AFTERMATH I – AT 8:13 A.M. ET:  It was not difficult to predict, after we learned that the Norway killer was a "right winger," that the international left would go nuts.  We didn't have to wait long.

The deranged criminal who committed the atrocity left writings, many of which are remarkably mainstream.  He quotes writers, on the right, who are quoted routinely around the world.  These writers are now being smeared all over the internet for having provided the "inspiration" for the actions of this one man.  That, of course, is obscene.  It is common for even the most corrupt of political actors to quote perfectly respectable sources.  Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the vicious North Vietnamese dictatorship, quoted Thomas Jefferson.  That didn't make Ho a Jeffersonian democrat and it didn't make Jefferson a Commie lover. 

Those self-righteous clowns who are today lecturing those on the right who have warned of multiculturalism and have taken on the jihadists and their teachers might ask themselves a simple question:  If these writers, like Robert Spencer and Melanie Phillips, "inspired" the mad Norway killer, why weren't any of their other readers inspired to do the same thing?  A truly inspirational writer inspires the masses, not one man with a mental defect.

And the left is also becoming unhinged because a number of commentators, in the hours after the atrocity, theorized that Al Qaeda mght have been involved.  Yes, I would have preferred that judgment be withheld, but the speculation in this case was informed speculation, not wild guesses.  The fact is that a number of incidents involving Norway in the weeks leading up to the attacks involved threats against that country from radical Islamic sources.  The fact is also that the overwhelming majority of large terror attacks committed each year are committed by jihadists.  Speculatively mentioning that is not irresponsible.

In this case the speculation turned out to be wrong, and that requires cautious apology, but only cautious apology.  You may be sure that much of the left, which had no problem blaming Sarah Palin for "inspiring" the Tucson shootings, wants to now try to sell us the line that the Islamic threat has been exaggerated, and that talk of the failure of multiculturalism is "racist" and "hate speech," and that we must ban it.  You can almost hear the smacking of lips on trendy college campuses, where dissent from the party line is indeed often called "hate speech." 

Fortunately, thoughtful conservatives are immediately fighting back against the outrageous attempts to link this Norwegian lunatic with conservatism, Christianity, or concern over multicultural excess.  Ross Douthat, the somewhat conservative columnist for The New York Times, points out that America's Unabomber wrote things about environmentalism that could have been written by Al Gore.   And he notes that Angela Merkel of Germany has denounced the failures of multiculturalism.  He adds:

...this doesn’t mean that conservatives need to surrender their convictions. The horror in Norway no more discredits Merkel’s views on Muslim assimilation than Ted Kaczynski’s bombs discredited Al Gore’s views on the dark side of industrialization. On the big picture, Europe’s cultural conservatives are right: Mass immigration really has left the Continent more divided than enriched, Islam and liberal democracy have not yet proven natural bedfellows and the dream of a postnational, postpatriotic European Union governed by a benevolent ruling elite looks more like a folly every day.

For decades, Europe’s governing classes insisted that only racists worried about immigration, only bigots doubted the success of multiculturalism and only fascists cared about national identity. Now that a true far-right radical has perpetrated a terrible atrocity, it will be easy to return to those comforting illusions.

But extremists only grow stronger when a political system pretends that problems don’t exist. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have an obligation to acknowledge that Anders Behring Breivik is a distinctively right-wing kind of monster. But they also have an obligation to the realities that this monster’s terrible atrocity threatens to obscure.

Well said.  But The Times will undoubtedly get letters denouncing Douhat as a "hate" writer. 

Oh, and it would be nice if some of the leftists would express some compassion for the victims of the attacks.  In their rush to politicize the horror, they have left out the young kids who will never see another day.  You know, sometimes people count, not just ideology.

July 25, 2011