English-Language Media Ignores Breivik’s Coming-Out As A Nazi

Last Friday, I published a translation of a Swedish report about a letter mass murderer Anders Breivik had sent to the media, in which he revealed that he was a Nazi, and that he had published his “counter-jihad manifesto” intending to destroy the counter-jihad movement. The Swedish news source Expo Idag (Expo Today) reported:

Anders Behring Breivik has sent out a letter to the international media that Expo Today has reviewed. He describes the letter as a sort of first step in a “peace negotiation” with his political opponents. In the letter, Anders Behring Breivik to some extent changes the rhetoric from that which he used in his so-called manifesto. He says that he used “counter-jihadist” rhetoric in the manifesto to protect “ethno-nationalists” and instead provoke a media campaign against the anti-nationalist counter-jihad supporters. He calls this a strategy of “dual psychology.”



Now Daniel Greenfield has picked up the story, but he is the only one: the English-language media has completely ignored this story, not even bothering to publish stories designed to shore up their earlier demonization of the counter-jihad movement, and claiming that Breivik is cravenly trying to obscure his counter-jihadist tracks, or simply delusional and crazy, as Greenfield does. Instead, no one mentioned it at all. Nothing. The Wall Street Journal published a piece about his claims that he was tortured, but that was as close as any mainstream media outlet came to covering this story at all.

Contrast that to the huge media barrage when Breivik’s “manifesto” was first discovered: I was on NBC for the first time in ten years, I was on the front page of the New York Times, I was on the BBC, and in a hundred other places — everywhere being blamed for the murders. But now, when Breivik says he was a Nazi and was not only not influenced by the counter-jihad movement, but was trying to destroy it?

This isn’t the first time the media has distorted Breivik’s story, although this is the first time it has done it by omission. Although Leftists and Islamic supremacists, as well as hard-Left governing and media elites, will continue to insist that there is something wrong with opposing jihad terror and Islamic supremacism because of this mass murderer, and will continue to claim that I and others somehow “inspired” him, it has been clear for quite some time that Breivik was not a counter-jihadist at all, and could not have been and was not incited to violence by the counter-jihad movement.

In all his quotations of me, Breivik never quotes me calling for or justifying violence – because I never do. In fact, Breivik even criticized me for not doing so, saying of me, historian Bat Ye’or and other critics of jihad terror: “If these authors are to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance then other authors will have to” (Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, p. 743). Breivik explains in his manifesto that he was “radicalized” by his experiences with Muslim immigrants in the early 1990s, before I had published anything about Islam (See Breivik, p. 1348).