En blogosfære fuld af had

Jostein Gaarder og Thomas Hylland Eriksen skriver i New York Times om den islamofobiske diskurs på nettet, som har dannet grobund for forestillingen om en “væbnet kamp” mod “islamiseringen” af Europa (et Europa, hvor muslimer udgør 3% af befolkningen i Norge, og 5% af befolkningen i det, om man skal tro de mere ekstreme kredse, “hårdt ramte” Storbritannien):

IT is tempting to view Anders Behring Breivik, the self-described Christian crusader behind the July 22 massacre in Norway, as an isolated case of pure evil. Yet history has taught us that such acts of violence rarely occur independent of their social and cultural surroundings.

Mr. Breivik managed to commit two terrorist attacks in a single afternoon. But the hatred and contempt from which he drew his deranged determination were shared with many others throughout the international right-wing blogosphere.

The racism and bigotry that have simmered for years on anti-Islamic and anti-immigration Web sites in Norway and other European countries and in the United States made it possible for him to believe he was acting on behalf of a community that would thank him. As John Donne famously put it, “No man is an island … every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

The global Islamophobic blogosphere consists of loosely connected networks of people — including students, civil servants, capitalists, and neo-Nazis. Many do not even see themselves as “right-wing,” but as defenders of enlightened values, including feminism.

The Islamophobes of Norway have no manifesto, but they share three fundamental views: that Norway is in the hands of a treacherous, spineless, politically correct elite that has betrayed the pure spirit of Norwegian culture by permitting demographic contamination; that Muslims will never be truly integrated (even if they pretend to be); and that there is a Muslim conspiracy to gain political dominance across Europe.

Hatred of Muslims and resentment of the left — one of us has repeatedly received resentful diatribes against the “multiculturalist elite,” and was mentioned in Mr. Breivik’s own writings — is not confined to Norway. Mr. Breivik has praised Gates of Vienna, a Web site that compares contemporary Europe to long-ago wars with the Ottomans. He has praised writers like Bruce Bawer, the American author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” and Bat Ye’Or, the pseudonym for the British author of the conspiratorial “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.” He is an enthusiastic reader of the virulently anti-Islamic blog of Pamela Geller, an American who leads the group “Stop Islamization of America” and gained notoriety for her opposition to an Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan.

Europe’s new right is, in other words, not neo-Nazi; it has swapped anti-Semitism for Islamophobia. After a hiatus of several hundred years, fear of Islam reemerged around 1989, as the Cold War was ending and Iranian mullahs issued a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie. It gained popularity as increasing numbers of Muslims entered Europe as immigrants in the 1990s, and became widespread in the aftermath of 9/11. Traditional racism may actually be waning in several European countries, but hostility toward Islam and animosity toward Muslim immigrants and their children is on the rise.

Og ja, det er der jo nogen af os, der har sagt i årevis. I Danmark har man – udover i de mere ekstreme af Dansk Folkepartis udmeldinger – kunnet finde ekkoer af Breiviks synspunkter i den samling af højreekstreme blogs, som jeg selv spøgefuldt har kaldt skrigosfæren. Det ekstreme og nærmest grænseløst hadefulde anti-islamiske højre er i dag den største trussel mod det frie og åbne samfund i Europa, og det på trods af, at der er masser af konkurrence på netop dét område.

Link: A Blogosphere of Bigots