This hasn't happened yet. Even in Norway, it has been pretty much back to business as usual. This winter, for example, Norway decided to return 400 young asylum-seekers to Ethiopia, saying they did not face persecution there. The children have been living in asylum-seeker centers for three years or more; a quarter of those to be deported were actually born in Norway. They attend school, have Norwegian friends, and speak Norwegian. A coalition of grassroots groups has been trying to block the scheduled deportations, but the authorities have not budged, a move heartily cheered by the anti-immigration lobby.
Yes, the voices of Islamophobia were temporarily cowed in the aftermath of the Breivik killings -- and it was a hopeful sign that some kind of lesson had been learned about the power of words and hatred. But this reprieve didn't last long. After vehemently disowning the psychopath Breivik, the counter-jihad went back to touting its anti-Muslim racism as stridently as ever. Norwegian newspapers regularly shut down their web comment boards because of abusive language on almost every published article on Islam or immigration. Moreover, this year a heavy-metal band -- Taake -- nominated for Norway's top music prize has songs on its latest album with explicitly anti-Muslim lyrics. In the group's song "Hurricane," members sing, "To hell with Mohammed and the Mohammedans" and their "unforgivable customs." It ends with the line: "Norway will soon awaken."
Meanwhile, the country's media is obsessed with the details of Breivik's monstrous act, the mistakes of the police, and, above all, the man himself. "We are looking so intensely into the eyes of the terrorist that we are becoming blind," wrote Aslak Sira Myhre of Fritt Ord, a Norwegian foundation for free expression. "He is becoming a celebrity, an icon of evil. But we close our eyes to the fact that Behring Breivik's worldview is shared by many all over Europe."
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