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Breivik’s sick mythology also shows another new post-9/11 element: the changing role of the Jew in the narrative of the West’s right-wing extremists.
The Jew traditionally has been the primary target of such extremists because it was imagined that his evil hand lay behind those forces — capitalism, Marxism, globalization, financial speculation — once deemed to be most threatening to the traditional Western order that Breivik says he wants to defend. The creation of Israel in 1948 added a new excuse for anti-Semitism: The Turner Diaries are full of references to American foreign policy being controlled by Israel (an accusation that, of course, has now been taken up by the left).
With 9/11, that changed: The greatest cultural and military threat now is seen to be militant Islam, with the Jew — and Israel — now instantly cast as a defender of the established Western order. To quote something I wrote in my recently published book, Among The Truthers: “The Jew [is now seen as] the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability in the war on terrorism was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. For the first time in the history of Western civilization, the Jew’s ‘foreignness’ and mixed loyalties-to the United States, Israel, world Jewry- became a source of respect and trust rather than suspicion.”
