Dr. Michael Welner, Chairman of the Forensic Panel

Yesterday, Dr. Michael Welner, renowned Forensic Psychiatrist and Chairman of The Forensic Panel in Manhattan, gave radio and TV interviews in Canada on the devastating events in Norway perpetrated by mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. We have frequently posted on Welner’s valued comments  concerning Jihadi killers like Maj. Nidal Hasan and Canadian Afghan Omar khadr.  Welner testified for the prosecution in Khadr’s military tribunal that were chronicled in a series of NER articles. Welner understands depraved minds perpetrating evil from his professional  practice and expert testimony in a number of landmark cases. 

Welner has a different take from some pundits in the media who immediately jumped to conclusions about what influenced Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik to undertake this spectacle of mass murder. Pundits have also lashed out at prominent counter-Jihadists accusing them of fomenting this horrific event through alleged inciteful postings on blogs or commentary in articles and books. The combined effect has been to silence some, but certainly not all valued criticism of Islamization in Norway, the EU and here in America. Welner has read through Brevik’s 1500 page Manifesto. While he found the document lucid, he also found it toxic and dangerous in the hands of extremist groups like al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Last night Welner was interviewed on the CBC TV News program Connect with Michael Kelley. He also did a longer radio interview with Arlene Bynon of 640AM Talk Radio in Toronto. Watch the CBC News interview with Michael Kelley, here. Listen to the Bynon audio interview, here.

A hat tip to mrcTv.org.

Welner sent us the following digest of the points raised during the Canadian interviews. Here are his remarks:

Psychotics have an ideology shared by none other than themselves. Fanatics have ideas shared by only a fringe few. Spectacle mass murderers graft ideas shared by many and attach them to a grandiose nihilism that recognizes they will become larger than life if they kill many, or kill shockingly. Their general fascination with destruction wraps itself in a mainstream ideology in order for them to argue the legitimacy of their atrocity with righteous indignation.

The anti-tax movement inspired Joseph Stack to fly his plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX . That in no way delegitimized the anti-tax movement. The Black Panthers murdered symbolic targets to create shock value. But the civil rights cause was legitimate. So it is that Breivik co-opted the movement in Europe to resist Shariah’s growing influence in European society and to engage the inability of Islam to assimilate into Europe.

For public officials to target political ideologies as responsible does a great disservice to the victims and their families. They were killed by a criminal who wants us to think others would do as he would, and there is no evidence to date that he even acted in a conspiracy. In my professional experience, it is healthier for victims and their families to focus on the perpetrator and his co-conspirators because they can more readily separate those depraved actors from the rest of benevolent society. If politicians and the press broad brush segments of society as responsible, then victims and their families look at their neighbors with suspicion and resentment, and the fabric of society unravels. Those who use political finger-pointing in the aftermath of such tragedy score political points and manipulate public opinion, but because they pit people against one another, they devolve their communities into insecurity and the inability to see things differently. It polarizes communities and those who do it should not be in positions of responsibility.

For more on what Welner has to say about the Oslo Mass Murderer, plan on watching tonight’s edition of The Joy Behar Show on CNN-Headline News  at 10:00PM  EDT.