Tabloid Watch has a post on the British newspaper The Sun‘s initial response to the right-wing terror attack in Norway that left about 90 people dead. Tabloid Watch shows that the initial version of an editorial was deleted from the website of the Murdoch paper, and the ‘new’ version contains no mention of the fact it has been amended.
Today the paper’s line is that ‘madman’ Anders Breivik was a Nazi. With no discernible tone of irony, a paper that is proudly right-wing and Islamophobic, alludes to the alleged Norwegian terrorist’s ‘war’ on The Sun‘s very own targets, before quickly moving on to a fascist ideology that supposedly all of ‘Western civilisation’ can – belatedly – agree on hating. Why not just call him Hitler and be done with it:
“In 1,500 hate-filled pages, the warped Norwegian declared war on Muslims and left-wingers – and threatened to help bring down Western civilisation by the year 2083. Breivik – who honed his terror skills at camps run by neo-Nazis called The Vikings – told how he built an arsenal of guns and kept a huge explosives cache at an isolated farm.”
The sections in bold are the words removed from the current online version of Saturday’s article:
Stand strong with Norway
Carnage in a city centre. A massacre at an island youth rally.
Terrorism, the scourge of the West, brought slaughter yesterday to the friendly and civilised streets of one of Europe’s most peaceful nations.
The Sun and its readers grieve today with the people of Norway, stunned by the assault on their capital Oslo and the island of Utoya.
How well we remember, from London’s 7/7, the shock and misery when an ordinary summer’s day turns into a nightmare of smoke, flames and bodies in the street.
Just as on 9/11 in New York and in Madrid in 2004, horror came when everyone least expected it.
Why Norway? The answer is simple.
Because it is brave. It is a loyal member of NATO and plays its part in Afghanistan and Libya.
It has courageously stood up to Muslim fanatics trying to stir up hatred in Norway, where Islam is the second largest religion.
Recently it refused a grant to an Islamic leader demanding that those who did not observe Ramadan should be decapitated.
By daring to oppose terrorism, Norway has become a victim of it.
Attack
The gentle nation best known for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize suffered its most violent attack since World War Two.
We do not know if yesterday was the work of al-Qaeda, which has threatened Norway before, or Libyan madman Gaddafi, who has vowed revenge on NATO. Last night one extremist Islamic group had already claimed responsibility.
The lesson for us are clear.
Osama Bin Laden may be dead. But the tentacles of al-Qaeda, and groups linked to it, spread deep into the heart of Western nations.
That is why our security cannot be relaxed, especially with the London Olympics only a year away.
The Government must keep its promise to change the law so our judges can no longer free terror suspects on human rights grounds.
Muslim hate preachers must be arrested, as the law allows. We need the decent Muslim majority to help stop their impressionable young men being recruited as bombers.
We must find every penny our security services need.
We must ask ourselves whether – like Norway – we offer too cushy a life to bogus asylum seekers.
And we must recognise that quitting Afghanistan with the job only half-finished will put Britain in peril…
