Anders Behring Breivik is the name of the Norwegian man being held by Norwegian authorities as a suspect in the horrific slaughter of children at a summer camp, and the bombing of central Oslo.  Brevik is being identified as "right wing," "Christian," and "conservative" -- much as Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner was presumed to be a Sarah Palin acolyte driven to murder by the sight of a bulls eye on a map over a year ago. We shall see if Breivik is as insane as the acts he is purported to have carried out. But for the moment, the left has its fondest desire realized: someone they can brand as a Christian terrorist, proving that Islamofascism is no worse than Christianity.

After initially urging caution in presuming it was Islamic terrorists at the root of the mayhem, when reports came in of Islamic groups claiming credit, we noted that Norway has pursued anti-Israel policies, and that anti-Israel boycotts are popular among certain groups in Norway.  I remain skeptical about Brevik, just as I remain skeptical of the narrative that Timothy McVeigh was a "right wing Christian" terrorist. (See Jayna Davis's extraordinary work debunking the official narrative of McVeigh, a cover-up of dismaying effectiveness in this country.) 

Mike Baehr adds:

Mike Baehr adds:

The narrative of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian fascist attacking his own country is entirely too convenient.

I have no doubt that he's the shooter, given the witnesses and the fact that he was arrested at the scene.  But an attack like yesterday's took months of planning and probably quite a bit of training.  Not just anyone is capable of building explosives that will remotely (or were they timed?) detonate successfully in a major downtown.  It would be interesting to see where he got his arsenal of weapons, too.  Norway's gun laws are more liberal than the remainder of Europe (and their rate of violent crime committed with guns is very low), but he still had a collection of things you wouldn't find, including apparently several automatics.

One also does not knock the ruling party from power by murdering 80 of its up-and-coming in a horrific attack.  If anything, that's a good way to keep them in power for the next 20 years.  I would count on Labour to milk this for all it's worth.

I think someone took advantage of an angry and somewhat crazy man to carry out their own agenda, and we may never find out who.

A note about social media:  I have observed the following trend in recent years around events like this (the Loughner shootings in Arizona are a good example).  The instant a suspect's name is dropped, there is a mad rush on the Internet to find anything related to him.

Witness the bandying about of Breivik's Twitter account and Facebook, as well as various right-wing/anti-Islamic posts he made on Norwegian message boards.  Some unauthenticated translations are available, by the way, at this blog.  I cannot attest to their veracity.

What I read in that blog is nothing I haven't read countless times from concerned citizens.  Without his recent notoriety, Breivik would be a nobody, and his views, though to the right of center, would not be particularly out of the ordinary.  Many in Europe share his viewpoints, and there has not been a rash of right-wing terror.

If I were masterminding a murderous conspiracy, I would be foolish not to at least seed the Internet with content about the suspect first.

Let's admit it: nobody had even heard of this guy before yesterday.

His Twitter account was registered ony a week ago, and we don't know about his Facebook, which is quite ordinary.  Nevertheless, now we can all feel like we "know" something about him, despite the fact that none of us has actually met him.  The relevant pages are down now (at least his Facebook is), but they've already been archived for the masses, who can begin their psychoanalyzing in earnest.  More food for thought.