Norway gunman Breivik makes first public appearance since twin terror attacks

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Norway gunman Breivik makes first public appearance since twin terror attacks
Today's court appearance by Anders Behring Breivik, the Norway gunman charged in a July bombing and shooting spree that killed 77 people, was the first chance for press and victims' relatives to hear him speak.
Christian Science MonitorBy Valeria Criscione | Christian Science Monitor – 19 hrs ago

Several hundred people packed Oslo District Court to hear Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman charged in twin terror attacks on July 22, speak before press and victims for the first time since the attacks, which killed 77 people.

The country is still haunted by the national tragedy that shocked the normally quiet Nordic nation, which was hoping that today's public hearing would give some insight into what kind of man could commit such violence.

The 32-year-old Breivik appeared composed, dressed in a dark suit with light blue tie, for his open court custody hearing. He sat face to face with about 80 members of the press and 50 survivors, victims' relatives, and victims rights’ attorneys.

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Breivik has been in custody for 16 weeks, essentially in solitary confinement. He is awaiting trial, expected in April, for bombing a government building and carrying out a mass shooting spree on a political youth camp being held on the island of Utøya.

http://news.yahoo.com/norway-gunman-breivik-makes-first-public-appearance-since-151116133.html

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1. Juan Cole: Muslim- and Liberal-Hater Breivik Confronted by Survivors in Open Court

http://www.juancole.com/2011/11/muslim-and-liberal-hater-breivik-confronted-by-survivors-in-open-court.html

Norway’s mass murdered Anders Behring Breivik, a right wing white Christian supremacist who has confessed to killing 77 Labor Party youth activists and allegedly wounded 151 others, appeared in open court on Monday.

Breivik says his killing spree was intended to save Norway from multi-culturalism and from Islam. Muslims are between 2 and 3 percent of the Norwegian population. He seems to mean by “multi-culturalism” a philosophy that does not approve of killing Muslims (thus he shot the European “multi-culturalists” rather than shooting Muslims, since the former were the true enablers of the latter in his twisted mind).

Breivik’s passions were whipped up, according to his diary, by reading anti-Muslim hatemongers such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes (whose “Campus Watch” is an Israeli settler-oriented attempt to deny tenure to American academics critical of Israel’s oppression of the stateless Palestinians, and to harass more senior professors with character assassination).

Aljazeera English has a video report:

Reasoned arguments that Muslims are incorrect in their beliefs, or that liberal premises about the good society are flawed, are a healthy part of the democratic process.

But authors who use propaganda techniques, of demonization, fear-mongering, guilt by association, gross exaggeration, and appeals to base emotions and latent racist sentiments, bear some moral responsibility when they whip persons with fragile personalities into a murderous frenzy.