What Norway’s terror teaches us about Islamophobia and online hate

By Peter Jukes

If there’s any shred of comfort that come come from the horrors of ten days ago, the bomb attacks in Oslo and massacre of dozens of teenagers in Utøya, it is scant consolation for bereft families or a nation in mourning. The biggest atrocity on Norwegian soil since World War II, and one of the biggest terrorist incidents in Europe in decades, is no occasion for political point scoring. But some good may yet come out of it: the full glare of public scrutiny (and one hopes police attention) has now been turned on the largely ignored growth of extreme right-wing Islamophobia in Europe.

Nearly exactly a year ago, I wrote how Obama had bravely faced up to the Islamophobes in the US during his Ramadan speech and worried that Europe lacked such leadership.

“The rise of Islamophobia in Europe over the last few years – expression of which I have encountered many times in the past, even on LabourList, – has filled me with a kind a foreboding I haven’t felt since the early 90s and the rabid nationalism in former-Yugoslavia, which itself had an anti-Muslim component.”

“The signs are everywhere to be seen. The US have Palin’s ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the threat of Koran burning. We have the French assembly voting to ban niqab, Switzerland banning minarets, and the rise of the English Defence League here in the UK, deliberately targeting Muslim communities with provocation and violence…”

“We have demagogues like Geert Wilders in Holland getting 33% of the vote by inciting fear and hatred. Meanwhile, opportunist politicians in the UK try to ride the bandwagon, putting forward legislation to ban burkas. This is hardly helped by so-called intellectuals (who should know better) talking about ‘Islamofascism’ or “Londonistan” and trying to yolk together a religion of universalist appeal with racist ultranationalism.”

Don’t worry. This is not some gratuitous exercise in ‘I told you so’. My hands are no cleaner than others, and in the rise of Islamophobia I have to share some blame. We do not know yet if Anders Behring Breivik acted entirely alone. He may yet win an insanity defence. Yet there’s little doubt that both his targets and his motivation were avowedly political. Both the video he uploaded and the European Manifesto of Independence he passed on to sympathisers should place that beyond doubt. Though somewhat rambling and derivative, Breivik’s arguments are rational and coherent. He articulates a vision of the ‘Islamisation of Europe’, deliberately smuggled in by Marxists spouting ‘multiculturalism’ as their credo. That vision, and his belief that an incendiary act of violence was needed to trigger the inevitable religious and social conflict make it indisputable: the killings on Friday 21st of July a classic act of political terrorism.

Like many young men who search for some final battle between good and evil, Breivik was a dreamer of the absolute, who found his purpose in sacrificing himself for a cause greater than himself. In this, he resembles the extremist Jihadists he purports to despise, and like many of them, he seems to have been indoctrinated and then motivated into a medieval mindset through a quite modern source: what he read online.The more that emerges about Breivart’s relatively affluent and quiet background in Norway, the more investigators search for the sources of his warped worldview, the more abundantly obvious it is that online conversations with British extremists were a key source of ideology and inspiration. This has led Nick Cohen to assert, in yesterday’s Observer, that Britain is the Breeding Ground for Hate

“Nothing about Breivik is as interesting as the people he shot, but those with the stomach to read him will find that ideas made in Britain enthralled him. He writes in English. He uses a British pseudonym – Andrew Berwick – and gives his manifesto a London dateline. He meets sympathisers in a London pub and drops strong hints that the organisation he is closest to is the English Defence League. He has a respect for at least some of the EDL’s ideas because it does not go along with traditional antisemitic Nazism but agrees with Breivik that there has been a plot by the treacherous “cultural Marxists” of the European elite to undermine the nation state by flooding it with immigrants, most notably Muslim immigrants.

British extremists of whatever type have the advantage that English is the language of the web that foreigners must master if they want an international audience. Breivik’s references to British sources would not be surprising if all he did was quote from obscure websites and chatrooms.

But Breivik did not only listen to British far rightists screaming out their hatreds in the madhouses of the blogosphere, but peppered his manifesto with citations of articles in the Daily Telegraph and other respectable conservative newspapers. Britain’s mainstream media, not the fringe on the web, formed the basis of his claim that readers could find all the evidence they need of the multicultural plot to turn white, Christian Europe into a Muslim-dominated “Eurabia””

As usual, Cohen is right about the detail but jumps to a debatable conclusion. When it comes to displaying knee-jerk suspicions of Islam, it wasn’t just Murdoch’s The Sun who assumed the Oslo attacks were Jihadist in origin: even the liberal New York Times jumped the gun and wheeled out its bloviating Al Qaeda experts.

There’s also no doubt the English speaking political blogosphere is full of cocoons of craziness and hatred. Outbursts of Islamophobia can be found anywhere. But so too can unfounded claims about Climate Change, the EU(SSR), Obama’s birth certificate, or the CIA’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. It’s not just on the xenophobic right where echo chambers of extremism flourish. As a regular blogger in the US, I encounter conspiracy theories and apocalyptic thinking regularly on the left too – on liberal blogs like Firedoglake or Dailykos.

The internet is still dominated by the English language, and so the growth of extremist rhetoric could be something to do with the nature of politics online. Because you preselect your sites and sources – narrowcasting rather than broadcasting – the net brings the attendant dangers of confirmation bias, and a ramped up atmosphere of increasing hyperbole and extremism of expression.

However, as my own experience reveals, blogging has forced me to engage with, and try to combat, generalised arguments about Muslims, Birthers, Climate Change, or the EU. Why didn’t Breivik’s online excursions lead him him to The Guardian or indeed Labourlist, where his ideas would have been challenged?

Short answer: they probably did. But he didn’t listen. The internet didn’t create extremism. It might have amplified on some occasions. But there are other example of new media – from the Murdoch scandal to the Arab Spring – where online activism has served more liberal ends. The net is basically a neutral space to share opinions. And when it comes to the recent phenomenon of Islamophobia, those opinions predate Twitter or Comment is Free.