{"id":13796,"date":"2011-08-08T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=13796"},"modified":"2011-08-04T00:07:22","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T23:07:22","slug":"oslo-europe-islam-and-the-mainstreaming-of-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/08\/oslo-europe-islam-and-the-mainstreaming-of-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Oslo: Europe, Islam and the Mainstreaming of Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

European media coverage of the Norwegian tragedy has led with dangerous and clich\u00e9d arguments about \u2018Islamic extremism\u2019 and multiculturalism, even after the identity of the killer was confirmed \u2013 thus contributing to the mainstreaming of racism that helped make Breivik what he is.<\/em><\/p>\n

An hour before Anders Breivik embarked on his massacre of the innocents, he distributed his manifesto<\/a> online. In 1500 pages, this urgent message identified \u201ccultural Marxists\u201d, \u201cmulticulturalists\u201d, anti-Zionists and leftists as \u201ctraitors\u201d who are allowing Christian Europe to be overtaken by Muslims.\u00a0He subsequently murdered dozens of these \u2018traitors\u2019, the majority of them children, at a Labour Party youth camp.\u00a0His inspiration, according to this manifesto, were those pathfinders of the Islamophobic right who have profited immensely from the framing and prosecution of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d including Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer and Bat Ye\u2019or.<\/p>\n

Yet, almost before the attacks were concluded, a \u2018line\u2019 was developing in the mass media: it was perpetrated by jihadists, and certainly an \u2018Al Qaeda style\u2019 attack.\u00a0Peter Beaumont of The Guardian<\/em> was among the first<\/a> to develop this narrative, but it was rapidly taken up across the media.\u00a0Glenn Greenwald describes<\/a> how on the day of the attack \u201cthe featured headline on The\u00a0New York Times<\/em> online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC<\/em> and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.\u201d\u00a0 Meanwhile, \u201cthe Washington Post<\/em>‘s Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible\u201d.\u00a0A hoax claim of \u2018responsibility\u2019 for the attack from a previously unknown group, disseminated by a dubious \u2018expert\u2019<\/a>, was used to spin this line well beyond the point of credibility.<\/p>\n

One might ascribe all of this to bad judgment and prejudice were it not for the fact that well after the identity of the terrorist had been established as a white, Christian Norwegian, the conversation continued to be about Islam and multiculturalism.\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, for example, began its editorial on the subject with three paragraphs about Islam<\/a>.\u00a0The Sun<\/em>, a flagship daily of the disgraced Murdoch empire, prepared a front page that initially described the attack as an \u2018Al Qaeda Massacre\u2019<\/a>.\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u2019s analysis piece<\/a> on the day following the attack featured a series of experts \u2013 including Will McCant, who had circulated the bogus claim of responsibility \u2013 attributing the attacks to \u2018jihadists.\u2019 \u00a0In fairness, The Guardian<\/em> later removed the analysis piece and the Peter Beaumont article, while The Sun<\/em> changed its front page<\/p>\n

Even when the \u2018jihadi\u2019 angle was dropped, the effort to incriminate Islam and Muslims continued.\u00a0The Belgian daily De Morgen<\/em>, accepting the \u201cwhite roots\u201d of the perpetrator, nonetheless insisted that \u201cthe possibility that . . . the perpetrator is a sympathizer of Al Qaeda should not be ignored\u201d.[1]\u00a0In The Atlantic<\/em>, it was asserted<\/a> that the spirit of jihadism had \u2018mutated\u2019 and spread to the far right, as if fascism has no tradition of terrorism to speak of.\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u2019s Simon Tisdall similarly argued that Breivik adopted the \u201clanguage of Muslim jihadists\u201d<\/a>, though his idiom was classically fascist.\u00a0There was a real fear that the grotesque nature of the attacks, by drawing attention to the dangers of racism, would undermine support for Islamophobic policies.\u00a0For the Jerusalem Post<\/em>, it was imperative that this should be avoided, and the attack should serve as an opportunity to<\/a> \u201cseriously re-evaluate policies for immigration integration in Norway and elsewhere.\u201d\u00a0Similarly, the widely esteemed \u2018atheist\u2019 writer Sam Harris is insistent<\/a> that this attack should not blind us to the fact that \u201cIslam remains the most retrograde and ill-behaved religion on earth.\u201d\u00a0This is the same author who has written<\/a> that those \u201cwho speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.\u201d\u00a0The logic is clear: Breivik is despicable, but his savagery expresses a truth about Islam and multiculturalism; an understanding of which should form the basis of European policy.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the least convincing claim about Breivik has been the idea that he operated alone \u2013 a claim that would never have been made had the perpetrator been a Muslim.\u00a0This was encouraged by Norwegian police and intelligence<\/a> as they attempted to downplay<\/a> his far right connections.\u00a0Breivik may have planned and perpetrated this specific atrocity by himself, but it is also clear that, far from being a lone wolf, he comes straight out of a racial-nationalist activist milieu.\u00a0He had been active<\/a> in the anti-immigrant Progress Party in Norway, and has been in contact<\/a> with the English Defence League<\/a> (EDL). Daryl Hobson, a member of the EDL whose links<\/a> with EDL leader \u2018Tommy Robinson\u2019 have proven a source of embarrassment, acknowledged<\/a> that Breivik had met him, while a \u2018senior member\u2019 told the Independent<\/em> that Breivik had met several of the group\u2019s leaders<\/a>.\u00a0Breivik himself claims to have advised the EDL on tactics, and to have been instrumental in co-founding the Norwegian Defence League.\u00a0Far from being a lone madman, Breivik seems to have been embedded in the activist networks of the European far right.<\/p>\n

Equally important, the racism that motivated Breivik comes straight from the \u2018mainstream.\u2019\u00a0His ideological inspirations are prominent European politicians such as Geert Wilders, as well as media reports, columns and books written by various Islamophobic intellectuals.\u00a0This connection is not incidental.\u00a0A 2010 report<\/a> on Islamophobia in the UK, conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter, established an important correlation between both political rhetoric and media coverage concerning Islam and subsequent upsurges in racist violence toward Muslims.\u00a0In fact, the ideas that Breivik articulates stand in a tradition of European reaction.\u00a0In \u2018Londonistan\u2019 and \u2018Eurabia,\u2019 we hear echoes of \u2018Jew York,\u2019 just as in Breivik\u2019s \u2018Marxist-Islamist alliance,\u2019 we hear Hitler\u2019s evocation of the \u2018Bolshevik-Jewish threat.\u2019\u00a0That Islam has now taken the place of Judaism in the paranoid weltanschauung<\/em> of some of the far right is a result of a transformed global situation.<\/p>\n

The \u2018war on terror\u2019 licensed a period of intense imperial revivalism.\u00a0It was suddenly the fashionable thing for intellectuals, former enrag\u00e9s<\/em> among them, to eulogise about the benefits of empire, especially if led by the US.\u00a0But the negative obverse of this supposedly humane dominion was Islam: the reputedly inhumane, irrational and barbaric nemesis of empire.\u00a0While this dehumanisation of Muslims fuelled the bloodshed on the frontiers of Iraq and Afghanistan, it could not but flow back to the metropole, so that every European Muslim became a potentially menacing alien. The outward attributes of Islam, from dress to architecture, became the subjects of reactionary campaigns, street violence and state repression.\u00a0The far right has learned and benefited from this.\u00a0The organisations esteemed by Breivik \u2013 the English Defence League and the Dutch Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders \u2013 are among those that have translated the ascriptive hierarchy of the new imperialism into a new language for domestic reaction.<\/p>\n

The complicity between the Islamophobic right and the far right is partly manifested in the latter\u2019s growth translated into parliamentary seats.\u00a0No longer marginal, they now occupy positions of state power.\u00a0This has intensified both the quotidian racism of the streets and institutional racism at the level of the state, manifested in the ban on minarets, the niqab, hijab and halal meat in Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, respectively. Further, they act as a gravitational force pulling mainstream parties further to the right. The sources of their support are challenged neither by the centre-right nor the centre-left, both of which instead seek to emulate the far right. This trend has contributed significantly to the mainstreaming of racist ideas that form the basis for such violent outrages.<\/p>\n

That the media\u2019s response to the attacks very often conformed to the same \u2018clash of civilizations\u2019 motif that undergirded Breivik\u2019s own would-be chef d’oeuvre<\/em> is an irony that has largely been lost in the deluge of opinion.\u00a0What has also been lost, and what is as important, is the sheer idiotic irrelevance of such ideas in an era of Arab revolutions.\u00a0The \u2018clash of civilizations\u2019 is more vacant than ever.\u00a0Meanwhile, transnational jihadism has had its day.\u00a0For as long as the vast majority of people in the Middle East suffered under the thumb of US-sponsored despots with little prospect of a reprieve, the solution of \u2018terror\u2019 had some limited purchase.\u00a0But, while there may still be attacks, the base of support for such actions is being eroded every day.\u00a0Astonishingly, none of the media\u2019s queue of experts referred to this outstanding fact.<\/p>\n

Many of the Muslims \u2013 including European Muslims \u2013 whom many Europeans have spent a decade vilifying, are now demonstrating that they have a more expansive and humane conception of democracy than most of their European oblocutors, and that their commitment to it is more enduring.\u00a0Pundits might wish to reflect on that heroism and its meaning, as well as the diabolical horror in Norway and its meaning, before they reflexively verbalise the stale clich\u00e9s of the \u2018war on terror.\u2019<\/p>\n

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[1] Original: “De kans is klein maar het valt ook niet uit te sluiten dat de dader ondanks zijn blanke wortels een sympathisant is van Al Qaida.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jadaliyya.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

European media coverage of the Norwegian tragedy has led with dangerous and clich\u00e9d arguments about \u2018Islamic extremism\u2019 and multiculturalism, even after the identity of the killer was confirmed \u2013 thus contributing to the mainstreaming of racism that helped make Breivik what he is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}