Norway’s blast signals end of peaceful Europe – analysts
Countries like Norway or Sweden are fairly soft targets for terrorists, and the Scandinavian countries’ long-held liberal values will now be put to the test.
Gerard Batten, a European MP from the UK Independence Party, cast doubt on suggestions that the terrorist act was the result of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s threat to bring war to the streets of Europe, noting that over the years the major terrorist acts were committed by fundamentalist Islamic organizations.“If you hit places like London or Paris, where these things happened before, then I suppose, from the terrorists’ distorted and sick point of view, it makes sense to move to easier targets – small countries, tolerant societies with a higher sense of security,” Batten told RT.He declared that “in many ways we invited this problem because it goes hand in hand with mass unlimited immigration.” Private multiculturalism is one thing, he added, while recognition of “imported cultural customs that are not appropriate in a Western, liberal, advanced democracy… is a road to ruin.”
"Terrorism is not an ideology – it is a method of a minority to promote its agenda when legal ways to do so are closed,” argued political and military analyst Igor Khokhlov. Direct links between Norway’s involvement in NATO operations and the blast in Oslo, he said, are doubtful, or would only be a PR pretext for the terrorists.“Norway, like Russia or Belarus, is a victim of imported terrorism,” he said, but unlike many other countries, Norway is encountering real terrorism only now.“Terrorists’ activities are more like a business, with its own costs and profits,” Khokhlov stated. “Organizing a terrorist attack is a pretty costly business, and cartoons or Norway’s NATO involvement are only a pretext. There are deeper reasons.”
Northern European countries like Norway, Denmark and Sweden are fairly soft targets for terrorists, even though their image as a safe place was destroyed earlier by the Danish scandal surrounding cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.“The threat image from Denmark and Norway are similar,” Jens Bostrup, the foreign news editor for the Danish magazine Politiken, told RT. “The notorious cartoons mentioning the Prophet Mohammed caused outrage among Muslims.”
The aim of the attack was to incite fear, stated radio host and author and Stephen Lendman.“Terrorists want to make people believe that that even the most peaceful countries are attacked by terrorists,” Lendman told RT.He also underlined that the official information about the attack was published too fast, which makes it hard to trust.“It’s easy to say that these were Muslim terrorists and then not go after them,” Lendman added.
