This morning I received this email:
Subject: Concerning Anders Behring Breivik
Message: My name is Marie De Rosa, and I´m a Norwegian journalist at the newspaper VG. I have some questions for you, related to the recent terror attacks in Oslo by Anders Behring Breivik. I hope you find the time to answer them. I´ve interviewed the Norwegian professor Lars Gule recently, and he claims that you and others who are mentioned in Breiviks [sic] «manifesto», are partly responsible for Breiviks [sic] extreme actions. Gule thinks that even though you don´t have any legal responsibility for Breiviks [sic] actions, you still have some moral responsibility because you have inspired his world view. Gule thinks that you have contributed to the intellectual climate and line of thought that Breivik identifies with, and that led him to attack the goverment [sic] building and Utøya. Gule claims that by rejecting this moral responsibility, you put yourself outside what is considered decent within a political debate.
Thank you.
I sent back this response:
Gule is thuggishly trying to silence (rather than refute) a point of view with which he disagrees by demonizing it. The problem is that he is using an argument that can be used against him, and anyone. I expect that Gule criticizes American and NATO foreign policy. Yet there have been numerous terror attacks committed by people who oppose that foreign policy. Is Gule partly responsible for creating an intellectual climate and line of thought that led such people to commit terror attacks? Gule is using the same kind of argument that the KKK used when they blamed Martin Luther King for the Watts riots. King was steadfastly non-violent, but he agreed with the political perspectives of the rioters. Was he then responsible for creating an intellectual climate and line of thought that led to the riots? By Gule’s logic, no one should be critical of anything, for fear that some evil person will misunderstand that criticism and commit violence because of it. If I am killed in the near future (and I have many death threats), would Gule have blood on his hands?
UPDATE: Heartfelt thanks to the many Jihad Watch readers who have alerted me to the fact that Lars Gule is a convicted terrorist and stooge of the jihad. How interesting that neither Marie De Rosa nor the BBC, which used him to hit me and others a few days ago, thought it necessary to identify him as such. “Media bias” isn’t remotely an adequate term for this hard-Left pro-jihad advocacy pseudo-journalism.