Counterjihad - Not A "Religion Of Peace?"

By Steve Hynd

Apparently the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik was a big fan of that strain of wingnut bloggers who call themselves "counterjihadists".

His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a grave danger to Western culture.

...The revelations about Mr. Breivik�s American influences exploded on the blogs over the weekend, putting Mr. Spencer and other self-described �counterjihad� activists on the defensive, as their critics suggested that their portrayal of Islam as a threat to the West indirectly fostered the crimes in Norway.

Mr. Spencer wrote on his Web site, jihadwatch.org, that �the blame game� had begun, �as if killing a lot of children aids the defense against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, or has anything remotely to do with anything we have ever advocated.� He did not mention Mr. Breivik�s voluminous quotations from his writings.

Adam Serwer, writing for the Plum Line blog at the New York Times, hits one out of the park:

American anti-Islam bloggers aren�t to blame for the Norway Massacre. But their response to the attacks is nonetheless revealing, in that they are now demanding the kind of nuanced analysis of the Norway shootings that they�ve always failed to offer when implicating jihadism or all Muslims for terror attacks.

...Most of Geller and Spencer�s blogging consists of attempts to tar all Muslims with the responsibility for terrorism. At CPAC last year, Geller and Spencer drew a large crowd for their documentary referring to the proposed community center near Ground Zero as �the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.� Yet they�re now pleading for the world not to do what they�ve spent their careers doing � assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association. What�s clear is that they understand that the principle of collective responsibility is a monstrous wrong in the abstract, or at least when it�s applied to them. They are now begging for the kind of tolerance and understanding they cheerfully refuse to grant to American Muslims.

These bloggers are not directly responsible for the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. But make no mistake: Their school of analysis, which puts the blame on all Muslims for acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has been fully discredited � by their own reaction to the Oslo attacks. While it�s obvious that few if any of them will take this lesson to heart, the rest of us should � terrorist acts are committed by individuals, and it is those individuals who should be held responsible.

Or. as the immortal Scottish bard might put it: "O would some Power the gift to give us, To see ourselves as others see us!"