonight, by the way.) The attacks on Oslo and Utoya island, then are better compared to the rampage committed by Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson earlier this year, or Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, than to anything religiously motivated. To defend ourselves from such attacks would require us to“turn our cities into locked-down security encampments and there’s no practical means to cast such a wide net anyway,” says DiManno, lest we all be considered terror suspects. It's just a particularly chilling reminder of the depths to which humanity can sink, and the lengths to which one depraved farmer will go to see his vision through. That Norwegians have responded to it with such sorrow, calm and reservation, and not vindication and anger, is indeed a tribute to their spirit.