“A few years ago, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote a fascinating essay about the “radical loser.” Radical losers are mostly young men who are so enraged by their own lack of social, economic, and sexual self-esteem and the indifference of the world around them, that they long for a suicidal act of mass destruction.
Anything can trigger such an act: rejection by a girl, being fired from a job, failing an examination. And sometimes the killers reach for ideological justifications: building pure Islam, struggling for communism or fascism, or saving the West. The particular ideals might be unimportant – simply those that happen to be available, owing to fashion or other historical circumstances. Once a radical loser is in the mood to kill, any reason will do.”
"Perhaps. But does this mean that there is no link at all between the stated views of radical clerics or politicians and the acts committed in the name of those opinions? For all the finger pointing at Wilders, just because Breivik professed to admire him, the acts of a deranged killer, others caution, should not be used to discredit what he stands for. After all, there is nothing irrational, or murderous, about claiming that multiculturalism is a flawed ideal, or that Islam conflicts with modern Western European views of gender equality or gay rights, or that mass immigration will cause serious social conflicts.
These claims began to be made by respectable conservatives, and even some social democrats, in the 1990s. They reacted against a rather smug liberal establishment that tended to dismiss all critical thought about immigration or non-Western faiths and traditions as racism and bigotry.
But, while there was nothing intrinsically wrong with discussing the social consequences of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries, some populists in Holland, Denmark, France, Germany, Belgium, the U.K., and other countries, went much further. Wilders, in particular, likes to speak in apocalyptic terms of “the lights going out over Europe,” and “the sheer survival of the West.” And the problem is not just a particular strain of violent revolutionary Islam, but Islam itself: “If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national socialism – a totalitarian ideology.”
“This is the language of existential war, the most dangerous kind. Indeed, the terminology of World War II is being deliberately revived. Those who oppose radical hostility to all forms of Islam are “appeasers” of, or “collaborators” with, “Islamofascism.””
►http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2011/Aug-10/Too-thin-a-line-separates-Breivik-from-intolerant-populists.ashx#ixzz1
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: ►http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
