** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 790 bis 17 October 18 A CHRISTIAN TALEBAN

NORWEGIAN MASS KILLER ANDERS BREIVIK WAS A CHRISTIAN. AS DETERMINED AS A TALEBAN WARRIOR. THE FILM '22 JULY' MAKES YOU WONDER: DOES RELIGION LEAD TO VIOLENCE?
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On July 22 2011, a Norwegian Christian called Anders Breivik coldly and methodically massacred 77 innocent people. Mostly youngsters relaxing in a summer camp near Oslo. A rather edifying movie just released, ‘22 July’, portrays Breivik’s killing spree and the subsequent trial. The killer demanded an end to immigration, the destruction of multiculturalism and restrictions on Islam.

As a teenager Breivik had undergone baptism in the ultra-liberal Lutheran Church of Norway. Later he joined another putatively Christian entity, the Knights Templars, awarding himself the rank of Justiciar Commander - a sort of high judge who could issue death sentences for treason. To clarify: the Knights Templars of history were warrior monks. A medieval religious and military Order created after the First Crusade to protect pilgrims from brigands in the Holy Land and also to fight the Muslim foe. Two centuries later the Knights had grown too wealthy. With the Pope’s complicity, covetous King Philip II of France had them arrested, tortured and exterminated. That was the end to the Order. Breivik’s ‘Knights Templars’ were a fantasy. Still, given the man’s anti-Islamic agenda the devout warriors were a suitable inspiration.

A Guardian reviewer of ‘July 22’ writes of the ‘troubling charisma’ with which actor Anders Danielsen Lie renders Breivik’s figure. A revealing phrase. Could Breivik’s self-driven, demonic commitment to his cause excite…something perversely close to admiration? That possibility bothered left-wing director Paul Greengrass. ‘Cultural Marxists, children of the elites and liberals’: they all deserved to die, Breivik ferociously asserted. An online manifesto sets out the ideological grounds of his terrorism. The opening page announces ‘A European Declaration of Independence’. It bears the Knights Templars’ Red Cross, as well as a Latin sentence, meaning: ‘In Praise of the New Army of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon’. (St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great contemplative mystic, drew up the Order’s Rule.) Overlong and verbose, it is hardly a text to stir up and inflame the average EDL yob. Nonetheless it is written in good English and clearly expounded. The mind at work is not s
tupid. Breivik’s arguments are obsessive but not irrational. Not even, horribile dictu, wholly wrong. Take his beef about multiculturalism. Haven’t impeccable democratic luminaries like Tony Blair and Sir Trevor Phillips criticised that idea? And it is not racists alone who worry about uncontrolled immigration. Nor is the photo showing Breivik wearing Masonic regalia an emblem of ‘extremism’. Freemasons are a legal and respectable organisation all over Europe. In England their Grand Master is the Duke of Kent, the Queen’s cousin. Lunacy occasionally obtrudes but no more than, say, in some fanatical statements by animal rights or ecological activists.

Back in 2011, I observed how despite his hatred of Islam Breivik actually copied the violent Jihadists who murder the innocent. A recent BBC feature confirms that impression. A journalist in Afghanistan interviews jailed Taleban fighters. ‘How can you kill harmless women and children?’ he asks. Behind the bars, fierce-looking, shaggy-bearded chaps growl: ‘We must kill them. Until they leave Afghanistan. We must kill them all!’ ‘But why?’ the interviewer presses them. ‘It came down from Heaven. A command. It tells to kill them. We must obey’. Then the prisoners turn angry. Despite being behind bars, they look menacing, murderous. ‘Leave now!’, a guard orders the journalist. ‘For your own safety’.

The Qur’an verses the prisoners alluded to would be given a different interpretation by many Islamic scholars and individual believers. But any attempt to do ‘tafsir’, exegesis, would have fallen on deaf ears. Those Taleban were simple fundamentalist warriors, with no time for tafsir. ‘It came down from Heaven. We must kill them!’ There is a brutal logic in those words. Conversely, Breivik didn’t appeal to the Bible. Odd because his beloved Knights Templars did do so. During meals they would listen to war-like passages from the Book of Joshua, in the Old Testament. A text which records the chosen people’s bloody conquests in the land of Canaan, at God’s behest. Genocidal wars, no other way of describing them. Yet God commanded them, the Bible avers. After taking the city of Jericho the victorious Jews ‘utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old…with the edge of the sword.’ Surely a neat biblical paradigm for the Christian Breivik to invoke?

The ending of ’22 July’ is overly didactic. At the trial a young survivor of Breivik’s shootings declares that the killer has failed because he, his victim, refuses to be crushed. Rhetorically effective but Breivik’s real failure went deeper. He hoped to incite his fellow Norwegians to rise up against immigrants and Muslims and reject the multicultural society. Nothing of the kind happened. Like writer Yukio Mishima’s violent attempt to lead back Japan to the era of the Samurai, Breivik miscalculated. Norway remained content with its diversity, material goodies and general hedonism. Like the Samurai, the Vikings and the Knights Templars have gone for good and never will come this way again.

The Taleban is another story. Far from being isolated, deluded loners, they are rooted in an Afghan society shot-through with religion and potentially attuned, though in varying degrees, to their world views and message. (Norway, by contrast, is the least religious country in Northern Europe.) Of course, not all Afghans wish to slay the infidels. There are plenty refugees near where I live, running local café, cabs and launderette, who are agreeable, peaceful people and would never dream of harming me. The question is: who is going to win? My nice neighbours or the threatening guys of the BBC interview?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli


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