The news of the cold-blooded murders in Norway last month saddened us all. We at Glór Moslamach wrote to the Norwegian Ambassador in Ireland to offer our heartfelt condolences. Meanwhile, the attitude of the media was hopelessly predictable.
Fingers were immediately pointed at Muslims by so-called ‘experts’ on terrorism before anything was known about the attacks. UK tabloid The Sun, owned by the despicable Rupert Murdoch, even went to the extent of publishing on its front page the headline “Norway’s 9/11”, labeling the atrocity as an “‘al-Qaeda’ massacre”.
But other news agencies and media outlets were equally quick to jump on the bandwagon of idiots enjoying their moment in the sun to bash Islam and Muslims. Then they realised that the perpetrator wasn’t a Muslim or an immigrant. Indeed, it turned out to be a blonde, purebred Norwegian, a self-styled ‘crusader’ full of sickening hate for Islam and Muslims. In his diaries discovered after the tragedy, he professed to be doing God’s work as a good Christian, punishing his own people for tolerating Muslims, allowing them to live in Norway and other similar ‘crimes’.
So they changed their tune. Now all of a sudden Anders Behring Breivik cannot be a Christian, according to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who has a regular nauseating act where he screams and shouts at the top of his lungs at people who disagree with his morbid jingoism.
Elsewhere, journalists started questioning the mental health of the killer. It makes sense doesn’t it? You’d have to be insane to commit such an atrocity! Unless you’re a Muslim. You see, Muslims who blow up innocent people are not mad; they are sane terrorists. But Christians don’t have to apologise for Breivik’s actions – after all, he’s a mad loner, isn’t he?
The focus of the story soon shifted to far right groups such as English Defence League, highlighting their anti-Muslim hate speech and their not-so-insignificant online forums. But the real culprits are the supposedly mainstream voices, the commentators and columnists who generate hate against Muslims and immigrants under the veil of speaking for the ‘common people’.
We know of such people within Ireland, too. One individual named Mark Humphrys runs a website on which he classifies Muslims as either ‘western’ moderates or Islamist extremists, and accuses Muslims of being anti-British and anti-American just because they speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s more, he even compares his own thinking to that of the killer Breivik!
Instead of nipping this evil in the bud, it seems lawyers, politicians and the media in Ireland are more than happy to ignore this vilification of Ireland’s Muslim population. Yet the terrorist massacre in Norway shows that ignoring the problem is not an option.
One can only hope that those diseased neo-Nazi cockroaches who squirm in Ireland’s underground don’t take inspiration from the likes of Humphrys and randomly kill people as ‘punishment’ for tolerating Muslims. The Norwegians never thought it would happen in their country; sadly it’s not much different in this country, either.
Qasim Afridi is a member of the think tank Glór Moslamach
glormoslamach@gmail.com
