 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Vijay Prashan from Trinity College, Connecticut. Vijay, good to have you with us back. Thank you. There has been a lot of reaction to the Andrew Brevik massacres in Norway, particularly the fact that he was initially talked about as only as a mad lunatic figure and not as a Christian fundamentalist or as an extremist or a terrorist. While if it had been an attack by any of the Islamic groups, then of course it got the terrorist level easily. Do you think that there has been any reevaluation of this or is it still the dominant media image that Christians cannot be terrorists like in India? Hindutva forces argue that Hindus cannot be terrorists? Well, exactly. After the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City's federal building, many reporters said that the odds are that this was done by, at that time they quite plainly said Muslim terrorists. Today they generally use words like Al Qaeda or Jihadis. But even after 1995 when it became clear that the perpetrator then was a member of the Michigan militia, a sort of racist organization that believes that the country is being taken over by the United Nations. Even though it was pointed out that he had conducted the act, still some reporters said that what at that time Timothy McQuay, what he had done was followed the grammar of Muslim terrorism. And indeed after Brevik's action where again initially people said this is a jihadi attack, now some people are saying that what Brevik has done essentially is follow the model of what the jihadis do. In other words Brevik simply followed something like the Mumbai attacks of 2011. So I don't think any lessons have been learnt here. There's very little soul searching particularly in the Atlantic media over the question of the growth of the far right and its propensity to violence. No lessons as far as I'm concerned. Do you think that this larger issue of the far right whether it is the United States, whether it's Norway, other countries in Europe or it is India or it's the West Asian scenario. Do you think the far right has a similar kind of ideology in terms of what it perceives and also the methods it wants to use? Well the far right particularly if you just look at Brevik for a minute, Brevik and his section of the far right are much more incensed about what they consider to be immigration that's ruining their culture. In other words they don't necessarily have a big global analysis. I've tried to go through some of Brevik's manifesto. It's very large, it's very flabby, it's a largely cut and paste job including large sections from Hindutva writers. But at the base of Brevik's anger is against the fact that what he considered his Norway is being ruined by immigrants. And by immigrants he means asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, he means asylum seekers from Iraq, he means immigrants coming from Asia and Africa. What he doesn't of course reflect is that the bulk of immigrants into Norway come from other parts of Europe and they are not coming from Sri Lanka and Iraq. But the animus is that how dare my Norway, his version of Norway, a sort of white Norway is getting destroyed by these immigrants. Of course this is a utterly specious argument because the very idea of Norway, you know, unconnected to the rest of the world is ridiculous. After all Norway gave us the Vikings who themselves went on pillaging in Ireland. So it's not as if Norway is some isolated place cut off from the world and now is being invaded by Sri Lankans and Iraqis. But the base of this form of hard-right anxiety is immigration. And in that sense it's different from organizations like Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups who don't actually worry about immigration as a phenomena. If you look at it Vijay, the other part of it that they also look at the West sort of changing their culture, changing the way they live. So in that sense that anxiety is not very different from the anxiety of a Bravik who also looks at his Christian Norway being overrun by quote-unquote Arab and Middle East religions and people. Well yes, in that sense, in the civilizational sense, Bravik shares a great deal with Osama bin Laden and interestingly with Samuel Huntington. Because after all they reflect Huntington's thesis that the cultures of the West and the cultures of the Islamic world and the cultures of the Confucian world etc. should remain separate, that they should not overrun each other and they also reflect at least the anxiety that Europe's culture is getting tainted. One way or the other in that the so-called bin Laden and that kind of Islamic civilizational crisis thinkers worry that Europe is tainting them and that they should go back and create another Andalusian kingdom or something like that. They have that idea in their head. On the other side of it people like Bravik and Huntington greatly worry that the fortress of the West is being damaged. Before he died Samuel Huntington wrote a book on the so-called Browning of America where he worried that with more immigrants coming from Central and South America the Anglo-Saxon culture, what he considered the Anglo-Saxon culture of the United States was being destroyed. And of course one always wants to go back to Samuel Huntington, now certainly he's dead. But at that time go back to Huntington and give him that old joke which is where they say the Native Americans say who's the real alien here. This was our land, this was not an Anglo-Saxon land and you came from outside. Nonetheless this is a widely shared thought in the far right and in the so-called normal right that the immigrant problem is destroying the culture and as far as the Jihadis are concerned they say the entry of American troops in Saudi Arabia is destroying the culture and so is American cable television. One thing I must say is that the Norwegians after this incident have had a number of large protests. The king recently said that this is going to strengthen our tolerance, strengthen our democracy. The mayor of Oslo I think very carefully says we are going to punish Bravik by democracy and love. We are not going to turn Norway into a garrison state. We are going to strengthen the institutions which indeed bring in asylum seekers. We are not going to cut off and follow Bravik's ideology. And I think that says a lot about Norway, how Norway is in some ways a model for how to deal with these kind of toxic actions. This in fact would be quite different from the way the United States has reacted to attacks on itself, 9-11 being the example. When it virtually turned into Islamophobic and much more intolerant than it was in the past. Well yes indeed the crown prince, the prime minister, they all directly confronted the issue of Islamophobia. In fact this is not a new problem in Norway. In 2002 a neo-Nazi group called the Good Boys killed a young man whose name was Benjamin Hermansen, whose one parent is African. And when Benjamin Hermansen was killed, this one act of killing in Oslo 40,000 people out of just over 4.5 million Norwegians. 40,000 people came to a demonstration led by the prime minister and the crown prince. And this was in 2002. What's very interesting is Bravik has asked as his lawyer the man who was the lawyer for Hermansen to defend him. When Hermansen's case came up, that lawyer then who spoke for Hermansen, Bravik has asked for himself. So Norway has had a long history of very I think strongly condemning actions of the right wing. And the 2002 incident is important because one man was killed, 40,000 people came on the street. And I would say with the killings of this year, the country has come out on the street. There have been very large demonstrations in all the major settlements including in Oslo. And in the parliament yesterday, the king spoke I think quite strongly about how Islamophobia is a danger. We never saw this in the United States. Indeed, what one saw after 9-11 was people coming out in vigils. And at many of these vigils for the dead, there was a language of revenge and retribution spurred on by the language from George Bush himself. So these are two very different models of how to react to violence. And I hope that the world watches Norway and follows Norway's example. It's also interesting that Bravik though his real angst was Islamization of Europe, but his real enemy for him were really the multiculturalists or those who were preaching tolerance and secular democracy. They seem to be his major enemies the way he turned his gun on them. Well, you know, it's very interesting how the media talks about this as a tragedy. And, you know, links to other tragedies where innocent people were killed. But in a sense, the people who were killed by Bravik were not, you know, just any ordinary people. These were important political actors in Norwegian social democracy. This was the AUF, the youth league of the Labour Party. Indeed, the current Prime Minister of Norway, Jan Stortenberg was the head of the AUF, this youth league when he was younger. This youth league has taken the lead in fighting for a tolerant multicultural Norway and has taken a very strong position on having Norway be a leading actor on the world stage for issues such as fighting against the occupation of the Palestinians. So, you know, when Bravik chose his target, he didn't pick anybody. He didn't go to a circus and just shoot randomly. He went to the youth camp where the AUF, you know, Carter were just about ready to have their next event and he struck against them. And, you know, when they say youth camp, the AUF, you know, young people were not there simply canoeing and going on hikes. They had held a rally on behalf of the campaign called Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, the BDS campaign against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. They had just had a very good meeting with the Foreign Minister of Norway to discuss strengthening the BDS position as far as the Norwegian state was concerned. They were congratulating the government of Norway for deciding to support the Palestinians at the United Nations. So this was not just an ordinary group that was struck. This was the leading edge of Norwegian social democracy. And of them, 90 young people, including many of them, children of asylum seekers from Iraq and Sri Lanka, were killed. And so in that sense, Bravik, his analysis was not so much that, you know, the asylum seekers are the problem. But why are there people like the AUF and why are they in a sense allowing the ideas of the left to become dominant in Norway? So he went after the left. He conducted political murder. That's why I don't believe this is simply a tragic act. This was a calculated political action that he took. It's also interesting that the extreme Christian right today is also Zionist in its understanding of West Asia, Palestine and Israel. And Bravik really clearly brings that out. Yes, I mean, you know, history changes. Fascism is not always the same as it was. It also morphs. I like to call this the tendency of Eurofascism. This is a fascism that is not going to come in jackboots and, you know, with Hitler pictures. It has its own character. It has its own dynamic. And certainly because this sort of Eurofascism is so obsessed with a particular Islam and migrants coming from North Africa and the Middle East into what they see as white Europe, because Islam is the principal enemy, they have made an assessment that therefore their friend in the Middle East is Israel. Now it's a slightly different situation in the United States where the Baptists have a theological link with Israel. The Baptists believe, given their reading of the Bible, that the Jewish temple has to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. And when that temple is rebuilt and the land of Palestine is in the hands of what it considers a Jewish control, at that point the Messiah will return and then bizarrely will kill everybody who is not a Christian, including the Jews, and the rapture will arrive. You know, that is their view. They have made an alliance with Israel, but it's not an alliance with the people of Israel because by their logic, once the rapture comes, the Jews will be killed. It's a very peculiar, I think barbaric kind of thinking that they have. But the European groups or the Eurofascists are much more invested in the fact that they are at war with Islam. Islam has come in, minarets are going to come up in European cities. You know, what some people are calling Europe is going to become Arabia. So their vision is that their ally in the Middle East against Islam is Israel. They have a sharper, more real politic analysis of their link with Israel. It's not so much this sort of theological, millenarian idea that is there among the far Christian right in the United States. By the way, using terms like far Christian right gives the impression that this is a fringe position, but actually it has a mass basis in the churches of the Southern Baptist.