Adam Serwer gets it completely right, IMHO:
These bloggers are not directly responsible for the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. But make no mistake: Their school of analysis, which puts the blame on all Muslims for acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has been fully discredited — by their own reaction to the Oslo attacks. While it’s obvious that few if any of them will take this lesson to heart, the rest of us should — terrorist acts are committed by individuals, and it is those individuals who should be held responsible.
Likewise, Nick Matzke has a long - and extremely detailed - response at The Pandas Thumb to a piece of tripe authored by the Discovery Institute's John West on the religious nature (or supposed lack thereof) of the writings of Breivik. He also points out that one of West's sources - WorldNetDaily, which published an article that West references - also was a source of material (written by its exceptionally loopy, thin-skinned founder, Joseph Farah, no less) that Brevik plundered for his "manifesto".
To wit:
I haven’t taken the time to do a thorough analysis, but it looks like the sections I’ve quoted are a mixture of material Brevik plagiarized from various websites (he cites many of them at the end there) interspersed with his own comments.
These bloggers are not directly responsible for the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. But make no mistake: Their school of analysis, which puts the blame on all Muslims for acts of terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists, has been fully discredited — by their own reaction to the Oslo attacks. While it’s obvious that few if any of them will take this lesson to heart, the rest of us should — terrorist acts are committed by individuals, and it is those individuals who should be held responsible.
Likewise, Nick Matzke has a long - and extremely detailed - response at The Pandas Thumb to a piece of tripe authored by the Discovery Institute's John West on the religious nature (or supposed lack thereof) of the writings of Breivik. He also points out that one of West's sources - WorldNetDaily, which published an article that West references - also was a source of material (written by its exceptionally loopy, thin-skinned founder, Joseph Farah, no less) that Brevik plundered for his "manifesto".
To wit:
I haven’t taken the time to do a thorough analysis, but it looks like the sections I’ve quoted are a mixture of material Brevik plagiarized from various websites (he cites many of them at the end there) interspersed with his own comments.
But what websites is Brevik plagiarizing from? Well, fundamentalist Christian ones. Have a look at that last link: What website is that? Why, WorldNetDaily! Who is the author? Why, Joseph Farah, head of WorldNetDaily, the very guy who will do news stories promoting the craziest claims of fundamentalists, including creationists/IDists, when no one else will!
Keep in mind that Farah was dim enough to threaten to sue Esquire for publishing a parody, so it's difficult to be surprised that he's both the source of material for Breivik's rant and a source of irretrievably bad information on it as well.