There are a couple of possibilities here. According to the article at Jihad Watch, following Pam Geller, the screen-capped Facebook profile from the time that the suspect’s name was released indicated no affiliation with Christianity or conservatism. The one that later began circulating includes those things, as well as an interest in hunting, the name of his high school, and other information. So . . . did he have two Facebook profiles, one in Norwegian and another in English, that differed from one another in these respects, or was the latter a put-up job?
In this morning’s Washington Times coverage of the story, police indicated that Breivik is pretty anxious to explain his motivations, so assuming that they’re at all coherent, we should eventually get some idea of what they are, but one of the reasons that we didn’t run with the story right away yesterday was that the information seemed so conflicted and unsourced that we didn’t want to start talking until we had something fairly solid to go on.
Still, there’s apparently considerable writing online that appears attributable to Breivik that would indicated that he was in some (European) senses conservative, and it’s significant that he decided to shoot up a Labour youth camp. Undoubtedly, there’s much to consider here, but it’s not helpful to jump to any kinds of conclusions. Prayers, as Joy reminds us on her Winehouse post, are more appropriate.
Much more important to consider on the merits of the available evidence at this moment is Bob Owen’s latest Gunwalker piece. He’s been the go-to guy on Fast and Furious, and points us toward evidence that the State Department (!) may have played a role in getting guns into the hands of Zetas. If there’s any truth in that, this story is going to be with us for a long, long, time.
If I were editor at PJM, I would have given Owen’s story the red lettering and left the Norway slaughter one in black, since everyone had that already. Charles Johnson’s already figured it out, anyway.
UPDATE: Chilling purported journal backs 2 accounts idea:
Ofc, it’s a quite tedious task due to the fact that Facebook has a 50 invitations cap per day. Even with my two accounts I’m limited to inviting a maximum of 100 per day, where an average of 40-50% accepts. Of these 40-50% around 90% have email addresses whereas aprox only 50% are checked on a regular basis. So of 1000 Facebook friends I will achieve a penetration rate of around 20-30%. Not optimal but then again, I can’t think of a more efficient way to get in direct touch with nationalists in all European countries.
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