Motives for murder

The fundamental question is whether or not Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the bombing and shootings in Norway, is insane or merely misguided. Let's be specific, the crime committed was terrorism, deliberate murder for political purposes. Did he kill people because he was unhinged or only because of his political views? This is a question one can pose of any terrorist who kills people. What about the young Asian men, seemingly well-balanced, normal people, who got into trains in London and blew themselves and many others to death on7/7/2005. And what of the 18 young men, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who trained to fly planes and then flew them into the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 killing 3,000. And the hundreds of Palestinians who strapped suicide vests to their bodies and mingled with Israeli passengers on buses and blew themselves up, killing hundreds. All of these terrorists could not have been insane. But, civilized society agrees that NO political cause can justify the murder of innocent men, women and children.

Let's remember that otherwise sane Germans, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Poles, Romanians, etc. killed Jews during the Holocaust merely because they were Jews. We cannot maintain that all the many thousands of murderers of Jews were insane. They were enabled to carry out these heinous acts because of the absence of any restraints, the lack of law and order in a civilized society and the defenselessness of the victims. This makes these cowardly acts, committed by people who were otherwise themselves powerless, as a means to empower themselves. That's why it is possible to believe the mutually contradictory views that "the Jews are powerful" at the same time that the murderers were murdering them. Similarly with Breivik, he believed that the Labor Socialists were powerful, after all they control the Government and are well-organized, and he must have felt empowered when he shot them, even though they were defenceless teenagers.

Because Breivik in his 1,200 page manifesto was pro-Israel, that has been taken by some Norwegians to support their anti-Israel views. It so happens that the Labor Youth group meeting on the island had passed a resolution calling on the Government, of their own party, to support the Palestinian initiative for Statehood recognition at the UN. But, this is a red herring. Hitler wrote a manifesto (Mein Kampf, my struggle), the Unabomber in the US (Kazinski) wrote a long manifesto. Breivik plagiarized both of them and others in his manifesto. It's what fanatical politically-motivated murderers do.

So whatever the political justications, that Allah approves of killing Jews, that Palestinians want to destroy Israel, that the British need to be "taught a lesson", that America needs to be punished, that the socialist left needs to be stopped destroying the fabric of European culture, all of these excuses are as nothing compared to the fundamental injunction that "thou shall not kill." Only in actual combat or in self-defence is the klilling of another human being allowed, whatever one thinks of his or her views or ethnicity. It is to be hoped that the Norwegians, otherwise generally strong opponents of Israel, will stop to recognize the reality of political murder and see the commonality of terrorism.