One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (24 page)

But then he got to jihad – the Muslims’ duty to wage holy war – and
he explained the Arabic term
al-Taqiyya
, which translates as dissimulation and in Islam means that Muslims can conceal their faith if it would put them in mortal danger to confess to it. Berwick claimed this was a Muslim tactic to hide their ambition of taking power in Europe. Until they struck. He explained the term
dhimmi
: non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, who are protected and allowed
to exercise their own faith as long as they pay a tax,
jizia
, and do not raise any objections. This was the future lying ahead for Christians.

He used the Arabic terms to prove the Muslims had a plan to conquer the West and to kill Jews and Christians. The Repentance verse of the Qur’an was part of the proof:
kill the polytheists wherever you find them, arrest them, imprison them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every site of ambush!

The verse was much more effective without the word
polytheists
. Then you could write that the verse was about Jews and Christians, when it really referred to sects that worshipped multiple gods in old Arabia. It also had more impact if you put
kill them
last.

He often quoted Robert Spencer, the man behind Jihad Watch. Spencer had dissected the
Qur’an into its component parts, taking them out of context to show how violent and full of hate it was. Berwick subscribed to that understanding of the Muslim holy book.

He hastened on, jumping backwards and forwards in time. The Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the extermination of the Christian minority in Lebanon in the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide in 1915, the
different dynasties of the seventh century. Towards the end of the book he got to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the start of the Ottoman downfall in Europe. The battle was a prophetic parallel to his own book, which he had given the title
2083 –
A European Declaration of Independence
. Four hundred years after the famous battle, the Muslims would be vanquished and out of Europe for ever.

*   *
   *

‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.’ With this quotation from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian
Brave New World
Berwick opened the second part of the book, which he called
Europe Burning
. Starting with quotations added authority, so he threw in various bits of Orwell and Churchill too. He only had to google ‘famous quotations’ and so many good ones came up.

The first hundred
pages were essays by Fjordman with titles like ‘The Eurabia Code’, ‘Boycott the United Nations’, ‘How the Feminists’ War Against Boys Paved the Way for Islam’, ‘What is the Cause of Low Birth Rates?’ and ‘The Fatherless Civilisation’. The themes overlapped with things Berwick wrote himself. It was cut-and-paste, stolen and shared. A lot of it was sheer repetition. One thing that could not be clarified
too often was: why we can never trust those who call themselves moderate Muslims.

Because they are deceiving us.

The Qur’an usually furnished the proof Berwick needed, as in sura 8, verse 12:
Remember when God revealed to the angels: ‘I am with you, so grant the believers resolve. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. So strike above the necks, and strike their very finger!
’ He really liked using that particular sura, called al-Anfal. It was the sura Saddam Hussein had used to name the genocide of the Kurds in the 1980s. In Berwick’s reading, the unbelievers were the Christians; in the Ba’ath Party’s they were the Kurds.

Then he complained a little. It was, after all, quite a laborious task he had taken upon himself. ‘Occasionally I get annoyed over the fact that
I am compelled to spend significant amounts of my time refuting Islam, an ideology that is flawed to the core and should be totally irrelevant in the twenty-first century.’

But he
had
to do it, because the actual number of Muslims in Europe was being kept secret by the authorities. There were far more than they said and, more importantly, those numbers were increasing all the time, through births
and mass immigration. This assertion was supported by more Fjordman essays and quotations from assorted experts, and finally proved by the Qur’an.

Berwick also endorsed Bat Ye’or’s theory that EU leaders had opened their doors to mass immigration of Muslims in exchange for peace, cheap oil and access to markets in the Arab world, the so-called Eurabia theory. He adopted her expression ‘freedom
or
dhimmitude
’. Freedom or subjugation.

*   *   *

In the middle of his critique of Islam, Berwick abruptly threw in some comments on how a blog could be turned into a newspaper. He ridiculed all those who were not bold enough to take the risk.

‘I have spoken to numerous successful and less successful right-wing blog/newssite/Facebook “reporters” over the years and the general opinion seems
to be that the creation and distribution of a paper-magazine/newspaper is so incredibly difficult and problematic. I can honestly not understand why people feel this way.’

He then offered a three-step design with a planning phase, the development of a subscriber base and use of bloggers’ texts as material to fill the pages. The only thing to be cautious about was ‘hate speech’, because racist
magazines were bound to be banned.

At the very end of Book 2 he was critical of Fjordman, Spencer and Bat Ye’or in the chapter ‘Future deportations of Muslims from Europe’.

It was the same question he had asked them to answer on Gates of Vienna. About the D-word. They didn’t dare raise the subject of deportation because it would ruin their reputations, wrote Berwick. ‘If these writers are too
scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance, then other writers will have to.’

Berwick felt himself called.

*   *   *

The chat went on about the weather, the neighbours, the children and other matters at the smokers’ table of the café outside the Coop.

‘Anders is writing a book,’ Wenche said.

‘Oh is he?’ said the others. ‘What about?’

‘Something historical,’ replied
his mother. ‘It’s a bit above my head.’

The neighbours nodded.

‘It’s going to be in English,’ Wenche went on. The book would go all the way back to 600
BC
, she explained. So everything was covered, as Anders put it. It was going to be about all the wars, everything that had happened.

Anders’s mother was quite worried about his future, in actual fact. She had even told him she could go with
him to the job centre. They would be able to help him to find out what sort of job could suit him.

She once told him she thought he would make a good policeman with ideas like his, decent and fair.

‘For that I’d need to have taken some different choices in life,’ Anders had answered then.

‘He’s good with computers, he’s good at history…’ his mother mused. ‘But really I’ve always wished he could
be a doctor,’ she said to her friends at the café. The nicest thing of all, she thought, would be for Anders to be a Red Cross doctor caring for starving children in Africa and helping people. Maybe Zambia, she suggested.

When he told her he wanted to be an author, she said, ‘That sounds grand!’

She remembered his very first proper job, when he was seventeen. He had got a job with a company
called Acta, where he sold shares to rich people.

‘Rubbish,’ Anders’s sister had said afterwards. ‘He’s not selling shares, he’s selling magazines.’

This had made Wenche sit down and wonder whether Anders felt that he wasn’t good enough.

At the smokers’ table where the sun rays never reached, they had learnt not to bring up the subject of Anders. They had a tacit understanding that if Wenche
wanted to talk about him she would, and then they could join in, but they never asked the first question. They knew he was just sitting there in his room, engrossed in his games.

If they made some comment about compulsive gaming being a form of illness, she might say they were only jealous because she had a good, kind son like Anders.

The sons of several of the women at the café had finished
courses in law or economics; some had already qualified as lawyers. Others worked in banks and finance.

Some had children. And when the ladies started talking about their grandchildren, Wenche pursed her lips.

Anders had told his mother to stop nagging him about getting a proper job. But it was even worse when she went on about how he ought to get a girlfriend.

‘Why not find a nice little single
mother then?’ Wenche asked.

‘I must have my own children,’ Anders replied.

He said he wanted seven.

How Can I Get Your Life?

The buses were already waiting. They quickly filled with passengers from the ferry who had onward journeys along the peninsula. At rush hour the ferries ran every twenty minutes. On the way to Oslo, on the way back from Oslo – the short crossing on
Huldra
or
Smørbukk
could be a peaceful interlude or a chance for a chat.

If you hadn’t been able to sit with who you
wanted on the ferry, there was always a second chance on the bus.

One day Bano deposited herself in the seat next to a slender woman with an elegant short haircut. It was no accident.

‘Hello,’ said Bano with a broad grin.

The blonde woman in her early forties returned the girl’s greeting. The teenager stopped chewing gum and started to speak.

‘I know you’re a member of the Labour Party. I
am too,’ said Bano. ‘I’m a local politician just like you.’ Bano was fifteen and had just joined the AUF.

Nina Sandberg was the Labour Party’s mayoral candidate in Nesodden. What a spring of joy, was the first thing she thought when Bano sat down beside her.

‘I’m supporting you,’ Bano confided. ‘So are my sister and mother.’

Then she got off the bus, while Nina Sandberg continued her journey
to her farmhouse at the southern end of Nesodden.

*   *   *

Bayan and Mustafa tried from the moment they arrived to be part of Norwegian society. First they had to learn Norwegian, so they could look for jobs. Initially Bayan cried when she saw people on their way to work in the mornings. How she missed her accountancy job in Erbil! Mustafa, who had been a mechanical engineer, looked for engineering
jobs. Water and drainage specialist, he wrote.

It got him nowhere.

He went to the social security office on Akersgata in Oslo.

‘I’ll take anything,’ he told the woman behind the counter.

The adviser helped him improve the standard of his applications. She corrected his written Norwegian and suggested he take a language course to improve his chances. Then they sat talking for a while.

‘Why
did you come here?’ she asked.

Mustafa said nothing.

‘To Norway, I mean,’ she went on.

Her question hung in the air.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mustafa.

Life had become a blur. The days passed by in idleness. He felt something had slipped away; he had lost something, himself, his self-confidence and the status that his education and professional experience had conferred on him. He had only a hazy
understanding of Norwegian and felt excluded.

The only thing that made him feel alive was the children, seeing them take root and grow, even if the girls were finding it a bit hard to settle at school. One of the teachers had told him that his daughters did not play with the other children, only with each other.

‘Have you told them they’re not allowed to play with the others?’ she enquired.

Bayan and Mustafa would not have such things said about them! They signed the girls up for ballet, gymnastics and handball. Ali, who was now in a kindergarten, had already begun football training.

They themselves attended matches, shows and tournaments, and volunteered for community tasks. At first the Rashid children took their own chicken sausages along to eat at sporting events, but one day
they simply didn’t bring them. Kurdistan felt further and further away.

The children went to church with the rest of their school class at Christmas, and Bayan hung advent stars in the windows like everyone else. Bano said she was a devout Muslim, but when somebody asked her if she was Sunni or Shia, she did not know. ‘I believe there’s a God,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what He’s called, that’s
all.’ And after attending church with her class, she said, ‘If God knows there is only Him, there’s no need to say it through the priest.’

As pupils from a minority background, the Rashid children were excused from lessons in New Norwegian, the country’s second official language, which is based on rural dialects. But the proposal only made Bano indignant. ‘If you get a letter in New Norwegian,
you have to answer it in New Norwegian,’ she asserted, quoting the general rule. When the teacher praised the fluency of a composition she had written, she was cross. ‘Why say that to me in particular? I started New Norwegian the same time as everybody else in the class.’

If her parents moaned at her or weren’t happy with something she had done, she would retort that lots of immigrant parents
had to go and fetch their children from the police station.

‘Mum, we’re not like the ones who don’t want to integrate. The future for us means good jobs, coming home to nice dinners and opening the fridge to find it’s full. You complain about the cost of sandwich fillings and us staying in the shower too long, but Mum, at least we always have food and water,’ she would say consolingly whenever
her mother was worried about making ends meet. ‘We’re not ashamed of having a messy house because the main thing is that we children aren’t being neglected. And our sofa and dining table are just as nice as everyone else’s.’

It was important to be ‘like everyone else’. The family had to have the same furniture, the same clothes and the same kind of sandwiches in their packed lunches. That is
to say, the same or better. Bano was so pleased when her mother bought her sister a Bergans jacket. ‘Mum, only Lara and one other person in her class have got a Bergans jacket. The others have just got the ordinary brands. I’m so proud she’s got an expensive jacket!’ she exclaimed to Bayan, who had been lucky enough to find the smart jacket in a sale.