By a commentator for Tjen Folket Media. Direct quotes have been translated from the original Norwegian by Tjen Folket Media.
The young fascist who murdered his sister before attempting to carry out a terror attack against a mosque in Bærum [county neighbouring capitol Oslo, translator] was previously reported to the police. He had access to weapons, raised concerns among classmates, and was on the police’s radar for a short time. One can ask how the surveillance police would have handled him if it was ISIS that he expressed interest in.
We know that a number of young Muslims have been called into questioning on very flimsy pretexts. We know that the police do not hesitate to scare the families of young boys with immigration backgrounds. We have seen how the police violently crack down on young boys who hang out around shopping centers. But a white, young millionaire from Bærum receives an entirely different treatment.
Even after terror attacks, we see how differently this terror attack is treated. The day after the attacks, Prime Minister Erna Solberg met for an interview on NRK. The day after a murder and armed attack on a mosque, Solberg finds it necessary to underscore that the Muslim environment must accept criticism for forced marriages and honor killings!
The mosque’s leader tells the newspaper Klassekampen how they were received by the police when they called in about the attack:
«I asked when the police patrol was coming. The officer asked me to wait and to tell him more. ‘Are you experiencing internal conflicts?’ was one of the questions he asked me. I had to push him to understand the severity of the situation, and I had to ask him to send an ambulance.»
Further, he describes how the police behaved once they arrived at the scene:
«So then, I begin to walk in the direction of the exit while supporting my grandfather. Right next to the door where I placed the bench, a police officer is standing there pointing a pistol at me and asks me: ‘Are you one of the suspects?’
And there I am standing, while holding up an older man covered in blood from head to toe. It was almost comic,» says Mushtaq.
Both the prime minister and the police show here that chauvinism against Muslims does not appear out of thin air. The media is busy trying to blame internet forums. Islamophobia on the internet plays an organizing and inciting role. But they are wrong if they believe that chauvinism exists in a vacuum. It grows out of the system itself, and both the prime minister and the police convey the same chauvinism in their treatment of the terrorism itself.
When Hitler’s Nazis persecuted Jews, the used a centuries-long tradition of chauvinism against Jews as their starting point. In Norway, we have had a «Jewish paragraph» in the Constitution for a long time (which maintained that Jews were not to have access to the kingdom), an expression for a rooted chauvinism against Jews. In the same manner, the fascists’ Islamophobia today is just a more extreme or radical variation of the systematic chauvinism against Muslims. A chauvinism that goes hand in hand with US-imperialism’s military adventures in Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the systematic oppression and suspicions against refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries to Europe.
Again – chauvinism does not appear from thin air; it grows out of society’s foundations. It grows out of imperialism and oppression, from the need for scapegoats when capitalism creates problems for itself, from the bourgeois state’s need to fill the people surrounding it with an «us-versus-them» mentality.
After the terrorist attack and the murder of the attacker’s sister, we send our condolences to the family and friends of the victim. We honor and commend the heroes who overpowered the murderer while unarmed. We call for struggle against the fascists’ organizations, ideologies, and apologists – from SIAN and the Nazi group NMR, to Sylvi Listhaug and Tybring Gjedde [leading members of one gouvorning party, translator]. And not least – we shame the system, the prime minister and the police, and we call for a fight against the very basis of Islamophobia: imperialism and the bourgeois state.
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