Media fundamentally wrong on Norway shooter

Truth and logic were ejected from the media mindset and the borders of public debate long ago. So it came as no surprise that as soon as it became clear that the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik was not a Muslim, and not part of some Islamic gang, the usual suspects would insist that his actions were typical of Christianity, and that all religions were capable of senseless violence. It’s utter nonsense of course. All people are capable of senseless violence in the name of their religion, but only some religions allow such horrors in their primary texts and through orthodox interpretation.

Next came the revelation that Breivik was, in his words, a “cultural Christian.” All of us who take faith seriously know that this is shorthand for “only a cultural Christian” or for someone who is “supportive only of Christian culture.” I, for example, like French culture, but I’m not French. I adore English rural culture, but I’m from London. The statement establishes him as a non-Christian, but journalists who knew no better, or wanted to think the worst, used it to identify him as a Christian.

The main photograph of the man used by the media as soon as the slaughter took place showed him dressed as a freemason. Some liberal Christians and lukewarm Christians may be freemasons, but freemasonry is anathema to fundamentalist Christianity, even more than it is to Roman Catholicism. Even so, a man labelled myriad times as a “fundamentalist Christian” by the CBC as well as numerous other networks, was a mason.

The plot thickens. In his personal manifesto Breivik wrote: “Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I’m not an excessively religious man. I am first and foremost a man of logic. If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God.” Still not enough to convince people he was not a Christian? Okay, there is more. He quoted in admiring tones various atheist philosophers, he was supportive of most of the agenda of the gay community, he was in favour of open abortion, he hadn’t attended church in 17 years.

But still the hint was not taken by the commentators, who seemed obsessed with demanding that this man was a Christian. Where, by the way, the term “fundamentalist” came from nobody seems to know. Just as nobody quite knows why the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh is still called a Christian. He was an agnostic, perhaps an atheist, who left the Roman Catholic Church when he was a youth, and wrote that “science is my religion.”

The reason that so many in mainstream media were so hysterically eager to call Breivik a Christian, of course, is because they wanted to do so. It was a blessing to their relativism. For years now the BBC, CBC, NBC, CBS and most of North America and Europe’s broadcasters have taken every shape imaginable in their attempts to report Islamic terror as something other than Islamic, and argue that there is nothing particular or Muslim about the thousands of jihadist murders that have taken place.

Many of these media outlets have official policies preventing journalists from using terms such as “Islamic terrorism.” Instead they have to abuse the language with “militant” or “Islamist.” So, militants rather than terrorists decapitate children. Rather destroys the meaning of the word “militant” one would have thought. Also plays havoc with common sense and assumes that the public are too stupid and bovine to understand what is really going on.

When not one or two, but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are willing to torture, rape, mutilate, murder other innocent people in the name of their religion; when they quote from their holy book as they commit these acts; when they scream that God is great as they slash and shoot; when they — not we — tell the world that their sole motivation is their religion; and when they are supported not by a handful but by millions of their co-religionists, it is surely time we sit up and believe them.

(Coren’s new book is Why Catholics Are Right. His web site is www.michaelcoren.com.)