'You can ignore jihad, but you cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring jihad." That was the first reaction of the American anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller to news of the terror attacks in Norway, and on her Atlas Shrugs website she linked to an earlier video of a pro-Hamas demo in Oslo. When it turned out the mass murderer was not an Islamic terrorist but an anti-Islamic terrorist, whose 1,500-page online manifesto was replete with material from anti-Islam writers like her, Atlas Geller shrugged: "He's a bloody murderer. Period. He is responsible for his actions. He and only he. There was no 'ideology' here."
"No one has explained or can explain how this guy's supposed anti-jihad views have anything to do with his murdering children," protested Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, another blogger quoted favourably by Anders Breivik. "Freedom fighters" like Spencer, said Spencer, should not be tarred with this brush.
Bruce Bawer, the Oslo-based American author of a jeremiad about the Muslim takeover of Europe, was more thoughtful. Noting that in his neo-Knights Templar manifesto, Anders Behring Breivik "quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times", Bawer reflects, with decent dismay: "It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the last couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo."
So what, if any, is the connection between their words and Breivik's deeds? What should be the consequences for the way free societies treat writers that this mass murderer quoted so approvingly?
First of all, people like Geller and Spencer, not to mention the milder-mannered Bawer, are not responsible for what Breivik did. It is as wrong to proclaim them guilty by association of mass murder as it is to make non-violent (though sometimes illiberal and extreme) Muslim writers guilty by association with the Muslim terrorists who bombed New York, London and Madrid. Since that is a game they themselves have been playing for years, one might feel a bat's squeak of schadenfreude at seeing Geller & Co so effectively hoist with their own petard. But we must not do the same. They are not guilty by association. Period.
However, if it is ridiculous to suggest that there is no connection at all between Islamist ideology and Islamist terror, it is also ridiculous to suggest that was no connection between the alarmist view of the Islamicisation of Europe that these writers spread, and what Breivik understood himself to be doing. "No 'ideology' here"? You bet there was. A significant part of Breivik's manifesto is a restatement – often by internet copy-and-paste quotation – of precisely their horror story of Europe as "Eurabia": so weakened by the poison of multiculturalism, and other leftist diseases, that it submits without a fight to a condition of dhimmitude under Muslim supremacy. His clearly unbalanced mind (whether "insane" in legal terms is another question) then leaps to the conclusion that the lonely Justiciar Knight (himself) must deliver a heroic, brutal wake-up call to his enfeebled society – a "sharp signal", as he told Norwegian investigators.
What, then, should be done about such inflammatory words? One answer, quite popular in parts of the European left, is "ban them!". If the thought was father to the deed, stop the thought. A further roster of offensive, extreme terms and sentiments should be added to the already long list of "hate speech" for which you may be prosecuted in one or other parts of Europe. A few years ago, the then German justice minister, Brigitte Zypries, got the EU to agree a "framework decision" for a pan-European multiplication of such taboos, although the practice has fortunately fallen far short of her intentions.
Fortunately – for this is quite the wrong way to go. It will not stop these thoughts, just drive them underground, where they fester and become more poisonous. It will chill legitimate debate about important issues: immigration, the nature of Islam, historical facts. It will bring to court fantasists such as Samina Malik, a 23-year-old shop assistant prosecuted in Britain for writing bad verse glorifying jihadi martyrdom and murder, but not the real men of violence.
Direct incitement to violence should everywhere and always be met with the full rigour of the law. The ideological texts that fed Breivik's madness did not, so far as I can see, cross that line. Allowing the expression of the crusader fantasies of extreme Islamists and anti-Islamists alike is the price we pay for free speech in an open society.
Does that mean they should go unanswered? Of course not. Just because the price of banning is too high, and in the internet age impossible to achieve anyway ("like jumping on a shadow", says the free speech expert Peter Molnar), we need to meet them in open combat. One key battlefield is politics, where mainstream European politicians, looking at the electoral success of xenophobic populist parties, are appeasing rather than speaking out against extremist myths. Another is the so-called mainstream media. In a country like Norway – and in Britain – public service broadcasting and a responsible quality press do generally assure that, while extreme views are aired, the dangerous myths they peddle are punctured by fact, reason and common sense. For those who still read and listen to those media, that is.
But what if you get your news from rabble-rousing, sensationalist tabloids, of the kind favoured by Rupert Murdoch? Or from a systematically partisan television channel, be it one of Silvio Berlusconi's in Italy or Murdoch's Fox News channel in the US? On the night of the Oslo shootings the guest host on the Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor, Laura Ingraham, reported "two deadly terror attacks in Norway, in what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists". After describing what was then known of the attacks, she continued: "In the meantime, in New York City, the Muslims who want to build the mosque at Ground Zero recently scored a huge legal victory …" Bloody Muslims, you see, planting bombs in Oslo, mosques in New York.
And what if you get your news of the world mainly from the internet? The Breivik story shows again what a fantastic resource the internet is for those who care to seek with an open mind. Within a few hours, you can gather a quantity of information that would previously have taken weeks, and probably a trip to the country concerned. But there is a growing body of evidence that the way the internet works can also contribute to closing minds, reinforcing prejudices and nourishing conspiracy theories.
Online, you can so easily find the thousand other people who share your perverted views. You then get a vicious spiral of groupthink, reinforcing the worst kind of ideology: an internally consistent, systematic world-view, totally divorced from everyday humanity. The Breivik manifesto, with its endless copy-and-pasted pieces from online sources, is a textbook example of that process.
There are no easy answers here. "Ban it!" is the wrong one. The real challenge is to work out how we can maximise the extraordinary capacity of the internet to open minds – and minimise its now evident tendency to close them.