Trail of hatred leads to anti-Muslim views

Norway is burying its 77 dead after an unprecedented terrorist attack. The Norwegian Police Security Service said that the massacre was “unique,” and would not boost the levels of threat from extremist political groups.

But some experts say the rampage, although appearing to be the work of one unbalanced individual, is far from unlikely in Western countries that are experiencing an anti-Muslim climate of fear and loathing.

The Norwegian killer, Anders Breivik, wrote a 1,500-page manifesto that patched together far-right and other ideas gleaned from the Internet, some of them part of mainstream political discourse. But his overriding sentiment was outrage against Muslims he claimed were overrunning Norway and European countries.

“This is exactly the kind of thing I was warning about,” said Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Fear of Barbarians. “Just because Breivik is an individual, and probably out of his senses — and none of the extreme right-wing parties endorsed the act — doesn’t mean the danger doesn’t exist.”

Todorov, a Paris-based historian, has studied the age-old practice of scapegoating minorities and says the West is locked into a cycle of demonization and violence at a time when growing international immigration has made it more urgent to find mutual understanding.

In Europe, he said, far-right parties want to distance themselves from mass killings, and convince their audiences that their arguments are strictly reasonable. They draw on the fact that in once-homogeneous countries, Muslims are much more visible as immigration increases.

“The wider problem is that it’s not even radical Islam that’s seen as a threat — it’s the idea that all of Islam or Muslims are a threat,” Ali Esbati, of Norway’s Manifest Center for Social Analysis, told al Jazeera.

Resistance to Muslim influence has gone mainstream in some European countries.

In France, laws bar the hijab from public schools. The Dutch parliament banned burqas in public places, while Switzerland adopted a referendum against building Muslim minarets.

Meanwhile, the political map of the European Union has been gradually redrawn, with conservative parties governing all but four of its 27 countries.

Some are backed by far-right parties that have moved away from violent rhetoric to gain bigger audiences, while their anti-Muslim and anti-immigration views have migrated to the mainstream.

In the U.S., where Muslims make up only 1 per cent of the population, 9/11 sparked a massive backlash.

“It’s coming from members of the Republican Party who use anti-Muslim prejudice as a tool in support of their own agenda,” says Drew Courtney of People for the American Way, a Washington-based think tank that has just published a report on the American right and anti-Muslim extremism.

“Tied in with hatred of President Obama, fear of religious diversity and hostility toward immigrants and gays, anti-Muslim rhetoric and paranoia has become a mainstream if not ubiquitous part of the conservative movement and the Republican party,” the report argued. That has led to “anti-Muslim prejudice and increased attacks on Muslim-Americans and houses of worship.”

If a way out of the overheated political atmosphere is to be found, Norway itself could lead the way with its measured reaction to the killings, says Michael Nagler of the Metta Center for Nonviolence at Berkeley, Ca.

“They have taken the opposite tack from the U.S. We have mythologized (9/11), and believed it could only be responded to by violence. The end result was we reduced our own democratic freedoms.

“The Norwegians are saying ‘we will not let these people determine who we are. We will stubbornly resist and have a more open society.’”

Origin
Source: Toronto Star