“One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests” This is the first and only tweet by Anders Behring Breivik, the man believed to have bombed the city of Oslo before shooting dead tens of children on the island of Utøya.
One may justifiably infer from this tweet that this man wanted to be seen as a lone crusader, fighting against the ‘evils’ he saw in Norwegian culture and politics. Yet before this man’s identity was released the mass voice of the pitchfork wielding twitter united to condemn ‘Islamists’ terrorists who would attack any nation with boots on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Despite there being no proof or evidence, certain conclusions were jumped to with almost frightening ease.
This man’s actions are abhorrent and utterly wrong. All our sympathy and thoughts go to the families of the innocent victims.
This blog is not about the horror of the act, which is adhorrent in every way, it is about our automatic assumption that abhorrent and utterly wrong attacks committed in Western countries are the work of extremist Muslim factions. The term ‘Islamist’ implies an attachment to Islam, a belief in Allah and a worship of the Quran; however anyone who has ever read this Holy Book can categorically tell you that Islam is a faith that contains a high level of tolerance and much love, similar to Christianity. Of course we will find acts of war and aggression within the Quran but, just as the Old Testament’s aggressions are often considered poetry with lessons of morality to be learnt, this is the same with the Quran.
These automatic assumptions were not just the reaction of casual tweeters; it was the reaction of Members of Parliament and terrorist experts who were called in to television studios to dissect an ever changing story.
We live in a world of fast moving opinion where the desire for rolling media and commentary means that quality is often sidelined for quantity. With attention spans short, and memories even shorter, we assign the term terrorist to a single group, identifiable by race and language, forgetting that terrorism is not a new phenomenon; it is a tool that has been used over centuries by many nations and certainly in the name of most faiths.
By using the term Islamist we inherently and incorrectly link terrorist acts to a faith that condones no such action. In allowing these flippant assumptions to be made we allow individuals to be stereotyped and persecuted. You may not necessarily notice this in metropolitan cities such as London but travel further afield and the repercussions are tangible. When people are attacked in their hometown because they are wearing a headscarf or the English Defence League is allowed to march through our high streets we provide the food upon which the extremists feed. Automatically assigning terrorist acts to groups such as Al- Qaeda on our televisions- rather than on banners – is merely the intellectual and acceptable equivalent face of racism. To hear that a bomber is white and blonde was a notable and newsworthy aspect of the story. It shouldn’t be.