Breivik Admits Murdering 77, Claims Self Defense As Lay Judge Is Replaced

The trial of Anders Breivik continues, and while a lay judge was replaced with an alternate, the focus should be on Breivik's strategy of claiming that he murdered 77 people in self-defense.

He claimed to be speaking as a commander of a Norwegian and European "anti-communist" resistance movement and an anti-Islam militant group he called the Knights Templar. Prosecutors have said the group does not exist.

Maintaining he acted out of "goodness not evil" to prevent a wider civil war, Breivik insisted, "I would have done it again."

The statement came after a citizen judge was dismissed Tuesday for his comments online the day following the July 22 attack that Breivik deserves the death penalty. Lawyers on all sides had requested that lay judge Thomas Indreboe be taken off the trial.

Breivik is being tried by a panel of two professional judges and three lay judges, local politicians who are appointed for four-year terms and participate on an equal basis as the judges in deciding guilt and sentencing. The system is designed to let ordinary people have a role in the Norwegian justice system, though the lead judge still runs the trial. Indreboe was replaced by backup lay judge Elisabeth Wisloeff.

This is a strategy that is destined to fail, particularly since none of children Breivik murdered actually engaged in acts that could ever be construed to be acts from which one would ever need to use violence to prevent harm to oneself.

The 69 people Breivik murdered at the youth camp at Utoya Island were not taking up arms or preparing for a war - that was Breivik. Breivik was acting in furtherance of his beliefs that he was the vanguard for a war against non-Norwegians; he was an Islamophobe and xenophobe. He hated those who weren't like himself, and vowed to take up arms in furtherance of his cause.

Now, he wraps himself in the belief that his actions were self-defense, which he's using in the most perverted of manners.

UPDATE:
Ausador at LGF provides a glimpse into the worldview and thinking of Breivik and why he could possibly think that he was engaging in acts of self-defense when carrying out mass murder. The presumption is that if you believe in the supremacy of "white" "culture", and see it beset upon all sides and nonwhites horning in on the culture and society of whites, then acts to protect the white culture is justified.

That's the general line of thinking, and it's an ideology shared by white nationalists in the US and across Europe, and it is a hate-filled ideology that justifies the use of violence to cleanse the world of non-white influences, ideology, and enforce the supremacy of whites.

Breivik's acts are a logical extension of this hate-fueled ideology.