Before one horrific terrorist crime has had time to become legally resolved, another mass-murder, with both political and racist undertones, is shaking Europe. And the common methods are becoming ever clearer amongst all the madness. Regardless of ideology, these offenders systematically use social media to spread their message of a coming Armageddon, while attempting to fix their crimes in a historical context that, with its knights and holy war, is more evocative of the fantasy genre than something that really happened in the past.

The latest addition to the infamous group of political mass murderers is Mohamed Merah, who, at the end of March, shot dead seven people in France; of these, four people of Jewish ancestry were killed for that very reason. Like many other contemporary terrorists, Merah’s claims seem to have been far from modest. He seemed convinced that he would, in the future, become a hero and role model for generations of Islamist fighters in the battle between Islam and the West. It is the certainty that this struggle will intensify that motivates ruthless men in both camps to document their deeds in the future.

Merah’s last Twitter message was signed, according to the established pattern, as “Mohamed Merah – Forsane Alizza”; the last part translates as “Knight of Honour”, and refers to a French Islamist organisation that, among other things, produces YouTube videos, with dull apocalyptic music, added flames in slow motion, kitsch sunsets with men in armour riding towards dawn with their bloody banners at the ready. There are also interviews in which men are exhorted to fight by forming their own groups that are threatened in thoroughly ‘Islamophobic’ societies.

The notion of being a victim of racism is one of the main pillars supporting the Islamic terrorists’ worldview – not least because Islamophobia serves as a breeding ground for the vengefulness that spurs the lone assassin to take action. The second pillar is the dream of the looming millennium, which is to arise when the Islamists’ interpretation of the Koran has been implemented in society at large. The third is the hatred of the corrupt West: its capitalism and liberalism regarded as having created alienated people. The fourth pillar is anti-Semitism: hatred of Israel and the Jews – the group that, through its alleged talent for conspiracy, is said to be responsible for the world looking the way it does.

Looking at Islam from this perspective, we see parallels with other kinds of political offenders. The aesthetics that support the French Islamists’ videos are as confusing as Anders Behring Breivik’s film with knights who try to hold out against the evil forces. For right-wing extremists, it’s either Jews or Muslims that threaten to take over the world. In addition, they cherish the image of their own group as truth-tellers, who are thwarted and silenced by a politically correct establishment. Like the Islamists, they believe that liberalism and capitalism have impoverished and weakened the Western world, which can only be revitalised by a return to a number of traditional values, which, in the case of the right-wing extremists, are usually linked to their own homeland and culture.

Similarly, even leftist political violence rests on the same four pillars. Firstly, the experience of being marginalised in the media, which is attributed to capitalism’s ideological superstructure. Second, the experience of capitalism and liberalism creating alienated human beings and therefore – for the good of mankind – they must be got rid of by force; thirdly, the vision of the communist millennium, where absolute equality (including gender equality) prevails; and fourthly, the hatred of the bourgeoisie and the capitalists.

Basically, these violent political activists all look alike. Partly, it is also this similarity that makes representatives of these respective forms of extremism want to portray other extremists as linked to larger social phenomena, rather than to each other. It is in the right-wing extremists’ interest, therefore, to see the Islamism as a natural offshoot of Islam, and it is in the left-wing activists’ interest to cast right-wing extremism as a natural corollary of the Liberal Party’s or the Christian Democrats’ party platforms.

In a world of growing terrorism, it is important to keep calm and refrain from making unwarranted associations: social democrats have little in common with left-wing extremists even though both groups takes a class perspective on society. Appreciation of the Koran leads no more to Islamist terrorism than a conservative Bible study results in right-wing extremist violence. Overall, it is necessary to avoid taking political advantage of terrorism, like when nationalists see it as confirmation of their worldview when an Islamist commits an act of violence, or when parts of the left use right-wing extremist acts of violence to argue that opinions other than their own are too dangerous to express publicly.

The theme in this issue of Axess is devoted to journalism and journalistic ethics and can, in an indirect way, be said to highlight the development of a media climate where analytical skills, fact-based arguments and logical consequences tend to draw the short straw in favour of the kind of subjective thinking, demagogic posturing and appealing to the public’s gut instinct, that has always been the lifeblood of political extremism.