For a Norway Filipino, echoes of Oklahoma

SAN FRANCISCO—It was immediately clear to Teresa Latorre and her husband Øystein that the bombing in Oslo was a terrorist attack.

But the immediate question was: Who was behind it? Some quarters quickly pointed the finger at the group now increasingly under fire in Europe and beyond: Muslims.

“Always the scapegoat,” Teresa said of Muslims in Norway, noting reports that some of them were harassed after the incident in Oslo.

Then the bombing was followed by a massacre at a youth camp. The real culprit emerged: Anders Breivik, a white native Norwegian, described by the London Guardian as “a Christian fundamentalist with a deep hatred of multiculturalism, of the left, and of Muslims.”

Teresa and her husband called him the “Norwegian McVeigh.”

She was referring to Timothy McVeigh, the right-winger who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. The attack killed more than 160 people. Nineteen of the victims were children under six.

It’s a fitting comparison. Just like the attacks in Norway, the Oklahoma bombing was followed by baseless speculation that Muslims were somehow involved.

And like in Oklahoma, the attacks in Norway highlighted the growing threat of intolerance—even in what is still generally viewed as one of the most tolerant nations in the world.

Teresa, who moved to Norway as a student in the 1980s, knows this first-hand.

Her views and her experiences are not those of the typical Filipino expat.  But they are important for other Filipinos to know at a time when Filipinos are moving and starting new lives in countries like Norway where the politics of multiculturalism has come into sharp focus.

In Norway, Teresa found a country that has struggled and succeeded in building a dynamic form of democracy—even more dynamic than US democracy.

She and her husband identify with one of the left-wing parties in Norway. But that has never been a problem, she says, in a country where parties with sharp political differences manage to work with one another.

Her community, she says, is “governed by the old ‘blue’ party leaders with the old Norwegian values still intact—respect and tolerance, equality, solidarity. So the social democrats, the extreme right-wing conservatives and leftists in my commune work side by side pretty well.”

“Solidarity is one of the core values in the Norwegian society,” Teresa says.

But those values have been under pressure from those who have reacted negatively to the rise of immigrant communities and to more ethnic diversity in Norway.

In parts of Europe, multiculturalism has become a bad word. The same thing has happened in parts of the United States where the rise of a multiethnic, highly diverse society has provoked fear and distrust.

And these, in turn, have given rise to dangerous, narrow-mindedness that, when embraced by those prone to violence or are mentally disturbed, can lead to tragedy. The recent shooting of an Arizona legislator is one example. The horrific bloodshed in Norway is another.

A New York Times report on the impact of the Norway killings on the debate over Islam in Europe quotes the head of the German Social Democratic Party Sigmar Gabriel who argued that in a country where anti-Islamic ideas are tolerated “naturally on the margins of society there will be crazy people who feel legitimized in taking harder measures.”

Sadly, Teresa says, these anti-Islamic and intolerant views have been embraced by some within her own immigrant community—they who consider themselves immune from the hatred that in the past has consumed the whole of Europe.

“Prejudice against Muslim and Islam exists not only among Norwegians, but also among immigrants, even among Filipinos in Norway,” she says.  “One who has no idea of Nazism and nationalism’s ideals would probably be in denial and say that Filipinos are better than the rest, and that we are not the main target of racists like Anders Behring Breivik.”

On Twitter @KuwentoPimentel.