Gerard Henderson, and the right of the commentariat to go on blathering ...

(Above: and for more on Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici), commonly known as the Knights Templar, the wiki's here).

This guy (Anders Breivik) isn’t a serious Christian. He’s a devoted New York Times reader, and he’s an extremely well-read guy. (Mark Steyn, here).

There you go, Christians, you dumb, extremely poorly read bunnies, out the back with you, and take your copy of See Spot Run! while you're at it.

Seriously. You have to be almost illiterate to be a serious Christian.

Well there's the bizarro comment for the day out of the way from Tim Blair's and Andrew Bolt's favourite freedom commentator - guess they must aspire to be illiterate too - and so we turn to our old favourite, Gerard Henderson, scribbling furiously in Right-wing extremism forces rethink on civil liberties.

Henderson fancies himself as a moderate thinker, so surely there'll be no dissembling, disingenuous nonsense about Breivik:

Last week, the New York Times ran a headline depicting Breivik as a ''Christian extremist'' while other media outlets have labelled him a ''white extremist''. Breivik is certainly white - so much so that he is said to have undergone plastic surgery to look like an Aryan Nazi. But he does not belong to any Christian church and he has condemned both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.

Uh ooh. Uh huh.

Clearly he isn't a serious Christian, and possibly reads the New York Times.

It's as if Christianity's long tradition of conducting pogroms and inquisitions against Jews, women, witches, secularists, atheists, Islamics, heretics, anarchists, socialists, communists (and who else have you got) can be swept under the carpet, and anyone calling themselves a Christian has to pass some kind of Steyn-Henderson theological test before they can call themselves Xian.

But Breivik's 'condemnation' of Catholic and Protestant faiths was unexceptional, even banal, and linked to the notion that Christians weren't doing enough to protect their heritage and fight off the Islamic hordes:

My parents, being rather secular wanted to give me the choice in regards to religion. At the age of 15 I chose to be baptised and confirmed in the Norwegian State Church. I consider myself to be 100% Christian. However, I strongly object to the current suicidal path of the Catholic Church but especially the Protestant Church. I support a Church that believes in self defence and who are willing to fight for its principles and values, at least resist the efforts put forth to exterminate it gradually. The Catholic and Protestant Church are both cheering their own annihilation considering the fact that they embrace the ongoing inter-faith dialogue and the appeasement of Islam. The current Church elite has shown its suicidal face, as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of Shariah in parts of Britain.

In a nutshell?

Religion: Christian, Protestant but I support a reformation of Protestantism leading to it being absorbed by Catholisism. The typical “Protestant Labour Church” has to be deconstructed as its creation was an attempt to abolish the Church
Religious: I went from moderately to agnostic to moderately religious

And he takes the each way bet, what we might call the Oscar Wilde death bed strategy, in relation to eternity:

If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past.

A Christian martyr, in the grand tradition of Christian martyrs. As for his vision of Europe?

I fully support that the Church gains more or less monopoly on religion in Europe (government policies, school curriculum etc at least) in addition to granting the Church several concessions which have been taken from them the last decades. (and if you want to waste your time on brain-addled nonsense, you can catch a link to Breivik's full manifesto as uploaded to Scribd here).

Being a half-baked science and 'logic' orientated Eropean from a secular background, and clearly delusional, Breivik gives anxious Christians plenty of outs, so that Henderson can reduce him to the status of the "lone psychopathic killer".

Yet earlier in his piece, Henderson acknowledges that Breivik had connections to other European extremists:

Breivik appears to have been a narcissistic loner but he had some links with the Knights Templar movement and the lunar right English Defence League. McVeigh had a relationship with the American militia movement, which is hostile to government.

And that's the problem for the commentariat, because Breivik, in an ill-digested way, has scribbled out fifteen hundred pages that faithfully replicate many of the talking points of the right wing commentariat, aping their points, supporting their world view, but instead of yammering on about it, taking direct, if completely futile, action to bring it in to being.

What to do? Well in this context, the best form of defence is attack, and to rattle other boogeyman:

...the activities of the terrorist right should not be used as a cloak to diminish the real threat posed by Islamist terrorism - of the kind experienced in the United States in 2001, Bali in 2002, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005 and Mumbai in 2008. Moreover, it would be unwise to assume that extreme left terrorism, of the kind that took place in North America and Western Europe in the late 1960s and the 1970s, will not be revived.

Indeed. It seems these days we must even be careful of poor sods inspired by anarchism, perhaps still living in the Spanish civil war days of the nineteen thirties:

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door? Dust off your old Sex Pistols albums and hang out a black and red flag to make them feel at home? Invite them round to debate the merits of Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism versus the individualist anarchism of Emile Armand? No – the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately. (Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminister anti-terror police).

But back to Henderson, and his sensitivities.

You see, Breivik had the cheek to quote some antipodean luminaries in his manifesto, including such notorious ratbags as George Pell, fornicating former Liberal MP Ross Cameron, and historian Keith 'kill the black armband' Windschuttle, not to forget Peter Costello and John Howard.

Naturally there must be a cleaning of the Augean stables to make sure the named rise about the mess.

Cardinal Pell is cited as expressing concern about invocations to violence in the Koran and about the deeply anti-Christian views held by some secularists. Cameron's citation turns on his view that young men should commit to women and agree to have children. And Windschuttle is mentioned as someone who is disturbed about an anti-Western culture in many of our universities. That is all.

All of these comments are considered. None has provoked acts of violence in Australia.

Considered comments? Or the ritual incantations of those with a right-wing mind set?

Well it's about time to play the victim card, and to remind everyone that poor Pell and the others mentioned are just being victimised:

One problem with the reaction by sections of the left to the Norway murders is that it is intolerant in itself. If the likes of Costello, Howard, Pell, Cameron and Windschuttle cannot say what they said, there would be no free debate at all.

You might happen to think that Pell blathering on about secularists and the Koran is intolerance personified, and as for the hypocrisy of Cameron saying young men should commit to women ... (I've cheated: 'Family man' MP's bombshell).

Yep, these days if you point out that the emperor's clothes might be a little ragged, or perhaps even invisible in places, that's intolerant, as if the original intolerance isn't in any way provoking or provocative.

Two thousand years of Christians condemning secularists and atheists to an eternity of agonising hell, and suddenly Pell comes over all sooky about a few remarks directed against the church ...

Poor Henderson feels under siege:

An unpleasant tension currently exists in Australia - probably unmatched since the Great Depression in 1931 and the constitutional crisis in 1975.

In both those instances, the tension was resolved by political events that led to a general election. No such outcome is likely in the immediate future.

Uh huh. So meanwhile we have to endure talk of drowning Julia Gillard like kittens in a chaff bag (yes, I've seen kittens drowned in a chaff bag in the Peel river, it wasn't a pleasant sight), and ditch the witch, and so on and so forth, and a relentless cranking up of the rhetoric to fever pitch by Tony Abbott and the commentariat and minions of Murdoch, determined to establish that Australia is on the verge of utter ruination, when what they really mean is that the believe the government is illegitimate, and their 'born to rule' right to power has been snatched away from them, even though the vote is in, and there's no need to call an election to satisfy Tony Abbott's lust for power, and the precioussss ring.

Hence the death threats on independents, and even a voice in a jolly Joe Hockey meeting mounting a call to arms.

Naturally Henderson ends with the notion that he's the epitome of moderation:

There is an obligation on all involved in the public debate to moderate their language, to desist from exaggeration and to disavow symbolic or real physical violence. However, mass murder in Norway should not be allowed to inhibit free speech. That would be counter-productive.

Uh huh. But in this very column, Henderson hasn't desisted from exaggeration, by pretending that somehow Breivik doesn't have anything to do with an extremist pro-Christian world view.

Perhaps Henderson could explain where he intends to draw the line, and in the process have a quiet word with Tony Abbott and Alan Jones, rather than just blathering on about the intolerant left.

Who'd have thought we'd be quoting David Williamson?

... when Alan Jones suggests he is about to ''put her in a chaff bag and hoist her into the Tasman Sea'', it's something else again. To suggest our Prime Minister should be drowned like a helpless kitten was nasty and tasteless. (Time for Gillard to set the Bulldog on the bully boy).

No, Mr. Williamson, it's just free speech, please no inhibitions, and no inhibiting!

And now it seems the pond might Barry O'Farrell and his state Liberals an apology. The Carcetti moment we wrote about recently might be deferred, and according to the cardigan wearers in the ABC newsroom this morning, ethics classes in New South Wales might well resist the ravages of Fred Nile, and continue.

Well that'd be a nice outcome, proving that it's possible to stand up against the guile and blackmailing skills of extremist Christians ....

(Below: how about drown them like kittens in a chaff bag?)