On Friday 22 July, a Norwegian fascist with links to the English Defence League carried out two deadly terror attacks, killing more than 100 people.

The capital, Oslo, was in chaos with those caught near the blast describing the scene as “like a nightmare” with debris and dust heavily littering the streets. The explosion was initially hailed as ‘Destiny Time’ by Norwegian newspapers, apparently signalling the inevitable Islamist terrorist response to the Jhyllands-Posten cartoons controversy in 2005, where a Danish paper published cartoons purported to depict the Prophet Muhammad.

This is the same conclusion newspapers and rolling news channels jumped to across Britain, including the BBC. Just twenty miles away from the chaos on Oslo’s normally ordered streets, tragic and even more extraordinary events were unfolding.

At around 5pm, a lone gunman was reported to be opening fire on the attendants of a Labour youth camp on the island of Utoya. The killer, now suspected to be Anders Brehring Breivik, arrived at the camp two hours before, dressed in police uniform. He encouraged the youth to gather around him before he opened fire, killing more than 85 people. He even shot those attempting to swim away from the island. The death toll of the massacre makes this the worst atrocity committed by a single gunman ever recorded.

The background of Breivik has since been unearthed, to be a man of Christian fundamentalist values and an adherence to extreme right wing politics and a former member of the conservative Progress party. After leaving this party, he had since developed an even more extreme hatred of the Left, Muslims, immigrants and multiculturalism in general. He is known to have had online conversations with members of the fascist English Defence League (EDL), the group whose street marches and extreme Islamophobic racism continue to incite violence against Muslims and Asian communities, as well as socialists, antifascists and trade unionists. He admitted he admires the tactics of the EDL, “[which] are now to ‘lure’ an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already.” (Guardian online, July 23).

It seemed clear from the beginning of this tragedy that the Utoya Labour youth camp was a politically-motivated target. For Breivik this would be a prime example of anti-Left terrorism. Yet the immediate response of news agencies, before the discovery and arrest of Breivik, was to place the blame with Islamic militants. This clearly reflects the dominant ideas surrounding terrorism in the West – that terrorism is the resort of Muslisms, not Westerners with our cruise missiles, Apache gunships and global networks of torture camps.

This in turn reflects the way the mass media is owned and run, and in whose interests, as debates are framed to reinforce particular attitudes and prejudices. In the context of Western imperialism’s War on Terror, this means manufacturing a climate of fear and ‘clash of civilisations’. By overplaying the extent of Islamist terror plots, and selective reporting, the media constructs an atmosphere where Europe and the US apparently face the ‘destruction of western civilisation’.

The purpose of this is to divide us through racism and Islamophobia at home, in order to justify wars and imperialist ‘intervention’ abroad, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.

This extraordinary act of terror by a crazed right-wing extremist lays bare what is at the heart of modern day racism, as an ideology that feeds on misery during times of capitalist crisis. This is the use of terror and violence against those that wish to fight for a better world, and those that are scapegoated for the failures of capitalism, at this time Muslims and migrants. This is the same way the EDL seeks to grow in the UK if we do not stop it in its tracks.

If nothing else, this tragedy has exposed the media’s systematic downplaying of the existence of fascist and white supremacist terrorism. This is not an isolated example, with racist and fascist terror plots barely reported in mainstream news, despite being far more common than ‘Islamist’ plots.

This act, although committed by an obviously unstable man, nevertheless highlights the growing adherents of fascist parties across Europe, as well as their apparent interconnectedness, with the discovery of Breivik’s EDL contacts.

As the bosses try to solve the economic crisis by plunging the working class of Europe into poverty and deprivation through austerity measures and cuts, the billionaire bankers and political gangsters know they can only maintain their power through a vicious program of divide-and-rule.

Right-wing violence is a necessary part of this, as fascists seek to turn the blame for the capitalist crisis on immigrants, minorities and trade unions, instead of the bankers who are profiting from the austerity measures which are destroying the jobs and services millions of ordinary people rely on.

This is why we need an organised working class response to the rise of fascist groups that can challenge them on the streets and ultimately deny them a platform.

But ultimately, fascism is only an expression of capitalist society in crisis. We can’t destroy the divisions and prejudices that the fascists prey on without uprooting the economic system which maintains them.

This is why we need a program for the working class to organise against and defeat the austerity budgets now being imposed by the capitalist governments across Europe.

The tragedy in Norway reminds us of the urgent need to build a united, fighting anticuts movement committed to opposing the bosses efforts to divide us by building a general strike to bring down this rotten milllionaires’ coalition and stop the cuts agenda once and for all.