My heart goes out to the people of Norway, to the victims of the Oslo bombing and the Utoya shootings, their families, friends, and all of Norway.

The shooter, who claimed to hate Islam, proved instead that he hates democracy and his own country. It’s still difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy, at the hands of a cowardly man who lived with his mother until he was 30 years old, and, having evaded military service, chose to stalk defenseless teenagers trapped on an island. In addition to being a coward, Anders Behring is a plagiarist who lifted portions of his hate-filled “manifesto” verbatim from the writings of the Unabomber.

Behring’s biological father, Jens Breivik, a diplomat who has ben estranged from his son since Anders Behring was a teenager, has expressed his horror and devastation at the attacks. After splitting from Behring’s mother, Wenche Behring, a nurse, Breivik and his new wife attempted to get custody of Anders to raise him in France, but they lost the custody battle.

Wenche Behring married a Norwegian Army captain. Throughout his childhood, Behring visited his father and stepmother in Paris, according to The Daily Mail.

In his memoir Breivik blames his father for their estrangement after he was caught spraying graffiti on walls in his early teens. He writes: ‘I have not spoken to my father since he isolated himself when I was 15 – he was not very happy about my graffiti phase from 13 to 16.

One wonders how things might have been different, if the child who would later destroy so many lives had been raised in a different environment, with nothing to prove to an absent father. Would he have become a less hateful individual? ‘

While Behring was apparently motivated by right-wing radicalism, his parents were supporters of the Norwegian Labour Party, which ran the camp where the massacre took place, and his mother is a feminist.

Despite his close relationship with his mother, he would later rage against his liberal upbringing. He writes: ‘I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminise me to a certain degree.’

He also writes about his stepmother, Tove, who he claims to care for but whom he also thinks deserves to die for her government work with immigrant applications:

He described her as ‘very intelligent’, but added that she was obviously a ‘traitor’ and a willing participant in the ‘indirect genocide of Norwegians through the continued Islamisation of Norway’.

He wrote: ‘Although I care for her a great deal, I wouldn’t hold it against the KT (Knights Templar) if she was executed during an attack.’