[The Pomegranate 13.1 (2011) 17-32] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print) doi: 10.1558/pome.v13i1.17 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online) © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR. The Birth of Counterjihadist Terrorism: Relections on some Unspoken Dimensions of 22 July 2011 Egil Asprem E.Asprem@uva.nl Herostratic fame spreads easily. This past summer Anders Behring Breivik overnight became the most famous Norwegian name since Vidkun Quisling made his a global synonym for treachery. The parallel is ironic, for in Breivik’s own mind it was a civil war against the “quis- lings” of contemporary Norway which made it absolutely “necessary” to blow up the government ofices in the center of Oslo, and cold-blood- edly murder sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers, one by one, on the tiny island of Utøya. In the days after the attack, several scholars of religion both in Norway and abroad took time from their summer holidays to relect on what had happened. In the immediate chaos on the 22 nd , “everybody knew” that al Qaida had inally struck the Norwegian capital. TV-studios were illed with experts who could tell us of the motivations for the Islamist terrorist organization to attack the city that is otherwise only known for the Oslo agreement and the Nobel peace prize. Norwegian troops in Afghanistan were, bombs fell over Libya—yet the terrorist who was apprehended, red-handed and without remorse, was a 32-year-old blond and tall Nor- wegian male, from Oslo’s afluent, bourgeois west side. His Facebook proile stated his political views as “conservative” and his religion as “Christian”—terms that the media soon conlated into “conservative Christian.” When pictures of the mass-murderer posing in Freemasonic regalia started circulating, it was as if a collective confusion gripped not only the Norwegian public but the international one too. Major Ameri- can television networks, including CNN, preferred to continue talking about Islam long after this information was in. “Does not compute.” 2083: Eurabia and the Counterjihadist Insurgency Attention was soon turned to the 1,500-page “manifesto” (the title belongs to the media; Breivik never used it, preferring to talk about his