Norway's terrorist: a lone wolf?
He’s what they call a lone Wolf. The Norwegian terrorist who lingered as he shot so many under the cover of a bomb blast that he hoped would kill many more. In all he wounded or killed almost 200 people on Friday.
He left no email trail, no phone tracks either. Despite his vast internet activity and extremist philosophy, he left no trace of his nine years of planning and written execution that crescendo’d with this harrowing and horrific act of terrorism.
This was a man who had so contorted his belief system that he could find it within himself to line up in the sights of his automatic weapons – sometimes for a minute at a time…to kill and kill again. To kill the innocent youth of his own kith and kin.
But Anders Breivik, did not act alone. He swept the extremist sites of the free world for material to stoke his hatred. He was nicely rewarded by entirely legal entities both in Britain and abroad.
The web is a feeding ground for deranged individuals who seek justification for their anger and resentment. The wonder is that we have to go back to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber to find the closest parallel. And that was sixteen years ago – 168 dead, over 600 injured. He was judicially killed in 2001.
Norway will have no such luxury. Indeed her struggle will be to ensure that Breivik’s satanic plan – to use these atrocities to promote his cause is not fulfilled. And then to change the law to prevent his statutory release in 21 years time when he will be only 54.
Read more: the manifesto of a murderer
As Congress debates the US debt mountain and its leaders sit in political gridlock threatening the entire world economy, normally sanguine commentators talk of the genuine streaks of insanity that they see parading through America’s electoral cycle.
The key Tea Party Presidential Candidate has argued that the end of the world is very nigh. Many other such positions are adopted inside and outside mainstream US political parties.
It should not matter. But with a handful of loan wolves prepared to go the whole cowardly hog, it does. Careless talk costs lives. Defence Leagues, “progressive” parties, anti-immigration groups, Islamaphobes, homophobes, and the rest would do well to remember that madder people than they, read and inwardly digest. Pray God they don’t chose to vomit bullets and bombs to prove the point again.
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