Michael Sells will hold the opening lecture at this year’s International Saladin Days, having, for a number of years, worked with issues related to religion, violence and ideology, such as for the book The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (1996). In the anthology The New Crusades. Constructing the Muslim Enemy (2003), Sells and his co-authors investigates George W. Bush’s rhetoric after 9/11, Samuel Huntington’s influential theory about the «clash of civilizations», as well as the underlying foundation on which these are based. In this lecture, first held during these Saladin Days, Sells draws lines from the terrorist attacks hitting the US 9/11, 2001, to Oslo and Utøya 7/22, 2011.