"Defense" of Mass Murder

MURDER IN DEFENSE OF PATRIOTISM
By Dick Bennett
     Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway on July 22, 2011.  Why?   He thought they were Muslims; he thought Muslims were taking over his country.   “I acted in self-defense on behalf of my people, my city, my country.”    “’I am a member of the Norwegian resistance movement….We demand that our ethnic rights not be taken away from us.”  It was a “suicide attack,” he said; he had not expected “to survive that day.”
      He sounds like bin Laden:  he too was defending his faith and people.  And like the followers of bin Laden, who murdered thousands of people, Breivik was willing to give up his life.
      In court Breivik argued that “he had acted in his country’s defense” and compared  himself to U.S. commanders  who authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.”  On this basis he asked the court “’that I be acquitted.’”  “’As long as you call me evil, you should call the U.S. commanders during World War II evil as well when they decided to drop the bomb on Japan.’”  But the U.S. was not evil because “they tried to have noble motives to try to save people’s lives.” just as he did.   He was protesting “the ‘Islamic’ “colonization” of Norway,”    “’I did this out of goodness, not evil.’”  The murders were a “’preventive strike.’”
       Thus “defense” because psychopathic and lethal.   To reverse the chronological order:   The U.S. Department of “Defense”. invades and bombs from Guatemala in 1954 to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, all in violation of the U.N. Charter, killing millions of innocents.   The U.S. equipped Osama bin Laden in his resistance to the Soviet Occupation.  Bin Laden ’s al Qaeda members bombed the Twin Towers, in defense of his faith, of Afghanistan, occupied now my the U.S.,  and other Middle Eastern nations.   And  Breivik bombs and shoots in defense of “my people, my city, my country.”  
     Formerly a high value, the idea of “defense” has been so outrageously sullied and abused by extremist nationalistic and ethnic fanatics and xenophobes, let us banish the word until the idea loses its power to motivate mass murder.
References
--William Blum.   Killing Hope and Rogue State.
--Mark Lewis and Alan Cowell (The New York Times).  “Patriotically Killed 77, Norwegian Testifies.”  ADG (April 18, 2012), 3A.