The new face of terror

The terrible acts of terror that shook Norway this Friday did not only brutally end the lives of more than 80 innocent civilians of which many were teenagers in the span of a couple of hours, they must also fundamentally change the way we think about terror and terrorism and how we fight it.
If you're reading this by now you probably know the basic facts of what happened. If not I believe the Wikipedia post is reasonably updated. - Or will be soon.
But as we discovered on Danish TV (in Danish), on the Wired.com website, in Great Britain and just about everywhere else journalist and most self proclaimed experts kept seeing the atrocities as the work of al-Qaeda or some spiritually related organisation.
As we now know it wasn't and that is an extremely important fact.
Historically Europe have a long tradition of terror: Serbian nationalists, Christians vs. other Christians, left wing revolutionaries in Italy and Germany Basque Nationalist, Greek right and/or left and so on and so on ad nauseam. Relatively speaking very, very few of these attacks have been perpetrated by Islamic extremists.

It's my conviction that this is extremely important.

Terrorists and extremist do exist and they do pose a very real danger to our society, culture and way of life. But just as terror isn't really what we think it is, the true nature of our culture and way of life is not what some political forces have tried to make us believe.

As I understand it terrorism is the concept that violence and the threat of violence can be used as an instrument to achieve goals that - in some sense at least - are political*. The main object is the creation of fear in the population and, I think, the expression of anger.
Obviously it's much more complicated than that and you could probably write books analyzing terror. As I suspect that one or two very intelligent persons may have already done.

This brings us to what I think "We" are. But lets start by examining why this is important: What we have been seeing since 9-11 and the beginning of the socalled "war on terror" is a concept of Us vs. Them. We, basically White Christians from Europe and the US seen a the good guys in a battle against the evil forces of another non-white religion.
This a fundamentally flawed concept. It is absolutely essential that 'we' can identify real values that are worth defending and that others can understand and respect. Objectively there is no doubt in my mind that if the group I'm supposed to be part of is white Christians, it's not superior and shouldn't be glorified and therefore not worth fighting for. It is simply impossible to list all the atrocities and idiocies that have been instigated in the name of the supposed superiority of white Christians.
The values that I do have, that I want to defend and I which I feel are central to any concept of civilization are Freedom, the willingness to listen, the ability to talk, openness towards people that aren't like me and a handfull of other things.
Not just because I think they are nice touchy-feely ideas to stand on but because I think they're absulutely central to the long term survival of our species: If we as a group, as a nation, as a people, as an entire species are to ever get out of this terrible mess we need to work together, we need to be able to listen to each other and most especially and importantly we need to stop trying to kill each other off.

This is not a fight against an evil religious force. This a fight against our own fears and anger and we will win.