IN referring to the carnage in Norway as the worst crime seen in the country since the Second World War, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has highlighted the sheer scale of the tragedy. On Friday a bomb ripped through government buildings in Oslo, killing at least seven people. Shortly afterwards a gunman on the island of Utoeya opened fire on young people attending a summer camp organised by the Labour Party, which has ruled Norway since the Second World War, killing more than 80. It is feared that the death toll from both the attacks will rise further in the coming days. The scale of the massacre, and the calm detachment with which survivors say the Utoeya shooter operated, is terrifying. The world has seen deadly shootings before but hardly ever one on such a scale.

In police custody is a 32-year-old white Norwegian man. The deputy police chief has said that the police have little information except that found on the suspect’s own websites, “which is that it goes towards the right and that it is, so to speak, Christian fundamentalist”. Reportedly the man also described himself as a Christian and conservative on the Facebook page attributed to him. Some analysts are likening the Norway attacks to the carnage perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people — the work of a lone, disenchanted and home-grown extremist. It is too early to tell whether the Norwegian suspect has links to any group, but one thing is clear: the polarities in the modern world are such that there are extremists of varying ideologies and political leanings. In the West in the wake of 9/11 there has been a linking of terrorism to mainly Al Qaeda and other purportedly ‘Islamic’ organisations. Yet the opposite extreme exists too, and always has. Indeed, it feeds off the growing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant culture in some countries. In the past some parts of Scandinavia have had trouble with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. If a link is established between such groups and the gruesome tragedy in Norway, Europe must seriously reflect on the causes of such right-wing extremism.