Charles Johnson reveals:

In June 2007, “counter-jihad” blogger Pamela Geller posted the following Email from Norway, from a reader who sounds a lot like the Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik.

Geller’s post began:

I am running an email I received from an Atlas reader in Norway. It is devastating in its matter-of-factness.
[The email begins] Well, yes, the situation is worsening. Stepping up from 29 000 immigrants every year, in 2007 we will be getting a total of 35 000 immigrants from somalia, iran, iraq and afghanistan. The nations capital is already 50% muslim, and they ALL go there after entering Norway. Adding the 1.2 births per woman per year from muslim women, there will be 300 000+ muslims out of the then 480 000 inhabitants of that city.

Orders from Libya and Iran say that Oslo will be known as Medina at the latest in 2010, although I consider this a PR-stunt nevertheless it is their plan.

From Israel the hordes clawing at the walls of Jerusalem proclaim cheerfully that next year there will be no more Israel, and I know Israel shrugs this off as do I, and will mount a strike during the summer against all of its enemies in the middle east. This will make the muslims worldwide go into a frenzy, attacking everyone around them.

The email Geller had received, continued:

We are stockpiling and caching weapons, ammunition and equipment. This is going to happen fast.

Geller subsequently deleted these lines, and as Johnson and others have established, she deleted them after Breivik’s July 22 bombing and shooting rampage.

If Geller was knowingly in communication with Breivik then she should probably be helping Norwegian authorities with their investigation.

But even if neither in this instance nor any other did she communicate with him, the contents of the email that Johnson has unearthed are no less damning. They suggest that far from condemning those individuals in Norway who she knew were preparing for armed violence, she chose to showcase their plans as though to say, “we’re with you.”

Update: This afternoon, Geller responded to Johnson’s post and acknowledges that after the massacre she removed the sentence from her 2007 post “as I found it insenstive [sic] and inappropriate.” She also says her email correspondent was not Breivik.

The sentence I edited is not an incitement to anything. It refers to self-defense, but I removed it in the light of recent horrific events in Norway. I thought it insensitive. Nothing more.

Everyone has a right to self-defense.

There are no doubt many members of armed militias across America who share Geller’s view that anyone has the right to stockpile weapons, ammunition and equipment in preparation for “self-defense” against the US government, enemies of the White race, Muslims, Jews or whatever groups or entities they happen to have demonized.

Such militias and the philosophies they espouse provide a breeding ground for the kind of paranoia that on occasions results in mass murder.

At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Heidi Beirich writes about the ideological trends in the United States that parallel those articulated by Anders Behring Breivik, who rails against cultural Marxism in his manifesto.

Fears of “cultural Marxism” have a long pedigree in this country. It’s a conspiratorial kind of “political correctness” on steroids — a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who use the term posit that a small group of German philosophers, all Jews who fled Germany and went to Columbia University in the 1930s to found the Frankfurt School, devised a cultural form of “Marxism” aimed at subverting Western civilization. The method involves manipulating the culture into supporting homosexuality, sex education, egalitarianism, and the like, to the point that traditional institutions and culture are ultimately wrecked.

A number of hate groups, including the racist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), have raised the spectre of cultural Marxism as a way to explain contemporary events (click here to watch the CCC’s DVD on the theory). Some prominent conservatives also adopted the conspiratorial theory (culturalmarxism.org features MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan and Texas Congressman Ron Paul). In 2002, William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, a far-right outfit long headed by the now deceased Paul Weyrich (one of the founders of the Moral Majority), gave a speech about the theory to a Holocaust denial conference. Saying he was “not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred,” Lind went on to lay blame for “political correctness” and other evils on so-called “cultural Marxists,” who, he said, “were all Jewish” (Lind is mentioned in passing in Breivik’s manifesto).

Breivik shares more than fears of cultural Marxism with America’s radical right. A recent SPLC report documented an increasingly reckless campaign to vilify American Muslims, driven in some cases by mainstream poltical figures. If irresponsible ideologues or public figures use the upcoming ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to further demonize American Muslims, this population may be great danger (in the past year, there have been serious attacks on mosques and other Islamic institutions. For more, read here and here).

Tensions are arising here for very much the same reasons as they are in Europe: societies on both sides of the pond are becoming more demographically diverse. In Europe, the targets of radical-right extremists are typically Muslims, because they make up a large share of European immigrants. In the U.S., until recently, ire has mostly been directed at Latinos and Latino immigrants. This growing population is blamed by racist ideologues for the impending end of a white majority, which will come midcentury according to the Census.

That racial fears could drive someone to kill on a massive scale should come as no surprise. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995, taking his blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing from the gruesome race-war novel, The Turner Diaries, written by neo-Nazi leader William Pierce. Between McVeigh’s April 19, 1995 bombing and early 2011, the SPLC has documented some 100 domestic terror plots by right-wing extremists. In recent years, these attacks have been propelled by additional factors such as the election of the nation’s first black president and the troubled economy.

The obvious danger from radical-right domestic terrorism makes it all the more galling that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has largely given up its efforts to monitor such threats. In April 2009, the department released a report, “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” warning of possible violence from racists, radical antigovernment types and others. The report was prescient; within a few month of its release two major domestic terrorist attacks took place. But that didn’t stop conservative analysts from savaging the report after it was leaked shortly after its release.

It was one thing for the right-wing media to savage the report; what was truly shocking was DHS’s reaction. The department ended up gutting its non-Islamic domestic extremism intelligence unit, which had been led since its inception by veteran intelligence analyst Daryl Johnson. Johnson recently talked to the SPLC about how the DHS bowed to the political pressure and basically abandoned its role in protecting the country from radical-right threats (The Washington Post provided further evidence here).

“[M]y greatest fear is that domestic extremists in this country will somehow become emboldened to the point of carrying out a mass-casualty attack, because they perceive that no one is being vigilant about the threat from within,” Johnson told SPLC referring to the fact that DHS is out of the non-Islamic domestic terrorism business. “That is what keeps me up at night.”

The SPLC’s CEO J. Richard Cohen recently asked DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to reconsider the department’s actions. The Oslo attacks are a reminder of why this is so critically important.