“We must be allowed to discuss how to stop terrorists without getting onto July 22nd” reads yesterday’s headline in Dagsavisen. The statement is by the Minister for knowledge and integration, from the Conservative party. The populist right-wing party has just proposed that people who are suspected of being foreign fighters shall be deprived of their citizenship, by the police, without a prior sentence. In response to this suggestion of abandoning the rule of law, the prime minister from the conservative party states that she wishes to “remain neutral”! I have written about the striking development in Norway since July 22nd in Nationalism and the Body Politic, questioning how the party the terrorist was once a member of could get into government and how virulent hate speech against minorities could become prevalent after what happened. What is new now is that the conservative prime minister has ceased to pretend to distance herself from the policies of the far right – those of her own government members.
It is very striking how July 22nd has either been blotted out, left out of public debate altogether, or the far right has gotten away with blaming Muslims and the left for the mass killings of a far right terrorist.
It is as if there is a taboo on mentioning that in a Norwegian context, terrorism does not look like this (first picture, the recent propaganda image by the Populist right-wing party), but like this: