First, a video posted by the admitted Norwegian killer shortly before he began his killing crusade:
There’s no doubt today that Anders Behring Breivik launched Norway’s worst peacetime killing spree, a massacre that has left at least 92 dead and nearly 100 other wounded.
And there’s no doubt about his motives either.
Brevik, who has acknowledged the killings in ongoing talks with police, considers himself a proud member of a monastic order founded on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount during the Crusades, the Knights Templar.
He’s a Christian Zionist with a twist, and a devoted fam of Dexter, the HBO series about a psychopathic serial killer who murders other serial killers.
Shortly before he launched his acts of terrorism, including the slaughter of more than 80 unarmed youths gathered for an idyllic Labor Party summer camp, Breivik dumped a massive manifesto and a collection of videos on the web.
Here’s how Washington Post reporters Will Englund and Michael Birnbaum described them:
His huge manifesto touches on everything from medieval history to the wars in Yugoslavia to weaponry to why Budapest is his favorite city. He writes a lot about sugar beets because they require large amounts of fertilizer; he suggests that anyone wanting to make explosives should grow beets commercially to justify large fertilizer purchases.
He apparently grew beets himself. The manifesto also includes a detailed diary of the past 80 days, in which he describes his meticulous planning for the car bombing in downtown Oslo and the subsequent shooting rampage on the island of Utoeya.
Overall, the huge collection of writing is a screed against Islam and the consequences of immigration to Europe. Breivik writes that a fourth-generation war is necessary to preserve the European people. He defends the Serbs for the war in Bosnia. He also says the man he’d most like to meet is Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister. He attacks neo-Nazis for glorifying Adolf Hitler because, he writes, by killing Jews, Hitler was opening the door to an Islamic resurgence. Breivik also criticizes some Jews — those who are anti-Zionist.
He refers to himself as Justiciar Knight Commander of the Knights Templar.
The myth of the Knights Templar
The Knights Templar, a monastic order of Christian knights formed to protect pilgrims in the Christian crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, were created in 1129 and abolished by Pope Clement V in 1312 under pressure from King Philip IV of France.
In the years before their fall, the order had transformed from a small band of knights dedicated to protecting travelers to the Holy Land into a massive, wealthy political power and the primary source of loans for European monarchs and nobles.
It was the Templars who created that indispensable instrument of finance, the letter of credit.
And since Philip was deeply in debt to the order, his easiest way out was to destroy his lender, and the Pope, then essentially a captive of the French monarch at Avignon, abolished the order and allowed the king to seize its assets within his realm.
Breivik was a Freemason, secret social society whose members played seminal roles in the 18th Century American and French revolutions as well as in the Young Turk movement which overthrew the Turkish Caliphate in the early years of the last century.
The Freemasons trace their origins to the Temple Mount as well, but to a much earlier date — claiming their founder as Hiram Abiff, who, they say, was the architect who build King Solomon’s temple, now a site disputed between Muslims and militant Zionists and their Christian Zionist allies in the West.
The temple site lies in East Jersusalem, and is now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, where, according to tradition, Mohammed ascended for a divine visitation. The temple’s Western Wall, also called the Wailing Wall, is sacred to Orthodox Judaism, and, according to the American strain of Christian Zionism, the rebuilding of temple is an essential precondition for the return of Christ that will inaugurate the end of the world.
In this context, we suspect that it’s not a coincidence that Breivik’s attacks followed soon after the Norwegian government declared its support for a Palestinian nation.
The Freemasons have created a Knights Templar degree within their hierarchy of orders, one to which one of esnl’s own grandfathers belonged. But the masonic order bears little resemblance to the original organization, and American freemasonry admits both Muslims and Jews to its ranks, though only Christians may join the latter-day Templars.
As New York Times reporters Steven Erlanger and Alan Cowell note, his online manifesto
describes a secret meeting in London in April 2002 to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. It says the meeting was attended by nine representatives of eight European countries, evidently including Mr. Breivik, with an additional three members unable to attend, including a “European-American.”
The document does not name the attendees or say whether they were aware of Mr. Breivik’s planned attacks, though investigators presumably will try to determine if the people exist and what their connection is to Mr. Breivik.
UPDATE: One curious anomaly in Breivik’s masonic involvement is his Catholicism. The Catholice Church has barred the faithful from membership in the organization since 1783, a doctrine reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in 1983, when he declared that “The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.”
The confession: A revolutionary not a murder
Brevik portrays himself as a proud revolutionary, and his acts as a necessary precursor to a European Catholic renaissance. The killings, he has written, where “gruesome but necessary.”
From the BBC:
In a press conference. . .police chief Sveinung Sponheim said Mr Breivik “admitted to the facts of both the bombing and the shooting, although he’s not admitting criminal guilt”.
>snip<
“He thought it was gruesome having to commit these acts, but in his head they were necessary,” Mr Breivik’s lawyer Geir Lippestad told Norwegian media.
“He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution,” Mr Lippestad said. “He wished to attack society and the structure of society.”
He added that the actions had been planned for some time.
>snip<
A 1,500-page document written in English and said to be by Mr Breivik – posted under the pseudonym of Andrew Berwick – was also put online hours before the attacks, suggesting they had been years in the planning.
The document and the video repeatedly refer to multiculturalism and Muslim immigration; the author claims to be a follower of the Knights Templar – a medieval Christian organisation involved in the Crusades, and sometimes revered by white supremacists.
>snip<
In the document posted online, references were made to targeting “cultural Marxists/ multiculturalist traitors”.
His lawyer, Mr Lippestad, said: “He’s stated that he went to Utoeya to give the Labour Party a warning that ‘doomsday would be imminent’ unless the party changed its policies.”
Mr Lippestad says the suspect remained calmed and balanced throughout a 10-hour night of interrogation.
“I think he’s realised what he’s done, and he views himself as sane,” he said.
And here’s more from Josiane Kremer, Stephen Treloar and Toby Alder of Bloomberg:
In a 1,500-page English manifesto posted hours before the killings, Breivik, 32, describes nine years of planning the attacks and his vision for revolution in Europe led by the Knights Templar, an order related to the Freemasonry. Breivik has a picture posted of himself in a Freemason outfit on the Facebook page bearing his name.
In the document entitled “2083 – A European Declaration of Independence,” which Breivik began writing while he was still a member of Norway’s opposition Progress Party, he describes how the attacks would form part of a crusade against “cultural Marxism” and the rising “Islamization” of Europe. He writes that the massacre would serve as a tool to market the manifesto.
>snip<
Breivik posted a four-part video summarizing his manifesto on YouTube. The chapters are titled “The Rise of Cultural Marxism,” “Islamic Colonization,” “Hope,” and “New Beginning.” 2083 refers to the year a new European identity will emerge.
“You cannot defeat Islamization or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism,” Breivik writes in his manifesto. “Multiculturalism equals the unilateral destruction of Western culture.”
And, we should note, his rejection of multiculturalism has been echoed by none other than German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
And his favorite TV show? Dexter
From Jerome Taylor Oslo, Charlotte Sundberg, and Matt Chorley of The Independent:
The image that has begun to emerge is of a man with a disconnected and shadowy past. A loner who had few friends, he seemed to spend much of his spare time frequenting internet forums for far-right activists, neo-Nazis and Christian fundamentalists. A former member of Norway’s anti-immigrant Progress Party, Breivik loved violent video games and said his favourite TV show was Dexter, the popular HBO drama about a serial killer who murders evil people.
>snip<
As well as frequenting neo-Nazi forums, he spoke admirably of British far-right groups, eulogising both the English Defence League (EDL) and Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE). “I have on some occasions discussed with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use conscious strategies,” he wrote.
On a Facebook page set up just days before the attacks he described himself as Christian and listed some of his likes, including the violent computer game Modern Warfare and Dexter. His Twitter feed contained just one message, a now hauntingly terrifying line from John Stuart Mill that read: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”
A mass murderer who embodies a Zeitgeist
Breivik is a creature of his times, a frequent poster on American websites run by militant Islamophobic Zionists who has taken their rhetoric to its logical and bloody conclusion.
What’s unusual is his incorporation of the Templar myth, another hoary old tale that owes its rebirth to the media, in this case, Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code and the subsequent film starring Tom Hanks.
That the Freemasons have been a force for both good and ill is historical fact. Egalitarian elements in the organization’s doctrine helped spark the great revolutions of the 19th Century, attracting luminaries such as George Washington [who recited his presidential oath of office with one hand on a Masonic Bible] and Benjamin Franklin.
But in the years since, Freemasonry evolved into something of an old boys club, most notably in Britain, where membership was a prerequisite for advanced into the upper ranks of Scotland Yard.
What’s interesting in Breivik’s case is the embrace of an organization once reviled by the European far right. But that shouldn’t be too surprising, given that the same political extremists who once reviled Jews have taken up the cause of the most extreme forms of Zionism.
eats shoots 'n leaves 