The Hangover News

TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED IN NORWAY

(via)
On Friday, a man named Anders Behring Breivik went mad with bombs and guns, killing at least 93 people and injuring a hundred or so more in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

The bomb went off in Regjeringskvartalet, outside the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in the heart of Oslo's government quarter. The gun attack took place an hour and a half later on the island of Utøya, where the Norwegian Labour Party were holding their annual youth summer camp.

Breivik dressed as a policeman so that it was easier to lure victims towards him. He wandered around the island firing indiscriminately, before taking aim at those trying to escape back to the mainland across the lake. Most of his victims were 15 or 16 years old.

At the time of writing, these are the facts. But as the Western world tried to decipher what the deaths meant over the course of the weekend, it found itself getting mixed up. These days, the word 'terrorism' is as commonplace and everyday as toast or utility bills; this casual acquaintance lends itself to generalisations and assumptions.

In the initial confusion, we had 24-hour rolling news stations attributing the Oslo attacks to al-Qaeda. On Saturday, we had the first edition of the most widely-read newspaper in the UK going to press with a front page declaring the same.

It was 'terrorism', the media said, and 'terrorism' on the 22nd of July, 2011, meant Muslims. But when ambulances full of wide-eyed medics and unexpectedly busy police are still rushing around trying to stop the bad things happening, they don't have time to talk to journalists.

So when it emerges, as it soon did, that your man isn't al-Qaeda, but hates al-Qaeda and has killed all those innocent people and tried to blow up the president of his own country because of his hatred for al-Qaeda – those members of the media too fact-thirsty to wait for the blood to dry should perhaps hang their heads.

If you're gonna accommodate vagaries in your argot, at least have the balls to cope with the ambiguity, lay off for a while and accept the chaos of a situation like this.

Instead, the media seemed intoxicated with Breivik's callous and deranged spectacle. That's dangerous when your cameras are rolling 24 hours a day and you don't get a chance to sleep the intoxication off.

Here's not the place to go in-depth on this – it's supposed to be a concise and direct catch-up for people too fuzzy-brained to bother with news at weekends – so to be honest, I'd be happier just dropping the facts and taking my leave.

Anders Behring Breivik is expected to plead not guilty.