70 kids targeted by Islamophobic terrorist in Norway were Muslims

Some 70 of those kids targeted by Islamophobic terrorist at the Labour Party summer camp on the coast of lake Tyrifjorden at Utoya island on July 22 were Muslims, according to Norway's media. The Norwegian media said that out of the 600 people on the island when Breivik began shooting, an estimated 70 were Muslim. Authorities have yet to say how many of them were killed or whether they were specifically targeted. Labor Party leaders in Norway said that it was the rise of the Progress Party and other groups throughout Scandinavia that led them to recruit young people from immigrant families. That turned their summer gathering into a target for Anders Behring Breivik. The Muslim families, though they lost their loved ones, were relieved when they heard that the shooter was an ethnic Norwegian and they would not be the target of propaganda campaign. That the confessed killer, feared what he called 'Islamic colonization' reflects a xenophobic subculture in some corners of the Continent, where immigrant communities are rapidly redefining traditional definitions of ethnicity and nationality. Tensions over arrivals of Muslims have fueled the rise of Norway's conservative populist Progress Party, to which Breivik once belonged. Progress won a fifth of the vote in the last election and is now Norway's second-biggest political group in Parliament. The party has warned against the Islamicization of Norway, and suggested that tighter immigration controls are a solution. The party has denounced the attacks. The radical anti-Muslim views espoused by the perpetrator of the Norwegian massacre, which left 76 people dead, have focused attention on the Nordic country's small yet burgeoning Islamic community. Islamic congregations in Norway had about 99,000 registered members in 2010, up 29% since 2005, but still a tiny fraction of a total population of 4.92 million, according to Statistics Norway. Compared with countries such as Germany and France, Norway has relatively few Muslims. But the recent influx of Muslims in a once homogeneously white Christian country has fueled debates here about the headscarf, Sharia law and unemployment.