Domestic Extremism in Europe - Athena Institute

Extremist websites and groups that incite hatred and vio-
lence could not be fast enough to distance themselves
from these perpetrators by arguing that they were only
(crazy) lone wolves who had nothing to do with them,
and it is not their responsibility if someone is so dis-
tressed and desperate due to the “situation of Europe”
(i.e. the situation of Europe as depicted by extremist sites
and groups) that they have been reduced to extremes.
However, as much as the aforementioned groups would
like people to believe that they are not in the least at
fault, evidence shows otherwise. Causality is always a
tricky thing in social sciences, something that is very
hard to prove, but to ignore the myriad of facts that show
how violent extremist perpetrators were connected to dif-
ferent extremist sites/blogs/forums/groups would be
ignorant.
Several examples could be mentioned to substantiate the
above. First, the case of Anders Behring Breivik, the
Norwegian who killed 77 people; many teenagers
amongst them. It is not just Breivik that became famous
but his monumental manifesto: ‘2083 - a European Decla-
ration of Independence’. This manifesto only contained
miniscule contributions from Breivik himself and it was
mostly copied from different books and well-known anti-
Domestic Extremism in Europe - Threat Landscape 66