In July 2011, the media reported that Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two-year-old man accused of the bombing of a government office complex and the killing of scores of young people at a summer camp in Norway, was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers who have warned people about the threat from Islam. Breivik reportedly included numerous quotations from these blogs in the 1,500-page manifesto that was made public after his arrest. As is true of all acts of violence and terrorism, many disturbing issues emerged in the aftermath of one of the worst rampages in the history of Oslo, Norway. One fact in the Oslo case is the role that online forums and blogs may have played in reinforcing Breivik’s anti-Muslim thoughts. Throughout his planning of these horrendous acts that killed about 77 people and injured more than 150 others, Breivik outlined his beliefs in a manifesto that eventually grew to more than 1,500 pages and urged Europeans to engage in modern-day crusades against Islam. In the manifesto, he quoted from anti-Islamic Internet posts written by European and U.S. bloggers such as Robert Spencer, who maintains the Jihad Watch website and portrays Islam as a pronounced threat to the West (Shane, 2011). Breivik also quotes from blogs known as Atlas Shrugs and Gates of Vienna (named for the 1683 siege of Vienna by Muslim fighters). Both were full of anti-Islamist commentary until Gates of Vienna was shut down following the 2011 Norway killings (Shane, 2011). Specifically, the commonality between these websites and Breivik’s own anti-Muslim ideology is the belief that immigration from Muslim countries to Scandinavia and the rest of Europe poses a grave threat to Western culture and that something must be done to end this plague. In addition to blogs and websites, Breivik allegedly was influenced by the manifesto of the so-called Unabomber, a U.S.-based domestic terrorist named Ted Kaczynski, who sent bombs and bomb threats to universities and airlines between 1978 and 1995. The Unabomber’s manifesto was published in the New York Times and the Washington Post in a highly unusual agreement with Kaczynski. Newspaper editors reached an agreement with the Unabomber that his manifesto would be published in the papers if he
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