Car Bomb in Oslo

Mr Breivik has let it be known through his legal representatives that:

1. He wishes to wear a uniform in court (precisely which uniform isn't stipulated, but he obviously has a thing about them).

2. He wishes to use the courtroom as a platform to express his twisted views.

No to the first (unless he means his school uniform, his Boy Scout uniform, his St John's Ambulance Brigade uniform- or any other which he's entitled to wear).

2. Yes to the second. As the Norwegian Prime Minister put it, the best defence against barbarism is transparency. Let him condemn himself out of his own mouth.

If convicted he will only get the maximum 23 year prison term.

^^

Just noticed LaRue had already posted this, and yes, it's 21 years not 23 as I stated.

"And not a single fuck was given that day"

The perp had online links with the English Defence League, an Islamophobic far-right group in the UK who stage provocative marches through the East End:

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New British Fascism by Matthew J Goodwin – review

With UK far-right groups in the spotlight, can we learn from the fate of the BNP?

Matthew Taylor guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 July 2011 17.00 BST


Exploiting the rise in Islamophobia ... an English Defence League demonstration in February 2011 in Luton, England. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The horrific events in Norway have left people – politicians and public – scrabbling to understand Anders Behring Breivik's motivation. Part of this process has seen investigators and journalists explore the 32-year-old's self-proclaimed links to far-right activists across Europe – particularly in the UK.


New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party by Matthew J Goodwin

This unusual level of scrutiny of this country's rightwing groups has raised obvious questions about who is drawn to them – and why. Matthew J Goodwin's book begins to answer some of these questions. It weaves together statistical evidence and interviews with activists to chart the rise – and spectacular decline over the past 18 months – of the British National party, the UK's most successful far-right organisation.

Goodwin lays out the mindsets and anxieties that drive people to join, not just the BNP, but far-right organisations in general. We hear why supporters, often motivated by a specific incident or fear, became involved with the party and, once on board, how they were drawn into a wider belief system about the threat to white Britons. There is no suggestion these people are necessarily capable or inclined to carry out acts of violence but some of the language of "survivalism" and the "need to take action" finds disturbing echoes in Breivik's 1,500-page "manifesto" published online hours before last week's attacks.

Beyond these testimonies, Goodwin's book provides a comprehensive account, backed up by new data, detailing the rise and fall of the BNP under its leader Nick Griffin. In June 2009 the party appeared to be on the verge of genuine political influence as Griffin, and fellow BNP candidate Andrew Brons, took their seats in the European parliament. Just two years later and the party is in disarray. Even by its own vicious standards it has embarked on an unprecedented bout of bloodletting, old scores are being settled, a raft of key organisers have left and voters are deserting in ever greater numbers. Last weekend the scale of the divisions within the party was exposed when Brons narrowly failed to defeat Griffin in the election for party leader.

This implosion has, in part, paved the way for the emergence of new groups on the far right, such as the English Defence League, and although Goodwin's book does not deal with this phenomenon specifically it does provide context for the ebb and flow of far-right groups in the UK and explores the rise in Islamophobia over the past decade that has allowed the EDL to become a significant street movement.

The BNP's present plight is set in the context of the small but murky world of the UK's racial nationalist politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Teasing out its intellectual and political roots, Goodwin charts how Griffin seized power in 1999 and then pushed through a series of internal reforms (improved organisational structures, a focus on community politics – a lesson picked up from the Lib Dems – and an attempt to hide its hardcore agenda behind a softer "cultural nationalism"), that transformed the BNP into a genuine political presence in several parts of the UK.

The BNP also exploited a favourable social and political climate, from the rise in Islamophobia to the MPs' expenses scandal that led to widespread disillusion with mainstream parties. Goodwin picks out "anti-immigrant hostility and political dissatisfaction" as the two most important drivers. The BNP under Griffin moved its focus from its birthplace in London and the south-east to Labour-supporting areas in the north where they made a series of electoral breakthroughs.

This raises the question – not extensively explored by Goodwin – of the impact on the BNP's rise of New Labour's focus on middle England. Labour voters in working-class communities, particularly but not exclusively in the north of England, felt increasingly cut off from the party under Blair, leaving the way open for the BNP to racialise concerns brought about by a growing sense of economic insecurity. As Goodwin points out, nearly all of the BNP's advances in local council elections came at Labour's expense.

Goodwin identifies one of the party's key weaknesses as its inability to break free from a socially isolated base of "angry white men" who have low levels of education and are pessimistic about their future. He argues that failure to attract large numbers of women, young people and economically insecure sections of the middle classes prevented the party tapping into its potential support: too few people were ready to back Griffin – even if they agreed with many of the policies he put forward.

As Goodwin notes: "There exists in British politics a sizeable amount of latent support for the extreme right which is far greater than is apparent at the polls. Put simply, extreme right parties in Britain have consistently failed to realise their potential."

Whether this "potential" will one day be realised by a new party or organisation is unclear. The ongoing demise of the BNP has left a fractured, volatile landscape on the far right in which new groups like the EDL have emerged. At the same time attacks on anti-fascists and trade unionists have become more frequent and more vicious in recent months, while marches and often violent demonstrations against Islam are taking place in towns and cities across the UK on many weekends.

In the aftermath of the tragedy in Norway, and as we watch the BNP's internal feud intensify, we should learn what lessons we can – but we must understand that the end of one party is not the end of the far-right threat.

I simply don't cease to be amazed by Stoltenberg's reaction to the Breivik murders: 'The answer to violence is even more democracy.' (you can hear/read the exact phrasing near the end of the video below).

A lot of politicians and "security experts" should listen closely to this...unfortunately, they won't...

'No Trial' For Norwegian Mass Killer Breivik
Sky News

Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik cannot be held accountable for his actions and will be sentenced to treatment at a psychiatric hospital, it is being reported.

A copy of a psychiatric report allegedly seen by Norwegian newspaper VG, a Norwegian newspaper, says the 32-year-old will not stand trial.

It reportedly says Breivik was mentally ill and therefore not responsible for his actions when he killed a total of 77 people in two attacks.

According to the newspaper, he will be detained indefinitely at a psychiatric hospital.

The report is said to have followed a series of meetings between Breivik and a team of 13 psychiatrists - who say he believes he is sane and feared a character assassination when the report went public.

Anders Breivik's trial will only vindicate Norway's liberal legal system

No punishment can ever fit Breivik's crime. If we stay true to the values of Norwegian society, it will strengthen us as a nation

Erik Dale

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 April 2012 18.00 BST


Anders Breivik, right, with his defence lawyer, Geir Lippestad, at Oslo's courthouse. Photograph: Heiko Junge/AFP/Getty Images

This week Anders Behring Breivik has begun to explain his actions of 22 July 2011. Not since the end of the second world war has a European nation had to deal with such monstrous acts and statements. One out of four Norwegians knew, or knew of, one or more of the victims. They are around every dinner table, in every school and lunch room, on the bus and on the television. I was lucky. Most of my friends and acquaintances came back from that fateful day. Two never returned.

With such strong emotions in a close-knit community, this will be an extraordinary test of Norway as a nation and the quality of the Norwegian legal system. Much has been said about how Norway reacted as a nation in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but in 10 weeks we will know what this nation is really made of.

The first challenge is to accept that no punishment can ever fit the crime. Some have called for changes in the legal system to allow for longer prison sentences or even death, but even if those had been real possibilities no punishment in the world is ever going to feel enough. Others have reacted strongly to pictures of the terrorist smiling and giving extremist salutes in the courtroom, pointing out that he is getting exactly the kind of attention he wants.

We should be outraged by the ideas that motivate him, but if we deny him the chance of explaining himself in an open court, we let the essence of those ideas, oppression and intolerance, dominate us. Although my heart is filled with anger, fear and sorrow, I am glad the Norwegian legal system treats everyone the same and is not subject to popular opinion. Its objective rules are there to deliver justice when emotions get the better of us. If Norwegians can hold on to that, they have already won a great victory.

The second challenge is to remain true to the values of Norwegian society. It is easy to be sympathetic to demands for stronger censorship, policy controls and online surveillance. Many will suggest that Breivik could have been stopped if only we had adopted some measure or other. But such doubts must not be allowed to change Norway. Even more important than the terrorist's right to speak in court is that the right of opinion and right of organisation keep forming the core of our free society. Right of opinion, the heart of freedom of speech, also includes right of privacy and anonymity.

Extremism of any creed is not fuelled by those who speak in public, but by those who feel that no one speaks for them at all. There must be room for even the dark sides of human nature if Norway is to remain Norway. Only then can Norwegians emerge on the other side of this challenge as a greater and stronger people than they were before.

The third and last challenge is to see and accept one another. The Utøya killings were a tragedy that has touched those who were there, their families and their friends, but it has also touched all those who didn't know anyone but still shed tears when they think no one is watching. Understanding that this is a pain and a trauma that not everyone will handle the same way or with the same composure is key to helping each other move on. Norwegians and foreigners alike will make mistakes and as individuals we will overstep, but if we are forgiving in our dealings with others, we will slowly find that we do have the strength to get through this together.

Over the next 10 weeks the terrorist who took so many innocent lives will get the chance to explain himself, to question his witnesses and to look into the eyes of the world while stating that he has no regret and only wish he had killed more. At the end of those 10 weeks a just legal system will pass its verdict and he will disappear into the books of history as nothing more than a reminder of all those we have lost. They will never disappear and it's for them that Norwegians now need to pass the test that lies before them.

Anders Behring Breivik claims victims were not innocent

Gunman says youngsters shot on Utøya were not 'non-political children' and compares them to the Hitler Youth

Helen Pidd in Oslo

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 April 2012 11.57 BST


Anders Behring Breivik attends the second day of his terrorism and murder trial in Oslo on 17 April. Photograph: Pool/REUTERS

Anders Behring Breivik has described his killing spree last summer as "the most sophisticated and spectacular political attack committed in Europe since the second world war".

The 33-year-old made the claims in a written statement he was allowed to read to the court on the second day of his trial – an unusual demand granted only because he refused to give evidence conventionally otherwise.

The rambling text, which he claimed he had "self censored" out of respect for the bereaved sitting in court, attempted to justify what he had done in the name of "revolutionary nationalism".

He expressed no regret for planning and carrying out the attacks that left 77 dead last summer. Maintaining he acted out of "goodness, not evil" to prevent a "major civil war", Breivik insisted: "I would have done it again."

He identified as his enemy the "cultural Marxists" who he said had destroyed Norway by using it as "a dumping ground for the surplus births of the third world". Claiming Norwegians would be a minority in their own capital "within five years", he blamed liberal politicians for bringing about Norway's demise with "feminism, quotas … transforming the church, schools".

The 69 people, many of them teenagers, who died on the island of Utøya when he opened fire on the youth camp of the ruling Labour party were "not innocent", he claimed.

"They were not innocent, non-political children; these were young people who worked to actively uphold multicultural values. Many people had leading positions in the leading Labour party youth wing," he said, going on to compare the Labour party's youth wing (AUF) with the Hitler Youth.

He quoted from a variety of sources to support his case, including, he said, a story written in the Times in February 2010 which he said reported that "three out of five Englishmen believe that the UK has turned into a dysfunctional society as a result of multiculturalism". The Guardian was unable to find evidence of such an article.

Breivik told the court that "ridiculous" lies had been told about him, rattling off a list which accused him of being a narcissist who was obsessed with the red jumper he wore to his first court hearing, of having a "bacterial phobia", "an incestuous relationship with my mother", "of being a child killer despite no one who died on Utøya being under 14".

He was not insane, he repeated many times. He claimed it was Norway's politicians who should be locked up in the sort of mental institution in which he can expect to spend the rest of his life if the court declares him criminally insane at the end of the 10-week trial.

Breivik said: "They expect us to applaud our ethnic and cultural doom … They should be characterised as insane, not me. Why is this the real insanity? This is the real insanity because it is not rational to work to deconstruct one's own ethnic group, culture and religion."

Breivik insisted he was not alone in fighting against "mass immigration". He singled out as examples the National Socialist Underground, the neo-Nazi terror cell responsible for killing nine immigrants and one policewoman in Germany, and Peter Mangs, the man suspected of carrying out a seven-year killing spree in the Swedish city of Malmö.

He said that these "heroic young people" should be celebrated for sacrificing their lives for the conservative revolution. He said that "the three most powerful politicians in Europe" shared his views, saying: "Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron have all noted that multiculturalism doesn't work."

At the start of Tuesday's court session, one of the five judges was dismissed from the panel after it emerged he had posted a message on Facebook last year saying the "death penalty is the only just thing to do in this case". Thomas Indebro, 33, one of three ordinary Norwegians sitting as a "lay judge" alongside two professionals, stepped down and was replaced.

Breivik has five days to explain why he set off a bomb in Oslo's government district, killing eight, and then gunned down 69 on Utøya. He denies criminal guilt, saying he was acting out of "necessity". On Tuesday the court-appointed interpreters issued a correction to their translation of Breivik's not guilty plea on Monday.

He is not claiming to have acted out of "self defence", as originally reported, but using a defence under section 47 of the Norwegian penal code, which states: "No person may be punished for any act that he has committed in order to save someone's person or property from an otherwise unavoidable danger when the circumstances justified him in regarding this danger as particularly significant in relation to the damage that might be caused by his act."

Breivik's ideology is all too familiar: that's our big problem

It's comforting to view the killer's horror of multiculturalism as deranged – but it is just an extreme example of what many feel

Suzanne Moore

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012 20.00 BST


Anders Breivik … his arguments need to be met head on. Photograph: Allover Norway / Rex Features

I know well the line on Anders Breivik and his incoherent ramblings: a mass murderer enjoying the oxygen of publicity for his vile ideas. He should have been shot. He is, in fact, mad. His trial should not be reported. Liberals have said all these things and more. The quiet, almost sterile way in which the Norwegians are listening to him personifies the "muscular liberalism" that David Cameron once spoke of.

Breivik's ideology may be difficult to listen to, but not because it is incoherent. Precisely the opposite: it is familiar. This is a problem for all of us, right or left. I wish I lived in a world where I didn't have to hear gross generalisations about Islam and creeping sharia or see an increase in antisemitism, hear fantasies about feminism going too far, and where people didn't feel their own culture to be "swamped". I wish the word "war" wasn't thrown around all the time – the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on red tape. I wish that everything really was run by "cultural Marxists". I wish my neighbour, who has lived here for 50 years and whose grandchildren tell me she prays for me, had learned English and left the house sometimes.

I see what fuelled Breivik's crusader fantasy, his absolute fear of difference. It is not uncommon and it needs to be met head on. Still, any questioning of "multiculturalism" as it functions produces accusations of racism. The left closes in and closes down this debate. The middle class pretend Eid cakes, Diwali lights and a bit of jerk chicken will do. It won't.

Get on a bus and you will hear many a robust exchange about "ethnicity" which polite and political conversation is afraid of. Not everyone who expresses a less than rosy view of how we all rub along is a fascist. That far-right extremists stalk Europe during a recession is not novel; that this tragedy should erupt in the richest country in the world is a shock.

What does Breivik mean by "multiculturalism"? It is clear that there are many definitions in play. It is surely a response to the model of assimilation, though there have always been communities that deliberately refuse to assimilate. Instead, we are encouraged to see various and different cultural communities as having equal rights. A dialogue is presumed to exist between said communities. But it often doesn't. Grudging tolerance does. For some time, though, institutionalised multiculturalism has been experienced by some as special pleading. Certainly, in practice, in education it amounts to a mush where children are told that all religions are benign. I never want to sit through another nativity play with no mention of Jesus. Or a dire Kwanzaa in "African". Historical amnesia does not "empower" any group.

Indeed, as Trevor Phillips pointed out years ago, well-intentioned multicultural dogma has not pushed more ethnic minorities into the upper echelons of politics, media or business. It changes nothing structurally. The desire for a monoculture may well be nostalgic but it can be heard from Folkestone to Bradford. The flight from state schools of many middle-class parents is a flight from "diversity", the fear that dare not speak its name.

At its extreme, it incorporates a desire for a kind of re-masculation via the destruction of women's rights and a simplistic nationalism. The collision of Breivik's thinking with al-Qaida's is a circle of hell. Such thinking is driven by an urge for purity and an absolute certainty. The cultural relativism of liberals crumbles away here. We cannot "respect" those who would gun down our children.

In life, though there may be "passive tolerance", there is often aggressive confrontation between all kinds of people about who has priority. It is rough. And tumble. The excitement of difference. Edgy, if you are young.

And frightening sometimes, too. Breivik's fear of being taken over was out of all proportion, obviously, but how are people to express their fear of change? Is voicing concerns about the modern world not part of multicultural discourse?

For to express such a fear is to be labelled racist, uptight, intolerant. Parts of the left are still arguing for a multiculturalism that superficially placates but never involves deep and actual change. Breivik's "crusade" meant murdering children yet he still sees himself as a victim. He is indeed part of the modern world, after all, where the language of victimhood is paramount.

Surely not everyone who feels unheard or uncomfortable is an EDL headcase or will engage in a Breivik-style jihad. But we do need to listen to our fellow citizens instead of preaching this tired doctrine of cultures all fitting together in a beautiful mosaic. Multiculturalism too often means a kind of sampling, both musically and gastronomically, which is lovely for the bourgeoisie but leaves behind a huge and indeed ethnically diverse underclass who do not yearn for modernity and indeed oppose it. This is why we all keep talking about culture because we will not talk about class in a globalised economy. Modernity means we live without illusions but do not become disillusioned. Let's discuss these illusions instead of wishing them away. This is cultural Marxism for you. This is the very thing Breivik feared.