Distrust Between West And Islam.
”There’s an osmosis in war,” declares the once idealistic army lieutenant Hearn in Norman Mailer’s classic novel The Naked and the Dead. ”Call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the . . . the, eh, trappings of the loser.”
Of course, the ”war on terror” wasn’t really a war, and it is far from clear who emerged from it as victor and loser. Nonetheless, after the tragedy in Oslo, the osmosis is obvious. These sorts of attacks were meant to be the preserve of the Islamists who have dominated a decade of headlines. But now a white, far-right, anti-Muslim Norwegian has assumed such trappings. These terrorist attacks have merely spoken a long-standing truth: that in the wars of identity that currently trouble our world, the people who hate each other most deeply are in fact most alike.