It is Wrong to Link the Right Wing Extremist in Norway Charged with Mass Murder to American Politics

If Tempted to Do So, Don’t

The report in the New York Times describes the alleged killer in the horrific slayings in Norway this way.

The suspect in Friday’s bomb and shooting attacks was described as a gun-loving, highly religious Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to the cultural and patriotic values of his country

This is chilling, because this same description could be applied to various American individuals and groups with the clear implication that they too would be willing to engage in a heinous act of murdering campers to make their point.

For anyone to draw this conclusion would be offensive to the maximum degree. There are individuals in the United States who espouse this same philosophy, but there has never, ever been any evidence that they would either enter into violence of this nature or condone it. 



Morten Edvarsen/Agence France-Presse

— Getty Images

Emergency medical workers on Saturday aided

survivors of a gunman's attack at a
 camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya



The events in Norway are a terrible human tragedy.  They do not have any relationship to politics in the U. S. and no one should ever try to link American politics to what has happened in Norway.  To do so would dishonor not only the victims and but also those who would try to make political gains from their suffering.