25 JULY 2011


Islamophobia manifested in Oslo

Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for New Matilda on the rise of the Islamophobic right in Europe and the United States, in which I noted the mainstreaming of a violent, apocalyptic anti-Muslim discourse.

The people writing the stuff – the bloggers, the pundits, the intellectuals – were not, I suggested, themselves necessarily given to violence. But, as I said, "you can't warn against looming race wars over the future of civilisation, and not expect the boots-and-braces crowd to launch a preemptive strike".

It's increasingly clear that's what's happened in Oslo.

In his lengthy manifesto, Anders Behring Breivik, spells out the justification for his attack on the Labour Party youth camp. In essence, he feared that Europe was becoming Islamified and he blamed the proponents of multiculturalism for allowing it to happen.

In other words, he saw, explicitly, his crimes as political – as the opening shots in a broader war against Muslims and their allies.

When the news of the massacre first broke, media outlets around the world reported that a terrorist atrocity was taking place. But that was because they assimilated the news to the familiar narrative of Al Qaeda, almost entirely on the basis of unsourced claims from a so-called 'terrorism expert' that a jihadi group had taken responsibility.

Even today, many commentators are refusing to entirely abandon the Islamic angle story, suggesting, for instance, that Breivik represented "a mutation of Al Qaeda/Jihadist tactics".

Other commentators, now that they know he's not a Muslim, have dismissed Breivik as a lunatic rather than a terrorist.

Now, in some senses, anyone who would carry out such vile acts is, almost by definition, not right in the head.

But have a look at Breivik's manifesto. It's hateful, yes, but it's perfectly coherent. The guy's not a professional writer and the translation is pretty rough but the text is certainly not the ravings of a schizophrenic.

Indeed, what's most striking is how familiar much of it is. Huge swathes of the document are indistinguishable from what you'd find on any of the big 'counter jihadi' blogs of the Islamophobic right.

Sergey Romanov, a blogger at Little Green Footballs (a site that has broken with the Islamophobic right precisely because of its increasingly violent rhetoric), has posted (scroll down) a word cloud based on Breivik's writings. The most-used terms are 'cultural', 'conservative' and 'multiculturalism'.

Romanov describes how Breivik harbours "resentment against the mainstream media for pushing a culturally Marxist agenda and covering up Muslim wrong-doing and the negative effects of mass immigration and multiculturalism in Europe generally … he felt that the politically correct agenda was completely unchallenged by the mainstream press".

These are standard talking points for anti-Islam conservatives. Romanov points to the following assessment from a blogger writing for the symptomatically-named Islam Versus Europe site:

There is very little that [Breivik]said that I would disagree with. It is clear that he is a Counterjihadist and visits the same sites that most of us do, Gates of Vienna, Jihadwatch, Atlas Shrugs, etc. He is intelligent, thoughtful and well-read.  […]

Breivik also follows political developments in Britain and reads the Telegraph and Daily Mail. The revelation of the Labour government's conspiracy to flood the country with immigrants to "rub the right's nose in diversity" was of great interest to him. I'm sure the bien-pensants in the British left will now want to reflect soberly on the folly of pushing people too far.

Crucially, Breivik is not a traditional goose-stepping fascist. In fact, he explicitly condemns the crude biological racism of the old right, favouring instead groups like the English Defence League - organisations that claimed not to be racist, so much as concerned about defending European culture. As Matthew Goodwin notes in the Guardian, Breivik endorses the EDL's:

... rejection of traditional white supremacist discourse and racism, and their decision to oppose Islam on cultural grounds. This distinction between traditional race-based forms of rightwing extremism … and a new anti-Muslim narrative reflects a broader change within the European far right. Rather than oppose immigration and Islam on racial grounds (an argument that would attract little support), the emphasis shifts on to the more socially acceptable issue of culture: Muslims are not biologically inferior, but they are culturally incompatible, so the argument goes.

The connection that Breivik drew between radical Islam and leftist supporters of multiculturalism is, again, a staple of the Islamophobic right.

In his manifesto Breivik cited, some 46 times, the work of Robert Spencer, the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America, and a prolific Islamophobic author. As Loonwatch points out, Spencer's site "Jihad Watch is filled with posts denouncing the 'Leftist/Jihadist alliance', warning his readers of how the left will happily allow the Muslim hordes to overthrow the West and 'dhimmify' its population".

Nice article Astro.

,

perhaps not realising how far they'd end up going.



thinking they are acting on a real threat, even if the threat was merely concocted (or heavily exaggerated) to manage them.

Equitist wrote on Jul 26^th, 2011 at 11:23am:




Someone [like myself] who criticises ISLAM's agenda, and ISLAM's modus operandi [of violence against non-moslems] is a 'whacko' ?





The moslems who murder people, in mosque bombings and market bombings, in shootings, and who cut peoples heads off, THOSE MOSLEMS, AND ISLAM, are innocent, and have nothing to answer for ???

Is that what you are saying, oh unequal one ???

ISLAM and moslems must never be criticised ???

Oh unequal one, YOU ARE A RAGING HYPOCRITE.



e.g.

ISLAMIC scholar, Sayyid Qutb, .......PROMOTING, JUSTIFYING, ISLAM's VIOLENT JIHAD

Nice article Astro. I really think the media and the Western governments bear a lot of the responsibility for these kinds of acts, because they are the ones who incited such people, perhaps not realising how far they'd end up going. If you whip people into a frenzy and convince them their very survival depends upon you vanquishing a mortal enemy for them, some of them will obviously end up transgressing limits thinking they are acting on a real threat, even if the threat was merely concocted (or heavily exaggerated) to manage them.