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23 July 2011

Terrorism and compassion

A Norwegian movingly responds to the terrorist attack in in his country.

He wanted to save the world from the muslim threat. He was afraid. Fear, fear, sickening fear permeates his writing. It is clever. He is well-read. It has all the good, rational ways of explaining a point of view. He is afraid. Nothing in his writing says it clearly.
....
I am proud of the fact that we arrested this murderer alive. How would that have played out in USA? Even in this situation, norwegian police was able to catch him alive. It is horrible to have to talk about this. If a sniper bullet could have saved a single life more, of course that would have been immensely much better. But somehow, he was stopped without being killed, and if that happened without risking any more childen's lives, yes, that is a good thing.

My bodily reaction was a sudden wish to have him torn apart by horses. But that is my feelings. Fear. Rage. Disgust. This rage for vengeance is not what makes us human. It is the victory of abstract thought, of faith, that makes us human. The faith that any human can be something different tomorrow than they are today. To him, maybe killing children gave him a physical reaction. For his own sake, I hope he is a complete psychopath, if such a thing exists. If he really did this just to bring attention to his thoughts, and he will now have to face it like a human being ...

I agree with him that the only thing that can truly defeat terrorism is compassion. Violence just won't do the job. A few were wise enough to see this from the beginning, but we remain all too few.

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