The online edition of the Murdoch tabloid The Sun is still using the ‘Nazi’ tag for Anders Behring Breivik. In today’s print edition ‘Nazi’ has been replaced by ‘Devil’. Breivik had his own label for the leader of Nazi Germany: Hitler was ’The great Satan’. From his compendium, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, under the section heading The great Satan, his cult and the Jews:

Whenever someone asks if I am a national socialist I am deeply offended. If there is one historical figure and past Germanic leader I hate it is Adolf Hitler. If I could travel in a time-machine to Berlin in 1933, I would be the first person to go – with the purpose of killing him. Why?… Hitler had the military capabilities necessary to liberate Jerusalem and the nearby provinces from Islamic occupation. He could have easily worked out an agreement with the UK and France to liberate the ancient Jewish Christian lands with the purpose of giving the Jews back their ancestral lands. The UK and France would perhaps even contribute to such a campaign in an effort to support European reconciliation. The deportation of the Jews from Germany wouldn’t be popular but eventually, the Jewish people would regard Hitler as a hero because he returned the Holy land to them… Were the majority of the German and European Jews disloyal? Yes, at least the so called liberal Jews, similar to the liberal Jews today that opposes nationalism/Zionism and supports multiculturalism. Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of a threat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists. Conservative Jews were loyal to Europe and should have been rewarded. Instead, he just targeted them all… So, are the current Jews in Europe and US disloyal? The multiculturalist (nation-wrecking) Jews ARE while the conservative Jews ARE NOT. Aprox. 75% of European/US Jews support multiculturalism while aprox. 50% of Israeli Jews does the same. This shows very clearly that we must embrace the remaining loyal Jews as brothers rather than repeating the mistake of the NSDAP. Whenever I discuss the Middle East issue with a national socialist he presents the anti-Israeli and pro-Palestine argument. He always seem unaware of the fact that his propaganda is hurting Israeli nationalists (who want to deport the Muslims from Israel) and that he is in fact helping the Israeli cultural Marxists/multiculturalists with his argumentation… Never target a Jew because he is a Jew, but rather because he is a category A or B traitor. And don’t forget that the bulk of the category A and B traitors are Christian Europeans. 90% of the category A and B traitors in my own country, Norway, are Nordic, Christian category A and B traitors.

It is customary for Israel loyalists and apologists to label progressive Jewish voices as ‘traitors’, and that at least is something they and Breivik can agree on: there are ‘Good Jews’ and ‘Bad Jews’, and bad Jews are ‘pro-Palestinian’. Right-wing and Zionist commentators yet refuse to acknowledge that the motives for this killing spree cannot be reduced to the influence of Nazism and violent Islamism. This political ideology should be feared for what it is: Fascism, with its (inevitably violent) struggle for racial purity, singular collective identity and defense of a superior culture ‘under threat’ from the morally degenerate Other – this ideology is alive and thriving in the west and Israel.

The Times, being a Murdoch broadsheet has employed the ‘Nazi’ tag more subtly in today’s op-ed by Ben Macintyre (who appears to be their resident expert on Nazism). The byline is “The resolute way that Norway stood up to the Nazis shows the futility of Anders Behring Breivik’s terrorism”. Once the journalist has established an association with violent Islamism, (“Bin Laden and Breivik may be on opposite sides of the conflict they both sought to inflame but they belong to the same school of apocalyptic non-history”), it is fast rewind to the 1940s: “The last time extremist evil erupted in Norwegian society on this scale it came in the shape of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist leader who seized power in an Nazi-backed coup as the Germans invaded Norway in 1940… Quisling, like Breivik, declined to kill himself after the horror… The spirit that sustained Norway under the Nazis is widely in evidence today… ”

Over at the CST (Community Security Trust) ‘Protecting the Jewish Community’ blog, they initially comforted themselves on Sunday that the self-confessed Norwegian killer could be grouped with Neo-Nazis: “Previously, most attempts by neo-Nazis or other adherents of far right ideologies to perpetrate terrorist attacks have failed for logistical reasons, but there are enough examples that succeeded…” As early as Saturday, Nottingham University’s Dr Matthew Goodwin, author of New British Fascism, had already explained in a piece for the Guardian that “The sources of [Breivik’s] ideological influences have started to become clear. He was far from what we might term a traditional rightwing extremist. While he was profoundly concerned about the effects of immigration, multiculturalism, Islam and the growth of settled Muslim communities, he was also dismissive of crude racial supremacist and neo-Nazi ideas and parties that espoused these ideas, naming for example the British National Party (BNP).” Late to catch up, CST published a blog post today in which the emerging facts entirely contradict their original thesis. They concede: “Breivik brackets multiculturalism with Communism, Islam and National Socialism as ‘hate ideologies’…”

The right-wing press in the west is desperately scrambling around trying to deflect attention from its own long-standing incitement of hatred towards Muslims and immigrants and dissociate itself from the ‘extreme’ right-wing, but it is only the crude nature of the expression of these racial supremacist ideas that it is disavowing.