When it became clear, late in the evening of July 22, 2011, that the person responsible for the most appalling act of terrorism in modern Norwegian history was Anders Behring Breivik, a white Norwegian citizen, it turned out that those who during the day had rushed to announce the outbreak of a "clash of civilizations' had been premature. What had taken place in Oslo and on Utøya island was not an Islamist terror attack on an open and democratic society, but a crime committed by a lone maniac, a man with a deeply distorted perspective on the world.