Inside the Mind of Breivik

Many of my students have asked this question:  if the shooter was against Muslims "invading" Norway, why did he go to a camp and kill white Norwegian children? Why not blow up a Mosque and kill Muslims?  I skimmed Breivik's manifesto and watched his YouTube video, but the answer was not clear, so I visited a White Supremacist chat room to gather some opinions.  Here are a few comments:

(member talking about how the shooter tried to friend her on FaceBook) To be fair, he had back then quite a lot of known Nationalists on his FB friend list, that's how he found me. I wonder what was he thinking when he decided to shoot Whites...

- If this "knight" was fighting against Muslims, why did he kill white christian children?

- That being said, why didn't he kill Muslims then? *Because that would not have gotten people to think, like this will.*

- They deserved it. Terrorism is when you deliberately target non-combatant civilians in order to extract certain demands. Anders Behring Breivik did not do that. He did not target the Muslim or ethnic quarters of Oslo which motivated his actions, he targeted those parties directly responsible.

What sort of “democracy” is it which weans its future political leaders from a narrow group of teenagers whom are all ideologically motivated both within and by an ideologically biased, Cultural Marxist educational system? – That is not a “democracy”, that is a single party state.
If you make ethno-masochist Marxist Extremists out of Norwegian teenagers it’s no different from making boy soldiers out of Congolese minors.
They were all legitimate military targets of political interest, no different from when the United States, or Israel or NATO eliminates Islamic leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.
These were all legitimate military targets and this was a completely justified act of war by Norwegian National Resistance Forces.
While I cannot speak for Mr. Breivik’s Zionist leanings, as Nationalists, our only regret is that more enemy combatants were not killed in this, including the corrupt Prime Minister of that enemy state.

So therein lies the answer to the question, posted by a chat room participant who obviously shares the same ideology and possibly would follow a similar course of action.   Breivik targeted the camp because they were children of the social-democratic Labor party, which supports immigration.  As a Nationalist, his "duty" is to protect the State, and he viewed the children at this camp as legitimate targets, since they were Labor party members in the making. Reading through his manifesto, I found him repeatedly saying he bore no ill will toward Muslims, in fact he called them peace-loving people.

     Another point from a chat room participant implied this act was more shocking and improbable, it had people talking and thinking. Certainly, had Breivik blown up a Mosque we would be equally as horrified (and we can't forget that he set off a very large fertilizer bomb in the attempt to kill the Prime Minister), but targeting the camp children was more attention getting - this is a main goal of terrorism and actors who want to draw attention to their cause and change the political landscape. It was an asymmetric tactic to target Norwegian children -  no one could ever predict this action or defend against it.  Dressing as a police officer to gain their trust and lure them closer was also an asymmetric tactic, although something we've seen on the battlefield and domestic terror attacks many times in differing variations.  

There is much to learn from this shooting as we work to prevent similar incidents from happening in our country.  Are we hardening soft targets like schools, churches and hospitals...or continuing to shore up heavily defended places and people that aren't really domestic targets at all?   Do we look through the eyes of a disgruntled "patriots" in our country to identify their possible targets or assume that we know how and what they are thinking?  Questions worth pondering.