By Dr Firoz Osman – Secretary General, Media Review Network
(source: Pretoria News, Pg18, Friday, 29/07/2011)
Once again, the self-proclaimed “terror experts” have sprung to life using the horrendous slaughter in Norway to demonise Muslims and resurrect the phantom of “al Qaeda” terrorists for carrying out the carnage.
The media provided the platform for these Islamophobes to emit their noxious venom against Muslims, speculating on all sorts of tenuous links – from the arrest of a Kurdish leader, or Norway being a ‘soft’ target, or even that it has troops in Nato invading Muslim lands.
However, the arrest of a blond and blue-eyed right-wing Christian fundamentalist sent these “experts” scurrying back to the drawing boards. The blond and blue-eyed Anders Behring Breivik unleashed this terror because of his hatred for a democratic government that follow liberal policies on gay rights, has priests who march for Palestine, and is fair on immigrants from other cultures and Muslims.
The killers view is no different from the dangerous and racist right- wing groups in Europe and America, who violently oppose abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act. These groups are inspired by right-wing Evangelists that spawned Republican “Tea-Party” type rapidly flourishing in the USA, spreading the persistent lie that President Obama is not a citizen, that he is a Muslim, or that there is a plot to take away their freedoms.
It is disturbing that governments and the media dismiss this massacre as the work of a ‘deranged’ person or a ‘madman’ working independently. The bombing in 1995 in Oklahoma, USA, was blamed on Muslims until Timothy McVeigh, was captured. His right-wing links was dismissed as irrelevant, as happened in 1969 when Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian Christian set fire to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. It is likely to happen again in Breivik’s case.
Robert Murdoch’s remaining stable of news media outlets will ensure that Muslims and Islam remain engraved in peoples’ minds as the main organised “terror threat” to Western civilisation. And yet, it was the right-wing ideology of that gave us slavery and racist colonialism in Asia and Africa, anti-Semitism and holocaust in Europe, and Apartheid in South Africa and Zionism in Palestine. This vile and false right-wing notion of racial and cultural superiority led to the death of millions in the developing world, and is on the rise again.
Breivic’s racist venom spewed on internet suggest links with right-wing Christian groups such as the English Defence League, a virulent gang of skinheads who fly the Israeli flag at their rallies and agitate against Muslims.
To relegate this atrocity as an isolated act of a madman will be catastrophic.
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