The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board apologized for its July 25 column responding to Anders Breivik’s attack on Oslo’s government headquarters and a youth camp. The editorial board observed that their column “inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process.”

The Post’s initial response to the massacre was perceived by many as a criticism of Norway’s immigration laws and a defense of Breivik’s far-right views on multiculturalism. The July 25 column read:

Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right.

The Jerusalem Post column brought a torrent of negative publicity on the paper, leading the paper to apologize for it’s kneejerk response which had come dangerously close to defending the ideologies held by Anders Breivik. The column today read:

The editorial squarely condemned the attack, saying that “as Israelis, a people that is sadly all too familiar with the horrors of indiscriminate, murderous terrorism, our hearts go out with empathy to the Norwegian people.”

However, it also, inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process. [...]

[We] hope that the Norwegian government and people will accept the Post’s apology and forgive us for any offense or hurt caused by our editorial and columnists at this sensitive time.

The paper’s apology noted that the Islamophobic views expressed in Breivik’s manifesto ran eerily close to the “Nazis’ attitude toward Jews.”

Less than two weeks after the Norway massacre and the murder of 77 people, Islamophobe Robert Spencer appeared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” to talk about Islam. Spencer and his blog, “Jihad Watch,” were mentioned 162 times in Norway shooter Anders Breivik’s manifesto, but Robertson nevertheless found it fitting to welcome Spencer on his show to talk about the “cult” of Islam.

Robertson, completely disregarding the overwhelming evidence that Robert Spencer’s writings inspired Anders Breivik’s thinking about Islam, wondered why the U.S. media is so anti-American:

ROBERTSON: Tell me what it is about the media today that seems to be in favor of radical Islam. Why do they want to put down anybody who tells the truth about this cult.

SPENCER: Well I tell you, I think the unpleasant truth about it is the media being hard left is essentially anti-American and so anything that’s American, that’s western, that’s Christian, that’s Judeo-Christian, they hate. And so they see Islam and it’s non-western and non-Christian and they love it.

ROBERTSON: But how can they love murderers? These people are murderers. They kill American soldiers. They kill innocent civilians.

SPENCER: Well, you know, to be sure it’s not that they’re approving of that directly because they are propagating the propaganda line that Islam is a religion of peace, that it’s been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists. They constantly gloss over and sometimes outright deny that fact that Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to promote violence and incite peaceful Muslims to commit acts of violence. These things are matters of fact. It’s pretty obvious from what jihadists themselves say.

Watch it:

Spencer’s rationale for blaming Islam for all terrorism committed by Muslims is interesting because he doesn’t hold himself to the same standard. According to Spencer, if a Muslim terrorist justifies his violence with Quranic verses, then Islam as a religion should be held responsible for the killer’s actions.

But Spencer and his blog had numerous citations in Anders Breivik’s manifesto and, while Spencer has never explicitly advocated violence, Brevik clearly interpreted his writings as a call to action. While Robertson and the “700 Club” may offer a safe venue for Islamophobes to go unchallenged, Spencer is falling back on repeating his hate filled message while applying a ludicrous double-standard to himself and his allies. (HT: Right Wing Watch)

Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. and AEI fellow John Bolton has spent the past several weeks positioning for a presidential run. His candidacy, should he choose to run, will in all likelihood hinge on national security and challenging the Obama administration’s handling of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and U.S. – Israel relations. But while Bolton is making his presidential ambitions increasingly obvious, he has been quiet about his ties to right-wing, anti-Muslim bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

Spencer and Geller, who appear to have ideologically inspired Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and received 174 combined citations in his manifesto, have a long history with Bolton going back as far as 2005 when Geller endorsed George W. Bush’s nomination of Bolton as U.N. ambassador.

Since then, Bolton has sat for multiple interviews with Geller and even wrote the foreword for Spencer and Geller’s 2010 book “The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.” Bolton heartily endorsed their book, writing:

This book carries forward the ongoing and increasingly widespread critique of Barack Obama as our first post-American president. What it recounts is disturbing, and its broader implications are more disturbing still. MostAmericans believe they elect a president who will vigorously represent their global interest, rather than electing a Platonic guardian who defends them only when they comport with his grander visions of a just world. Foreign leaders, whether friend or foe, expect the same. If, by contrast, Obama continues to behave as a post-American president, our adversaries will know exactly what to do.

Spencer and Geller, in a passage eerily similar to Breivik’s manifesto, wrote:

Transformational issues facing this nation and the world at large—the world at war, creeping Sharia, the perversion of the rights of free men—hang in the balance during the Obama administration as never before. The stakes could not be higher. On foreign policy, Europe has lain down. The political elites have capitulated to Islamists and to multiculturalists. Europe is committing slow cultural and demographic suicide. It seems unclear that they could hold up their end even if America did the heavy lifting.

Most recently, Geller endorsed Bolton’s candidacy for president, writing:

I can think of no one more qualified for the office of the President. The depth and breadth of his knowledge and experience is the antidote to the sick, debilitated state of the country which Obama has inflicted upon us. We need extraordinary in the extraordinary times. We need gravitas.

Now that Geller and Spencer are widely understood to have inspired Breivik’s attack — The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement characterizing them as “promot[ing] a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the pretext of fighting radical Islam” and observed that Breivik was influenced by ideology “both in Europe and the United States, which views Islam as an existential threat to the world and sees leaders and governments as collaborators in allowing Islam to ‘infiltrate’ the West.” Bolton has yet to publicly denounce his blogger allies, but if he runs for president, he should explain whether he still endorses their views.

After neoconservative Washington Post “Right Turn” opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin drew criticism for jumping to blame Muslim extremists for the attacks on Norway (actually carried out by a right-wing anti-Muslim extremist), the vaunted newspaper’s ombudsman Patrick Pexton wrote that he chatted with Rubin and “found her forceful and unrepentant, yet not unreasonable.”

Pexton does offer some criticisms of Rubin, but starts his post by justifying her judgement and ends it by blaming liberal blogs who wrote about her rush to judgement for e-mail threats to Rubin. From the top, though, Pexton struck a sympathetic chord for Rubin:

When I received my Post e-mail alert about the bombing in Norway, my first thought was that it was al-Qaeda. [...]

So what explains the vociferous and voluminous amounts of e-mail I received last week denouncing Post opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin for making similar points online immediately after the bombing?

Just to clarify: Rubin did not blog immediately after the attacks. Her post went up just after 5 p.m. ET when the bombings occurred at about 9:30 a.m. ET and news broke about the youth camp attacks at about 12:30 p.m. ET. But there are more pressing problems with Pexton’s comparison: Because some people may have initially thought Islamic extremists attacked Norway does not justify a website of a major American newspaper reporting it that way. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, some speculation can be expected, but the level of certitude that Rubin and her so-called experts brought to her post went beyond just speculation.

Which brings up another issue: In what Pexton call’s Rubin’s “mea culpa post” at 8 p.m. on Saturday, she hardly issues a mea culpa at all, instead merely asserting that “[e]arly suspicion that the attacks might have been linked to a jihadist bombing plot in Oslo last year or the recent Norwegian prosecution of an Iraqi terrorist did not bear up.” Rather than take responsibility, Rubin took the opportunity as “a good reminder to all of us including myself that early reports are often wrong,” and then went on to draw the same conclusion in her original post (don’t cut defense spending) despite the utter debunking of her original premise.

In her “mea culpa post,” Rubin cherry picked her own reporting, making it seem as if she was skeptical that the Norway attack was the work of Islamic terrorists. “Right Turn quoted Thomas Joscelyn of the Weekly Standard for the proposition that we ‘[didn]’t know [emphasis added]‘ at the time if al-Qaeda was responsible,” she wrote. Yet in her original post, Rubin actually quoted Joscelyn saying we don’t know if al Qaeda was “directly responsible” and that “in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.”

Being over-credulous with questionable sources has long plagued neoconservative writers (see Ahmed Chalabi), so that comes as little surprise. But Pexton doesn’t see fit to apply this critique to Rubin, who regularly quotes dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative ideologues on foreign policy and national security matters. (Despite his lack of credentials, Pexton too considers Joscelyn a “terrorism expert.”)

Instead, Pexton ends his column by slapping the wrists of liberal bloggers who called out Rubin’s rush to judgement for inciting a string of e-mails he called “ugly, obscene, vile and, worst, containing threats of physical harm.” Hateful e-mails and certainly threats of violence are inexcusable, but they should not dull questions about shoddy reporting through poorly-informed sources at one of the nation’s top newspapers.

When the accused Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik‘s so-called manifesto surfaced on the internet in the aftermath of the attacks, many commentators quickly took note of the citations to — and wholesale reproduction of pieces by — a group of American bloggers who fancy themselves “counter-Jihadists.” Though no mainstream media outlets alleged that any responsibility for the attack rested with Islamophobic bloggers like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, the clear influence they had on Breivik’s anti-Muslim ideology garnered coverage in outlets like the New York Times.

Now Geller and Spencer are leveraging all the attention to raise funds from their supporters. In the past week, both Geller and the David Horowitz Freedom Center — the group that houses Spencer’s Jihad Watch blog — sent out e-mail portraying themselves of victims of what Horowitz, in his letter, called attacks from the “international left.”

In his July 26 email, Horowitz wrote that Spencer was under scrutiny “[b]ecause some of Robert’s ideas happen to have been cited by the lunatic responsible for the carnage.” According to a ThinkProgress analysis of Breivik’s so-called manifesto, Spencer and his Jihad Watch blog were cited a combined 162 times in the 1,500-page document. (Horowitz was cited once.)

Horowitz goes on to offer up a pamphlet he and Spencer are writing — titled: “Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future” — and asks for donations, linking to a page to donate online:

In return I ask you to please give as generously as you can to help us keep Robert, myself and my team of writers here at FrontPage and Jihad Watch turning out the work that keeps the left and its Muslim extremist allies at bay and keeps us in their gun sights. [...]

Help us build up our legal defense fund against the coming witch hunt. [...]

Thank you for standing by us again as we take the battle once more to those who want to kill free speech as the first step of their plan to disarm America.

Then on July 29, Geller — who, combined with here blog Atlas Shrugs, was cited 12 times in Breivik’s screed — sent out a fundraising e-mail of her own, co-signed by her long-time ally Spencer:

Robert and I speak the truth day in and day out and stand on the front lines of freedom. […]

And now they want to shut us up!…

Your Contribution TODAY goes directly to the Protection of Free Speech and Speaking Out Against Islamic supremacism.

For donations of $250 or more, Geller and Spencer will send you a “free DVD copy of our acclaimed movie The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks!” or, for donations of $500 or more, you can get a personally signed copy of Geller’s book “Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.”

Supporting their argument, Geller and Spencer cited the media’s reporting that Breivik considered himself a “Christian”: “mainstream media called this savage a CHRISTIAN, and tried to blame the murder of those innocent souls on ‘Radical Christianity!’ It is unbelievable!”

Breivik’s notion that “there are no important theological differences between jihadists and so-called ‘peaceful’ or ‘moderate’ Muslims” is lifted almost directly from the writings of Geller, Spencer and the “counter-jihadists.”

Popular hate blogger Pam Geller has received scrutiny in recent days as the public became aware that the right-wing terrorist in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, had praised her blog and thoroughly cited her writing in his political manifesto. After a number of blogs made the connection, as well as the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other major outlets, Geller became incensed and began lashing out at her critics.

In a post defending herself yesterday, Geller — who has called Obama “President Jihad” and claimed that Arab language classes are a plot to subvert the United States — reached a new low. Geller justifies Breivik’s attack on the Norwegian Labour Party summer youth camp because she says the camp is part of an anti-Israel “indoctrination training center.” She says the victims would have grown up to become “future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole.”

To get her point across, Geller posts a picture of the youth camp children Breivik targeted. The picture was taken on the Utøya island camp about 24 hours before Breivik killed over 30 children, so it is likely Geller is mocking many of the victims. Under the picture, Geller writes: “Note the faces which are more MIddle [sic] Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.” View a screen shot (click to enlarge) of Geller’s blog post below:

Could Geller’s outburst of smears be a distraction against mounting evidence that she might have communicated with Breivik in the past? A post from Geller in 2007 reprints a reader-submitted letter in which an anonymous Norwegian complains of Muslim immigration and boasts that he is “stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment.” In the comment section, Geller claims that she provided anonymity to the reader to protect him from being prosecuted. Although Geller recently deleted the ammunition line from her post, a cached version is available. As Glenn Greenwald notes, “If this were an attack by a Muslim group, and a Muslim had something like this on his/her website, the FBI and multiple other groups would be swarming.”

Geller, a fixture on Fox News and conservative gatherings, gained a large national following last year after fueling a campaign to smear a planned community center several blocks from the Ground Zero site as a “victory mosque.” Her influence extends beyond Breivik and the anti-Muslim blogosphere to the Republican Party, given the fact she has appeared with politicians like Newt Gingrich. And she is not the only leading conservative to rationalize Breivik’s beliefs and actions. Pat Buchanan wrote a column recently arguing that “Breivik may be right.” On his radio show, Glenn Beck said the youth camp Breivik targeted, which could be compared to the College Democrats or other mainstream political organizations, reminded him of “Hitler Youth.”

Politico reports today that, according to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, Anders Breivik, the right-wing “fundamentalist” charged with the terror attacks in Norway last week, purchased high-capacity gun clips from the United States. Part of Breivik’s attack included a gun assault on a Labour Party youth camp just outside of Oslo:

Anders Behring Breivik wrote in a 1,500-page manifesto that he bought 10 30-round ammunition clips for his .223 caliber rifle from an unnamed small U.S. supplier, which then in turn acquired the clips from other suppliers. Norway forbids the sale of clips for hunting rifles that hold more than three bullets, according to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

Breivik wrote in his manifesto that while he could have purchased the high-capacity magazines in Sweden, they would have been significantly more expensive than ordering them from a U.S. supplier. He wrote that he spent $550 for the 10 clips. He also described legally buying four 30-round clips for a Glock handgun in Norway.

The legal sale of high-capacity magazines in the U.S. became an issue earlier this year after Jared Loughner’s shooting spree at an event in Arizona that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Loughner used similar 30-round clips and was subdued only after he stopped to reload his weapon. Such high-capacity clips were illegal until 2004 when the assault weapons ban expired. Many have argued that lives would have been spared that day if it had been illegal to purchase high-capacity magazines.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) introduced legislation to put the limit back on these gun clips. However, the legislation has stalled in the GOP-controlled House. McCarthy told Politico that Americans should be ashamed that Breivik purchased the clips from American dealers:

“There should be a lot of shame,” she told POLITICO. “We’re sending a death warrant to other parts of the world. … Unfortunately now internationally it’s known that you can get here, buy your guns, buy your large magazines and you’re not going to have any problem.”

Of course, the National Rifle Association holds considerable sway among members of Congress, particularly Republicans, and opposes any restrictions on guns and ammunition. Responding to calls to limit the size of gun clips after the Loughner shootings, the NRA said high-capacity magazines are needed for “self-defense.” However, members of the NRA have disagreed with that argument. “If ten rounds of ammunition can’t do the job you probably shouldn’t own a gun,” one NRA member told ThinkProgress earlier this year.

CNN reports this week that terrorism experts are warning that the “threat of domestic terrorist attacks in the United States similar to last week’s fatal bombing and assault in Norway is significant and growing”:

The greatest threat of large-scale attacks come from individuals and small groups of extremists who subscribe to radical Islamic or far right-wing ideologies, said Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START. [...]

Ackerman said nationally, law enforcement has been focused since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 on the threat of Islamic terrorism, even as the threat from domestic anti-government groups has been growing.

“Some people believe we have taken our eye off the ball when it comes to domestic right-wing extremists,” he said.

Sadly, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly isn’t taking these threats too seriously. Daryl Johnson, a former senior Department of Homeland Security domestic terror analyst, told the Southern Poverty Law Center last month that “there is just one person” at DHS who is focused on these issues. Why? Shortly after President Obama took office, DHS produced a report warning of the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and that domestic extremists were looking to recruit Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

However, the report was leaked and right-wing media figures and Republicans in Congress were outraged. “The person who drafted the outrageous homeland security memo smearing veterans and conservatives should be fired,” Newt Gingrich said at the time. Michelle Malkin called it a “DHS hit job on conservatives.” Bowing to the right-wing hysteria, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano eventually ordered the report withdrawn.

Johnson, who describes himself a Republican, said that after the controversy, DHS gutted his unit:

When the right-wing report was leaked and people politicized it, my management got scared and thought DHS would be scaled back. It created an environment where my analysts and I couldn’t get our work done. DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies. Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. [...] Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” eco-terrorists, the whole gamut.

“Sad to say, we were right on this one. History has shown that,” Johnson said, referring to the murder of abortion provider George Tiller and neo-Nazi James von Brunn who killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.