Shocker Alert: Wingnuts Assumed Norway Killer Was Muslim
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, rushed up an editorial Friday, blaming ‘jidhadists’ for the attacks and exclaiming, ‘Norway is targeted for being true to Western norms’:
…in jihadist eyes, [Norway] will always remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy, and every other freedom that defines the West. For being true to those ideals, Norwegians have now been asked to pay a terrible price.
As more information came out about the attacks and the attacker, the WSJ rewrote the online version of the editorial, albeit by removing any trace of the above paragraph. Instead, it mentioned that it had falsely attributed the attacks to jihadists and called the attacker an al Qaeda ‘copycat.’
Many other conservatives committed similar follies. AEI’s Ahmad Majidyar published a post about the links between Norway and al Qaeda. FDD president Cliff May openly speculated at Pajamas Media that the attack was probably a ‘retaliatory’ strike for the recent indictment of a radical Islamic militant in Norway. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin made multiple references to jihadist attackers on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Josh Trevino, a GOP activist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, sarcastically quipped that he ‘suspected Lutherans’ for the attack while also saying it was part of a ‘jihad.’ Conservative activist Andrew Breitbart and RedState’s Erick Erickson were quick to join in as well.