Horror, yes. Shock, yes. But also relief. Relief that we had no need for caveats. Calls for historic perspective or dialogue, or remembrance of the fallen innocents on the other side. The massacre in Norway could be condemned unequivocally.
Anders Behring Breivik is the right’s Angel of Death. His act of barbarity perpetrated with brutal political clarity. A Labour prime minister, Labour government and a Labour youth camp his targets.
But as the slaughter was unfolding we still hadn’t encountered that cold, blue eyed stare. Initial reports indicated an attack in response to Norway’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Labour MP Tom Harris, responding, predicted on Twitter that “we’ll still have the apologists for terrorism saying it was caused by “foreign policy” or by “disrespect to the Prophet.”
Harris was wrong about the terrorists’ identity and motives. But the apologists rushed forward nontheless. “You have a better chance of a wet floor killing you than an Islamist”, tweeted Dr Eoin Clarke, founder of GEER, the new Gender, Environment, Equality and Race think-tank. “Hamas have a mandate better than the Tories”, was a follow up intervention. That’s the same Hamas that launched a rocket attack on Israeli schoolchildren in April. I tried to find Dr Clarke’s condemnation of that attack, but couldn’t.
On Utoya people were scrambling for their lives. Across the UK elements of the left were scrambling for their Twitter feeds. “Solidarity”, was a favoured response to cold blooded murder. In reply to the initial bombing, author Owen Jones took the opportunity to point out that “working class Norwegians have just been slaughtered”. Of the dead and dying of the Norwegian middle and upper classes there was no word. The BBC was condemned for describing Utoya island as a “summer camp”. The attack was a “political crime”. Not to report it as such was to “diminish” the young Labour members targeted.
By morning, the death toll had risen to 90. And empathy turned to appropriation. We had witnessed a “political act”. It would be “madness not to draw political conclusions considering politics”. Political points “should be made”. The victims had been “killed for their politics by a political activist”. It was important to defend “people’s right to use the language of solidarity when a right-wing extremist targeted young socialists”.
I was in the hall at Labour conference when the relative of one of the victims of the Dunblane massacre spoke of her campaign to introduce a total ban on handguns. It was silent, save for the sound of grown men and women crying. There was no political connection. Or motive to the crime. We cried anyway.
That night I was telephoned by a friend of mine who has no interest in politics. That moment had been shown on the television news. “I didn’t think your lot were like that”, he said.
He didn’t mean he thought we were heartless monsters. Just that we had too often let our politics obscure our humanity.
It’s important to put some of the responses to the Norwegian attacks in perspective. Many of those responding on Twitter are themselves still young. And you cannot fully appreciate the horror of a child’s murder until you have children of your own.
But there is something wrong when someone’s initial reaction to the scenes from Oslo is to reach for an expression of political solidarity, rather than one of basic sympathy. And we have been here before. The shooter of Democratic Senator Gabrielle Giffords and nineteen bystanders hadn’t even been charged before some on the left were rushing to place the blame squarely at the door of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
This isn’t just a matter of poor taste. There are massive issues raised by the events in Norway. If we feel a need to tackle the radicalization of Muslim youth then we clearly have to examine the influences that set Oslo’s Timothy McVeigh on his own murderous rampage. If we wish to focus on the threats posed by domestic terrorism then we clearly have to ensure our efforts and resources are focused across all our communities. And we need to examine which “preachers of hate” had Anders Behring Breivik’s ear.
But none of this will be achieved by turning Norway’s shattered buildings and shrouded bodies into a party political broadcast. The dignity of Jens Stoltenberg and his pledge to fight back with “more democracy and more humanity” stands on its own. It doesn’t require cheap comparisons with David Cameron or George W Bush.
Nor will it be addressed by retreating into moral relativism. Far right terrorists; barbarians. Palestinian terrorists; freedom fighters. Irish Republican and Loyalist terrorists; folk heroes. Al-Qaeda terrorists; by-products of US neo-conservatism.
The attacks in Norway weren’t an attack on us all. They were an attack on 80 children who went on a camping trip and never came home. Let us mourn for them. But please, let’s not grasp for the tragedy and the horror, and try to claim it as our own.
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