Norway attack shows dangers from Islamophobia and the far right

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Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen / AFP / Getty Images On July 21, following a devastating bomb attack on government offices in Oslo, a gunman attacked the annual summer camp of the AUF, youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party. After initial police estimates of more than 90 dead, the death toll has been officially reduced to 76.

The media frenzy in the immediate aftermath of the killings reveals a lot. The media immediately started to speculate about the attack being the work of Muslim terrorists. One “expert” even claimed that the attack was the work of a terrorist group, Ansar al-Jihad alAlami, or “Helpers of the Global Jihad.” The problem is that the group doesn’t seem to exist, except in the imagination of the so-called expert. Fox News, CNN and other mass media outlets hosted a parade of terrorism “experts” to talk about the “fact” that this was an example of Islamic terrorism, and when reports began to filter in that the attacker was a blond Norwegian, the experts scoffed.

Media outlets seemed unable to explain that the attack was carried out by a right-wing, anti-immigrant, Islamophobe, Anders Behring Breivik. Many media sources have shifted to referring to Breivik as a lone madman, ignoring the political context of the attacks.

Breivik has been revealed to have ties to the semi-fascist English Defense League and is an admirer of the Tea Party and Islamophobic bloggers in the United States, like Pam Gellar and David Horowitz.

Breivik’s attack on the AUF was not a random act.

His rampage was aimed at what the far right sees as a “Marxist multiculturalism” that is facilitating the takeover of Europe by Muslims. While many rightists in Europe and the U.S. have been careful to distance themselves from the violence of this attack, many have ... Budget crisis (continued from page 1: “The U.S. budget crisis — Bosses win, workers lose”) 67 rather than 65, and cost-of-living adjustments will be scaled down, providing additional billions to shore up the coffers of the boss class.

Of course, the deficit could be eliminated entirely by taxing corporations and the rich, or even by eliminating the military budget, but this is a non-issue in the framework of capitalist/imperialist politics today.

This new debt level will mark another historic high, rising from the present $14.3 trillion to some $15.2 trillion. And this in turn will, until the next time, avert the default of the world’s strongest (though crisis-ridden) economy—a default that would undoubtedly unhinge the world financial system.

The new debt will be paid for by other reluctant governments and assorted financial institutions that buy U.S. bonds. That is, U.S. IOUs will be exchanged for “real” money or credit to allow American capitalism to pay its bills.

It is far from clear what nations would be interested in buying U.S. dollar-denominated debt when the massive printing of U.S. dollars, coupled by the massive issuance of Treasury certificates, has nothing to do with an increase in the production of new commodities in the United States. China, the largest U.S. debt holder at $1.5 trillion, and virtually all the major capitalist powers, have already expressed alarm about the potential for the U.S. debt they hold to rapidly lose its value.

Congressional hoopla aside, including Republican Tea Party rhetoric about a balanced budget and the limited Democratic Party protests over Obama’s “concessions,” the deal cut between Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, between the ruling-class representatives of different corporate interests, was solidified quite early. The July 26 New York Times made no bones about it: “A full picture of the shelved [temporarily] compromise shows how close the two leaders were and 4 Socialist Action august 2011 made excuses for Breivik’s hate. Pat Buchanan, a U.S.based white nationalist and populist, said that Breivik “may have been right.” Glen Beck likened the AUF summer camp to a “Hitler youth rally”—as if this somehow excused the slaughter.

In the period since 9/11, the mass media and imperialist governments have whipped up a frenzy of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fervor. In Western Europe, where the number of Muslim immigrants has increased in recent years, the far right has taken up the issue of Islam and the notion that Muslims are a threat to Western Civilization.

This racist and Islamophobic scapegoating has spread to the U.S. as well. The official policy of the U.S. government is tolerance of different cultures and religions, but the reality has been preemptive prosecutions and frame-ups of Muslims. The cases of the Albany Two, the Newburgh Four, and the Fort Dix Five are examples of such frame-up prosecutions, which rely on the testimony of paid informants and, in some cases, on “secret” evidence.

In 2010, the anti-Muslim frenzy reached a boiling point in the United States around the issue of Cordoba House, the Islamic cultural center planned for Lower Manhattan. The ultra-right Tea party and right-wing blogger Pamela Geller and her organization Stop Islamization of America went on a campaign to paint the building of Cordoba House as some sort of conspiracy by radical Muslims. Fox News and the right-wing media took up the drum beat. Cordoba House was framed as a “9/11 Victory Mosque” and a “monument to the 9/11 hijackers.” Hate crimes against mosques and Muslims increased.

“Let’s make a DEAL on that money you owe us...”

how far each was willing to go in confronting their parties’ sacred cows—Mr. Obama on entitlement spending and Mr. Boehner on taxes. On paper about $59 billion in spending cuts separated them, a relative pittance in terms of projected spending for the decade. Most of that difference was over Medicaid; Mr. Boehner wanted $40 billion more in cuts than Mr. Obama.”

“If I were there,” declared Mickey Edwards, a House Republican leader in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, “I would say, My God, declare victory.’”

Obama and Boehner agreed on the essentials, over $2 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. Their banking and corporate advisers are currently scouring the fine print of the tax codes wherein billions in gifts, grants, and tax exemptions for the rich are hidden from 99.999 percent of the population. While the two-party, two-bit charade players prattled on with endless press conferences and statements of fidelity to their “no tax increases” or “no more cuts to entitlements,” the serious but unseen players are all agreed that corporate America’s crisis must Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images Some mainstream politicians and media defended the Islamic center, but often in timid terms and very often questioning the “sensitivity” of building the center within several blocks of the site of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack in Manhattan. Howard Dean— the so-called liberal—called Cordoba House an affront.

Breivik’s right-wing, pro-Israel politics point to an evolution in the European and U.S. far right. The new populist far right tends to be “pro-Israel” and seeks alliances with rightwing Zionists. Islam is seen as the primary opponent of the West. Anti-Semitism, once a central feature of European far-right politics, has not disappeared, but it has faded to the background.

Writing in the Fourth International on-line journal, International Viewpoint, Enzo Traverso has these observations about the new populist far right in Europe: “The decline of the fascist tradition is giving way to the rise of a far right of a new kind, whose ideology takes on board the changes of the twenty-first century … the abandonment of the cult of the state in favor of a vision of the neo-liberal world centered on the criticism of the Welfare State, the tax revolt, economic deregulation and the valorization of individual freedoms, opposed to any official interference…”

What are the lessons we should draw from the Norway attack? The labor movement and all socialist and progressive forces must unequivocally and uncompromisingly oppose Islamophobia and racism, and it must actively defend the democratic rights of Muslims and immigrants. We cannot rely on cops or the capitalist state to defend us from fascist and right-wing attacks. Only mass mobilizations, working-class political independence, and collective self-defense offer real protection against the far right.

The growth of anti-immigrant vigilante groups (Minutemen, etc.) and the ultra-right Tea Party means that this is not just a European danger. Recently, Tea Party supporters broke up a picnic in a public park attended by members of the liberal group, Move-On. These types of goon-squad tactics and the rhetoric by Tea Party politicians about “Second Amendment” solutions point to an increasing impatient and volatile right wing. n be borne by the working class as a whole. The phenomenon is repeated the world over, as the world economic crisis ever more compels the corporate elite to deepen their incursions on every aspect of working-class life.

A July 22 New York Times article entitled “European Leaders Back Broad Plan to Rescue Greece” was explicit on this question: “The lack of a solution to Greece [on the verge of a catastrophic default] has also rattled financial markets, ultimately forcing European leaders to act this week. On the eve of the summit meeting, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany met in Berlin along with the president of the European Central Bank, and came to a general agreement that euro zone taxpayers would have to cover the rescue costs to preserve the integrity of the single European currency. How German and French citizens will react to this is unclear.”

Just as Obama’s bipartisan policies bailed out U.S. banks and corporations to the tune of $16 trillion since the crisis began, their European counterparts rendered the same service to their corporate masters. In all cases, in every country, working people have been made to pay the price of capitalism’s failure—the failure of a system whose internal and inherent contradictions, including never-ending global competition for shrinking markets and falling profit rates, leave it no choice but to counter its downfall by squeezing the lifeblood out of workers everywhere. There is no other explanation for the massive and growing unemployment, for the obliteration of pensions, massive foreclosures, fierce attacks on public education, union busting, voiding of union contracts, degradation of the environment, and more.

Contrary to popular opinion, it is not greed that drives the capitalist system forward, but the never-ending quest to accumulate more capital or perish in the face of competitors. The latter are ever reduced in numbers, as the weaker are driven from the market place, and the (continued on page 5, in “WikiLeaks lifts lid on U.S. role in Haiti”)

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