Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik got what he wanted: A ruling which declared him sane enough to answer for the murder of 77 people last year. There was never any doubt Breivik was the killer; the question was whether he was a political terrorist or a psychotic mass murderer. The judge ruled that on that horrific July day Breivik was sane for he knew exactly what he was doing, and sentenced him to the steepest punishment Norway has — 21 years in jail. What Breivik was doing, as he claimed in testimony, was fighting to save Norway from “Islamization." He blamed Muslim immigration for the disintegration of European society. He sought to defend Norway against a growing Muslim presence. He justified blasting a government building and gunning down dozens of teenagers at a summer camp as a service to a nation threatened, he said, by Muslim immigration. Breivik freely admitted to the killings but argued that authorities were trying to cast him as sick to cast doubt on his political views. Had Breivik been declared mad, he would have been confined indefinitely to psychiatric care rather than prison. And had he been found deranged, it would not have been easy to blame him for his actions. But now that Breivik has been found sane while he was murdering to stop the Islamization of Norway, the killings raise questions about the prevalence of far-right views in a nation of five million which had prided itself as a safe haven from much of the world's troubles. Right-wing extremism in Norway is not plainly visible. But there is a far-right ideology, in Norway and throughout Europe, shared by groups and characterized by unmitigated hatred of the new immigrant Europe and pejorative generalizations about immigrants, targeting Muslims in particular. Most of those belonging to such groups would not contemplate the sort of carnage that happened in Norway. There are extremist people around who are not insane and do not go around shooting people dead. But they would probably empathize with Breivik and his ideas, empathy which is poisonous all the same. The far right in Europe is driven by rejection of multiculturalism that has accompanied rapid immigration from the developing world. Breivik's rampage, the worst atrocity on Norwegian soil since World War II, prompted much soul-searching. Many Norwegians apparently drew on the experience to debate issues like immigration and tolerance. Norway's anti-immigration Progress Party suffered in municipal elections after the massacre, forcing the second biggest party in parliament to tone down its rhetoric. Opinion poll support for liberal immigration policies even grew. At a series of mass public tributes held in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Norwegians reasserted their commitment to multiculturalism and tolerance. Breivik, who boasted of being an ultranationalist who killed his victims to fight multiculturalism in Norway, wanted to be ruled sane so that his actions and far-right views wouldn't be dismissed as those of a lunatic. The sane ruling means Breivik's diatribes against his governments' acceptance of Muslim immigration should not be seen as the ramblings of a madman.
