clear that most of the white Europeans in question get
along well with people from China,
India, Latin America , and so forth, and that the problem
always is general Muslim insularity
and their perceived backwardness --and the fanatic
jihadist population within Islam.
Needless to say, the word "Islamophobia" is an absurdity
since the issue is not some sort
of irrational bigotry which the title implies by
associating racism with opposition to Islam,
an absurdity since Muslims come from many different races.
The problem in every case
is what Europeans have learned about Islam from negative
experiences with Muslims
and, in many cases, from study of the Koran and Islam at
large, finding its doctrines
to be immoral and repugnant. In other words, just as you
would not call
those who oppose Islam simply are critics of Islam --with
good reason.
Regardless, an informative article.
In the wake of the atrocities in Norway perpetrated by
Anders Behring Breivik, it is still unclear whether he was
part of a wider conspiracy, but alarm bells are now ringing
across Europe about the threat from far-right extremist
groups. With no end in sight to the economic crisis afflicting
many nations, the growing fear is that voters are increasingly
attracted to far-right parties, many of whom have been
building support by opposing immigration and stirring up
hatred of Muslims.
In Norway, the right-wing Progress party garnered 23 per
cent of the vote in the last election, making it the
second-largest. And a recent poll found that half of all
Norwegians favour restricting immigration. This did not go
far enough for Breivik, who believed that the forced
deportation of Muslims should be government policy, a
radical political view he formed over time by participating
in extreme online forums where he discussed his beliefs with
like-minded individuals across the world.
The 32-year-old Norwegian made his thoughts clear in a
1,500 page document he wrote before embarking on his killing
spree. Shortly before he detonated his bomb in Oslo and then
killed 68 people on Utoeya, Breivik emailed his document to
1,003 of his far-right contacts, including extremists in
England whom Breivik boasted to have forged links with in
recent years in his opposition to Islam.
He particularly admired the English Defence League for its
anti-Islam stance, and - according to the respected
anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight - posted a message on its
website in March this year. Using the pseudonym Sigurd
Jorsalfare after a Norwegian king who led a Crusade in the
12th century, Breivik wrote: "Hello. To you all good English
men and women, just wanted to say that you're a blessing to
all in Europe, in these dark times all of Europe are looking
to you in such [sic] of inspiration, courage and even hope
that we might turn this evil trend with islamisation all
across our continent."
United Kingdom
Searchlight said that Breivik had been in contact with both
the EDL and its Norwegian counterpart, the Norwegian Defence
League (NDL), a claim denied by the EDL whose leadership
condemned Breivik's crimes.
The EDL has always insisted it is a peaceful protest group
which opposes militant Islam, but since its inception in
2009, violence has erupted at many EDL demonstrations in
Britain.
Stephen Lennon, who was convicted last week (Monday) of
leading a street brawl involving 100 soccer fans in the
English city of Luton in August 2010, is one of the founders
of the EDL and during an interview with Al Jazeera in 2009,
he explained why the group formed in Luton,
the city where he lives: "For more than a decade now,
there's been tension in Luton between Muslim youths and
whites. We all get on fine - black, white, Indian, Chinese -
everyone does, in fact, apart from some Muslim youths who've
become extremely radicalised since the first Gulf War.
Preachers of hate such as Anjem Choudary have been
recruiting for radical Islamist groups in Luton for years.
Our government does nothing, so we decided we'd start
protesting against radical Islam, and it grew from there,"
he said.
While the EDL has been largely unsuccessful in gaining
public support - mainly due to the fact that its core
consists of football hooligans - there is concern that the
group could be inspiring other unstable individuals who
oppose Islam. The EDL has been pro-active in building links
across the world and claims to have support from - aside
from people in Norway - Holland, France, Sweden, USA and
Israel, among others.
The Netherlands
Indeed, the EDL embraced the Dutch far-right
politician Geert Wilders, whom Breivik also cited in his
writings. Wilders is virulently anti-Islam and leads the
Party for Freedom, Holland's third-largest party. He is a
controversial figure who antagonised the Muslim world by
calling for a ban on the Quran, which he likened to Adolf
Hitler's Mein Kampf. Despite this, Wilders was voted
politician of the year in 2007 by the Dutch press, and his
Freedom Party went from winning nine seats in the 2006
election to 24 in 2010, taking a larger share of the vote
than the Christian Democrats.
Austria
Austria has a Freedom Party (FPO) too, with a similar
political outlook. The party is led by Heinz-Christian
Strache, who has been successful in drumming up support by
opposing Islam and immigration.
In 2008, the FPO and Alliance for the Future (BZO) jointly
secured almost one-third of the electorate's vote during the
2008 election. Campaigning against the "Islamisation" of
Austria, the two parties secured 29 per cent in a result
viewed as a horrifying development by many people across
Europe. Both parties ran highly xenophobic campaigns,
particularly the FPO, which pledged to set up a ministry to
deport foreigners and whose leader, Heinz-Christian Strache,
mocked homosexuals and described women in Islamic dress as
"female ninjas". The FPO also wishes to revoke the
Verbotsgesetz, an Austrian law enacted in 1947 that bans the
promotion of neo-Nazi ideology.
Strache has been at the centre of controversy, and pictures
surfaced in 2008 showing the FPO leader wearing army
fatigues and clutching what appeared to be a gun in a
forest. The images were allegedly taken at a neo-Nazi
training camp in his youth, but Strache denied this and said
they were from a day out paint-balling. He was also
photographed apparently giving a three-fingered neo-Nazi
salute in a bar, though he said he was only ordering three
beers.
The FPO has tried to distance itself from extremism, but
the party was founded by two former SS officers, Anton
Reinthaller and Herbert Schweiger. In 2008, I interviewed
Schweiger - who died this past July - at his home in Austria
a few weeks before he was due to appear in court on charges,
for the fifth time, of promoting neo-Nazi ideology.
Described to me as the "Puppet Master" of Austria and
Germany's far right, Schweiger, 85, was remarkably
sharp-minded and remained proud of his Nazi views. He was a
lieutenant in the Waffen SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler, an elite unit formed in the 1930s to act as
the Führer's personal bodyguards. After escaping a POW camp
during WWII, Schweiger returned to his homeland, Austria,
where he lived openly from 1947 and became heavily involved
in politics.
He was a founding member of three political parties in
Austria - the VDU, the FPO, and the banned NDP. During our
interview he also admitted to involvement in terrorism and
training a far-right cell comprising of Burschenschaften
(right-wing brotherhoods founded in universities) who were
fighting for the reunification of Austria and South Tyrol,
now part of Italy, in 1961.
"I was an explosives expert in the SS so I trained the
Burschenschaften how to make bombs. We used the hotel my
wife and I owned as a training camp," he said. Thirty people
in Italy were murdered during a bombing campaign. One man
convicted for the atrocities, Norbert Burger, later formed
the now-banned neo-Nazi NDP party with Schweiger.
Schweiger's involvement earned him his first spell in
custody in 1962, but he was acquitted.
Schweiger gave support to the FPO, saying that Strache was
correct with his strategy in opposing Islam and immigration.
Schweiger said that despite his age, he still travelled
widely both in Austria and Germany to teach "the
fundamentals of Nazism" to underground cells of neo-Nazis
whom, he claimed, had infiltrated mainstream political
parties such as the FPO.
The FPO disputed this, but according to Vienna's
Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DOW) - which
monitors neo-Nazi activity - the party has strong links to
neo-Nazis through the Burschenschaften, many of whom are
members of Strache's party.
The Burschenschaften were banned by the Allies after
WWII, but reformed in the 1950s. In 1987, Olympia, one of
the most extreme fraternities, nominated Rudolf Hess for the
Nobel Peace Prize. Senior members of the FPO are
Burschenschaften, including Strache and Martin Graf, who was
elected deputy president of the Austrian Parliament after
the election, despite vociferous opposition from
concentration camp survivors. The FPO's Andreas Molzer is
also Burschenschaften and has met with the British National
Party in London. Graf, Strache and Molzer all strongly
denied having links to extremists and the FPO said that it
only wishes to revoke the Verbotsgesetz because it believes
in upholding freedom of _expression_.
Wolfgang Purtscheller, a revered author and journalist who
has spent his career exposing Austria's far right at great
risk to his life, said that neo-Nazis have learned by the
mistakes of their past, and are now working to build public
support within the mainstream parties:
|
"You had people like Schweiger - the puppet master
in the mountains for half a century - able to form
political parties while teaching people to make
bombs, and the Burschenshaften with its history of
terrorism and links to the mainstream parties. These
are the intellectuals who hold the positions of
power in Austrian society, in the police, the
judiciary and in parliament. The neo-Nazis have
learned by the mistakes of their past and are now
working to build public support within the
mainstream parties. Imagine what could happen if the
FPO gets rid of the Verbotsgesetz."
|
The FPO continues to do well, and last October the party's
vote surged when it took 27 per cent of the vote in Vienna's
provincial election. Later that month, the FPO hosted a
two-day conference attended by far-right factions from
across Europe, including representatives of the Sweden
Democrats, Italy's Lega Nord and the Danish People's Party.
Strache has succeeded in making the FPO "respectable", and
last week he sacked a party official who responded to the
Norwegian murders by declaring that the real danger was
Islam, not Breivik.
Russia
Russia is another nation experiencing an upsurge in racism
and anti-Islamic sentiments. A number of neo-Nazi groups
have sprung up in recent years, the most extreme of which
have attacked and killed foreigners and immigrants from
Chechnya, Tajikstan, and Caucasian nations that were once
part of the USSR.
This past July, Amnesty International reported that
racially-motivated violence remained a serious problem in
Russia. The AI report said that, according to data from the
SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis, 37 people died as
a result of hate crimes during 2010. The authors wrote:
|
"In April, Moscow judge Eduard Chuvashov was
killed, reportedly by members of a far-right group,
after he had sentenced several perpetrators of hate
crimes to long-term imprisonment. In October,
22-year-old Vasilii Krivets was sentenced to life
imprisonment for the murder of 15 people of
non-Slavic appearance. The extent of the problem was
brought into sharp focus shortly before the AI
report was published when five members of one of
Russia's most vicious neo-Nazi gangs were jailed for
committing 27 murders. They belonged to the
Nationalist Socialist Society North and were handed
life sentences at Moscow City Court. The string of
killings included the videotaped decapitation of one
of their own gang members."
|
During the trial, the court heard how the gang targeted
dark-skinned victims. They were also convicted of
decapitating one of their own whom they suspected of being a
police informant and stealing money from the gang's funds.
The decapitation, during which they donned clown masks and
sang a patriotic song, was videotaped and posted online.
Following the case, a group of nationalists announced a
coalition with Russia's third-largest political party, the
Liberal Democrat Party, which is committed to protecting
Russian people and their interests.
Breivik, who murdered 76 people, said he was committed to
protecting Europe from Islam. He claimed that two cells from
a network he was involved with were still active. It remains
to be seen if the 32-year-old was a lone wolf, but it would
appear that the far right is on the march.
Billy Briggs is a freelance journalist. His
work has appeared in the New Statesman, The Guardian,
the Sunday Times and other publications around the
world.
The views expressed in this article are the
author's own and do not necessarily represent Al
Jazeera's editorial policy.
