40,000 Norwegians sing song mass killer hates

Reuters:

Oslo - Up to 40,000 Norwegians gathered in Oslo on Thursday to sing a popular peace song derided by Anders Behring Breivik, the gunman on trial for the murder of 77 people, a protest organizers said showed he had not broken their tolerant society.

 "It's we who win," said guitar-strumming folk singer Lillebjoern Nilsen as he led the singing and watched the crowd sway gently in the rain. Many held roses above their heads, and some wept.

 The musical protest came on the same day that survivors of Breivik's two attacks last July began to give harrowing testimony at his trial, including a young woman nicknamed 'miracle girl' who described how she had survived his bombing of government offices in central Oslo against all the odds.

 The crowd chose a song - "Children of the Rainbow" - that extols the type of multicultural society Breivik has said he despised and one that he specifically dismissed during the trial as Marxist propaganda.

 He has often used chillingly graphic language to describe his killing spree, but it seems to have taken his comments over the song to touch a nerve in a country that prides itself on a tradition of tolerance and justice.

 The protest follows several days of defiant testimony from Breivik who has admitted he killed his victims in a blood-soaked attack on Norway's multicultural society, but denied criminal guilt, saying he did so in defence of Norwegian ethnic purity.

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