As Norwegians prepare over the coming days to bury scores of the dead from terror attacks on a youth camp and the government's headquarters, an aggrieved nation vowed it wouldn't let its proudly open society also fall victim to the massacre.
The first funerals of the 77 killed in the attacks 10 days ago took place Friday—those of two Muslim teenagers from immigrant families who, in many ways, embodied the evolving face of Norway that an anti-immigrant extremist said he sought to assault with the attacks.
As a Muslim imam and a Lutheran minister led the casket of one of them, Bano Rashid, an 18-year-old Iraqi Kurd who had come to Norway with her family in 1996, mourners spoke of a passionate young woman who aspired to become a Norwegian parliamentarian one day. Earlier on the rainy day of the attacks, friends said, Ms. Rashid had lent her rubber boots to former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who had spoken just hours before at the Labor Party youth camp she and others were attending.
In his eulogy for Ms. Rashid, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere also lamented an irony that many in Norway have struggled to come to terms with since the tragedy:
"As refugees...you arrived in Norway, looking for protection and safety. And yet you have been hit by what is most absurd and most brutal right here in our home, in safe Norway," he said. "It is not understandable."
In the days since Norway's worst peacetime atrocity, political leaders, police and ordinary Norwegians have been re-examining the openness that for so long has marked this nation's society and its security policies.
During the first reports that someone had detonated a car bomb and then opened fire at a youth camp in Norway, many assumptions clicked into place.
"In all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra," Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote within hours on the Weekly Standard website.
The massacre was actually committed, police say, by a blond Norwegian. As Breivik's 1,500-page manifesto emerged, calling for violence to rid Europe of non-Christians and those he deemed traitors to Christian Europe, some seized on the religious aspect of his delusions.
Mark Juergensmeyer, editor of the book "Global Religions: An Introduction" and a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara, wrote an essay likening Breivik to Timothy McVeigh, the American who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil until 9/11.
McVeigh and Breivik were both "good-looking young Caucasians, self-enlisted soldiers in an imagined cosmic war to save Christendom, and both were Christian terrorists," Juergensmeyer wrote.
In a column for Salon.com, Alex Pareene said Breivik is not an American-style evangelical, but he listed other connections to Christianity. "All of this says 'Christian terrorist,' " Pareene wrote.
Such claims drew strong resistance. "Breivik is not a Christian. That's impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder," Bill O'Reilly said on his Fox News show.
That makes sense to Joyce Dubensky, CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. She said it also makes sense that "millions of Muslims say Osama bin Laden is not a Muslim, that no one who believes in the prophet Muhammad commits mass murder."
"We need to hear Bill O'Reilly, but we also need to hear and understand the voices of the overwhelming Muslim majority around the world who condemn those who are terrorists in the name of their faith," she said.
Arsalan Iftikhar, an international human rights lawyer and author of the upcoming book "Islamic Pacifism: Global Muslims in the Post-Osama Era," said the Norway attacks "proved that terrorism can be committed by a person of any race, nationality or religion.
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