Brendan O’Neill apologises for Breivik

Just a harmless ultra-nationalist who was transformed into a monster by multiculturalism...so says Brendan O'Neill

I wondered how long it would take before Brendan O’Neill or Ed West would write a blog blaming Breivik’s mass killings on “multiculturalism” as a means of excusing the killer’s actions. I didn’t have to wait long and as I guessed, it was the Torygraph’s resident contrarian and self-styled “left-winger” who moved first. In his blog titled “Breivik: a monster made by multiculturalism” O’Neill opines,

Breivik is not so different from the “Cultural Marxists” he loves to hate. Like them, he uses academic lingo such as “deconstruct” and “cultural identity” to describe what he thinks is happening to Europe.

There’s only one problem: there is no such thing as “Cultural Marxism” , it is a confection that was devised by fascists and semi-fascists to lend intellectual gravitas to their conspiratorial musings. But O’Neill isn’t bothered by such things. His mission is to let Breivik off the hook and thus smear those whom he thinks are dragging ‘white’ Europe along the road to hell.

Here, O’Neill tries to offer some analysis but ends up looking like a first year undergraduate who has just failed to grasp the essential difference between fact and hearsay,

Another thing Breivik shares with the multicultural lobby is a powerful sense of cultural paranoia. He believes “my culture” is under siege. Only where mainstream multiculturalists tend to argue that minority cultures such as the Islamic one are threatened by tidal waves of Islamophobia and general public ignorance, Breivik says the majority culture – the white Christian identity – is threatened by the “Islamic colonisation” of Europe and also by general public ignorance (he says ordinary people have been led astray by the media).

Where does he get these ideas from? Who is this “multicultural lobby”? This sounds not too dissimilar to Breivik’s ramblings about “multicultural conspiracies”. Then he talks about “cultural paranoia”.  Who is he referring to? The Frankfurt School? This is very lazy stuff but it’s what we’ve come to expect from O’Neill, whose analysis of all things cultural wouldn’t look out of place on a site like The Gates of Vienna or Atlas Shrugs. He continues,

These are just different versions of the same sense of cultural panic that is fostered by the multicultural outlook. Indeed, it is remarkable how much Breivik has in common with those Islamists he despises. Where Islamists, also under the influence of multiculturalism, crazily claim that their cultural identity is threatened by “New Crusades” against Islam, Breivik says his cultural identity is threatened by crusades from the East, by “Islamisation”. Both groups of people have been made entirely paranoid by being encouraged to become obsessed with their allegedly fragile identities.

Here, O’Neill panders to his gallery of racist headbangers and fascists. He simply loads up his paragraphs with right-wing keywords like “multicultural outlook” but what is worse is how he suggests that “Islamism” is the creation of “multiculturalism”, this is something that is often claimed by self-styled anti-Jihadists, who insist that Europe is being “Islamized” because of this “mulitculturalism” thing.

Islamism is a fundamentalist right-wing expression of Islam. It is no different to other deeply conservative Christian, Jewish or Hindu movements. Yet, here is O’Neill trying to tell us that Islamism is a cut above the rest for its reactionary outlook. Nonsense. Islamism has its roots in the Mahdi’s response to British incursion into Sudan.  Today’s Islamism is best described as a reaction to Western and by Western, I mean what are perceived to be Christian, incursions into the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere in the Middle East.

O’Neill is so desperate to convince his readers that he is both a deep thinker and a serious intellectual but, in reality, he is at best, a philosophical lightweight and at worst, a shit-stirring trouble-maker who overrates his intellectual abilities.

He concludes his ramble with,

Breivik is not an implacable foe of multiculturalism; he is a product of it. He is multiculturalism’s monster, where his true aim is to win recognition of his identity alongside all those other identities that are fawned over in modern Europe. In essence, his barbarous act last year was not about dismantling multiculturalism but about expanding it, to make sure it afforded respect to his own petty cultural feelings as well as everyone else’s.

Make no mistake, this is an apology: what O’Neill is saying here is that if there wasn’t “multiculturalism” then there would not have been an Anders Behring Breivik but that’s simply ludicrous; as is his suggestion that “his barbarous act last year was not about dismantling multiculturalism but about expanding it”. Lazy and illogical with just a hint of right-wing paranoia. But how did Breivik’s actions “expand” multiculturalism? He does not say.

Many right-wingers in Britain were hoping that Breivik would be pronounced “insane” by psychologists and by the court. It seems that their hopes will be dashed. Breivik was compos mentis and knew exactly what he was doing. His ideas may have been delusional but then so are those right-wingers who constantly carp on about “Cultural Marxism”. Such paranoid delusions are not confined to Breivik and they do not end with “multiculturalism”. Many of those who buy into this nonsense also accept The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authoritative text. But O’Neill won’t tell you about that because it doesn’t fit in with his skewed narrative.

Tomorrow’s blog from O’Neill may well feature a link between Breivik and “political correctness”. Stay tuned!