[Belated] Update BlazingCatFur links to this post and previous. Tx BCF!
Yesterday I wrote about Guardian columnist Seamus Milne's selective quotation from the 2008 Europol Report figures on terrorism activities in Europe. He tried (rather lazily, without actually reading the Report, relying instead on third-party reports) to show that Right-wing terrorism activities are greater than Islamist ones. In fact, Islamist ones are greater by far than Right-wing activities, and Left-wing terrorist activities are also much greater than Right-wing ones. I know it's not terribly edifying to discuss which bunch of nutters kill more people, but really... it was Seamus wot started it, by selectively quoting to "prove" a point, that was the opposite of the truth.
In the post below, I cover his article as a whole (note: not all the links in the original article are highlighted, but they're still there, if you mouse over. Something to do with cut/paste in Blogger...). My comments are dark red Arial, smaller font:
Yesterday I wrote about Guardian columnist Seamus Milne's selective quotation from the 2008 Europol Report figures on terrorism activities in Europe. He tried (rather lazily, without actually reading the Report, relying instead on third-party reports) to show that Right-wing terrorism activities are greater than Islamist ones. In fact, Islamist ones are greater by far than Right-wing activities, and Left-wing terrorist activities are also much greater than Right-wing ones. I know it's not terribly edifying to discuss which bunch of nutters kill more people, but really... it was Seamus wot started it, by selectively quoting to "prove" a point, that was the opposite of the truth.
In the post below, I cover his article as a whole (note: not all the links in the original article are highlighted, but they're still there, if you mouse over. Something to do with cut/paste in Blogger...). My comments are dark red Arial, smaller font:
In his rage against Muslims, Norway's killer was no loner
It's comforting, perhaps, to dismiss Anders Behring Breivik as nothing more than a psychotic loner. That was the view of the Conservative London mayor, Boris Johnson, among others. The Norwegian mass killer's own lawyer has branded him "insane". It has the advantage of meaning no wider conclusions need to be drawn about the social context of the atrocity.
Had he been a Muslim, as much of the western media concluded he was immediately after the terrorist bloodbath, we can be sure there would have been no such judgments – even though some jihadist attacks have undoubtedly been carried out by individuals operating alone.
Individuals yes, but motivated and inspired by an ideology and specific, repeated and explicit calls to violene by a range of Islamic authority figures. Eg, on 27 October 2010, bin Laden called for Muslims to “strike the necks” of French for banning the hijab. Was Breivik similarly inspired? No. There is no reputable scholar and critic of Islam calling for violence. Spencer, one of those quoted most extensively by Breivik, is vocally anti-violence. Instead his calls for reduction of “Islamophobia”, are five violence-reducing proposals.
In fact, however deranged the bombing and shooting might seem, studies of those identified as terrorists have shown they rarely have mental illness or psychiatric abnormalities. Maybe Breivik will turn out to be an exception. But whether his claim that there are other members of a fascistic Christian terror network still at large turns out to be genuine or not, he has clearly fostered enthusiastic links with violent far-right groups abroad, and in Britain in particular.
Those include multiple contacts with the Islamophobic English Defence League, which has repeatedly staged violent protests against Muslim communities. "You're a blessing to all in Europe," Breivik apparently told EDL supporters in an online message, hailing "our common struggle against the Islamofascists". Whatever Breivik has done, he hasn't done in isolation.
He was a short-term member of the EDL, which expelled him and has condemned his actions. Their mission statement is specifically anti violence and anti racist and is aimed clearly at Islamist violence in the UK.
Of course the Norwegian killer's ideology, spelled out in mind-numbing detail in his 1,500-page online manifesto, is both repulsive and absurd. Its main focus is hatred of Islam and Muslims — who he wants deported from Europe — rooted in a self-proclaimed Christian conservatism. He declares himself hostile to "cultural Marxism", while being both pro-Israel and antisemitic, and a champion of anti-Muslim rage from India to the Arctic circle.
He’s a real ideological mess, alright. But he’s not a “fundamental Christian”, as many on the Left have labelled him. He says he is a cultural Christian, not a practicising Christian, something that the majority of Europeans would self-describe themselves as.
The killer has evidently absorbed the far right's shift from the language of race to the language of culture. But what is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives that for a decade have been the meat and drink of champions of the war on terror and the claim that Islam and Islamism pose a mortal threat to western civilisation.
Islam and Islamism are a threat to the values of the west not because the “meat and drink champions” say so; but because Islamists world-wide say so: it’s a drumbeat of constant threat to take over the west, by whatever means they can, be it demographic, educational, cultural, or – occasionally and controversially even within the Islamist community – violently. These threats would not mean much if they represented just a zany few. But the numbers who make the statements and who support them ideologically are in the hundreds of millions: majorities in Muslim countries and high minorities verging on majorities in countries like the UK and the US – repeated, reputable surveys (eg, Pew Research) show this. See my “Islam in figures”.
It's all there: the supposed Islamisation of Europe, the classic conspiracism of the "Eurabia" takeover fantasy, the racist hysteria about the Muslim birthrate, the inevitable clash of civilisations, the hatred of "multiculturalism" and the supposed appeasement of Islam by the European elite, which is meant to have fostered a climate where it's impossible to speak about immigration.
See my comment above. In addition: does Milne suggest that immigration can indeed be discussed without someone of his ilk trying to shut it down, shout it down, as being inherently “xenophobic”, or, like Brown in the infamouse case of the woman who doorstopped him, as being “bigoted”?
All these themes are of course staples of conservative newspapers, commentators and websites. So naturally, exponents of one or more of these tropes are quoted liberally by Breivik, from Bernard Lewis and Melanie Phillips to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Mark Steyn.
Phillips, a Daily Mail writer, has complained of a "smear". But an article of hers Breivik cites at length described the former Labour government as guilty of "unalloyed treachery" for using mass immigration to "destroy what it means to be culturally British and to put another 'multicultural' identity in its place" – Breivik's feeling precisely.
Phillips’ article linked above describes something that was breathtaking in its audacity and mendaciousness. It was an act of government done underhand, and which the media had full right – indeed responsibility – to bring to light. Many millions of Britains would have shared, continue to share, her indignation at the government’s duplicity in changing the immigration policies without telling the electorate, and going in direct contrast to what they told the electorate they would do. By the way, are we to assume by Milne’s last comment above – Breivik’s feelings precicely – that all people who happen to share one or other of his “feelings”, is by definition as guilty as Breivik? How else to read that? Surely, by analogy, that would make vegetarians complicit in Hitler’s genocide, as he was a strict vegetarian, “feelings” therefore shared by them both. Same for dog lovers….
None of these writers is of course in any way sympathetic to the carnage carried out in Norway last week. But the continuum between the poisonous nonsense commonplace in the mainstream media in recent years, the street slogans of groups like the EDL and Breivik's outpourings is unmistakable.
Of course it it “poisonous slander” to write off all critiques of Islam as “poisonous nonsense”. Whenever I read writers such as Milne and his ilk on the left, I’m left with the impression that they have not read the basic texts of Islam. I’ve only read one other article by this fellow, but both it and this one evince no evidence of his having read anything about Islam, and not its core primary texts. If he had, and if he had read knowledgeable critics like Robert Spencer, he could not call it “poisonous nonsense” without being guilty of “poisonous falsehood”.
I wonder, too, about that alleged “continuum”. Given that criticism of Islam is fact-based and real, what is one to do? Simply shut up for concern that there may be a nutter who might take it on himself to shoot and then quote you?
The same phenomenon can be seen across European politics, where the rise of rightwing Islamophobic parties from France and the Netherlands to Norway and Switzerland has encouraged the centre-right establishment to play the Islam card, wrap itself in "Christian" values and declare the chimera of multiculturalism an abject failure.
What’s with the quotation marks around “Christian”? Does he not believe such values exist, or that he casts aspersions on them? And why call multiculturalism a “chimera”? Isn’t this a contumely on what he presumably sees as something wonderful?
It's hardly surprising that some on the parliamentary right have recognised Breivik's ideas as their own: the Italian Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio described them as "100% good". But the same neoconservative zealots who have always insisted that non-violent (Muslim) "extremists" must be cast out because they legitimised and provided a "conveyor belt to terrorism" have now been hoist by their own petard.
That is exactly the role many of their own ideologists have been shown to have played in the case of the butcher of Utoya. When David Cameron denounced multiculturalism in February, he also announced – to the delight of the EDL – that the British government would now be taking on the "non-violent extremists" because they influenced those who embraced violence.
Don't expect the Islamophobic conspiracists to get the same treatment.
Why should they? One lot, the Islamist extremists call for violence against “infidels”. The other side calls attention to the Islamist extremists who call for violence and suggest that moderate Muslims call for peace and tolerance. Why should they get the “same treatment”? Because we should always shoot the messenger?
Breivik is an isolated case, it will be said. In reality, as Europol figures demonstrate, the overwhelming majority of terror attacks in Europe in recent years have been carried out by non-Muslims. In Britain, a string of recent convictions of would-be anti-Muslim terrorists has underlined that Breivik is very far from being just a Norwegian phenomenon.
Lower-level violence and intimidation continues unabated: last week on the day of the Norwegian massacre, in an entirely routine incident, a mosque in Luton was vandalised and spray-painted with a swastika and EDL slogan. The rise of Islamophobia in Europe and the US is the manipulated product of a toxic blend of economic insecurity, unprotected mass migration and the consequences of a decade of western-sponsored war in the Muslim world: from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Libya.
It has become the new acceptable form of racism – far outstripping in opinion polls the level of hatred for any other religious or racial group, and embraced by those who delude themselves that anti-Muslim bigotry has nothing to do with ethnicity – and even represents some sort of defence of liberal values.
For those who failed to deliver decent jobs, wages and housing, and encouraged employers to profit from low-wage migrant labour, how much easier to scapegoat minority Muslim communities than deal with the banks and corporate free-for-all that triggered the crisis? The attempt to pathologise last Friday's slaughter and separate it from the swamp that spawned it can only ratchet up the danger to all of us.
Dreary leftist shape-shifting and blame-shifting. Even were the attention to be shifted to the nasty bankers (and I do have a lot of sympathy for that argument, even though I’m married to an international banker….), that would do nothing to address the issue that the critics of Islam have consistently called attention to: its supremacism, suppression freedom of speck of conscience, and of the rights of women and minorities. These are in the texts, not in the fervid imaginations of the critics. The critics are not “Islamophobes” for calling attention to them, any more than the PM of Ireland is a Cathophobe for his scorching criticism of the Catholic church last week.
