Since the attacks carried out in Oslo last Friday, there has been a concerted campaign by the bourgeois establishment in Europe to deny that the murderous rampage conducted by Anders Behring Breivik was motivated by anti-Islamist prejudices with deep roots in mainstream politics.
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Writing in the Daily Telegraph a few days after the attack, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson reduces Breivik’s assault, planned over a long period of time, to a question of personal egoism. Johnson writes: “It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him…”
For the conservative Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Breivik is a social misfit addicted to violence. According to the NZZ, “There is a gulf separating populism and extremism," and any attempt to associate the mass murders in Norway with the rise of right-wing populism is “akin to modern superstition”. The NZZ’s argument is patently aimed at deflecting attention from Switzerland’s main anti-Islamist party, the ultra-right SVP (Swiss People’s Party), which was instrumental in introducing a ban on the construction of Islamic minarets.
The disingenuous attempts by the political establishment to wash its hands of responsibility for what took place in Oslo were [summarized] by the British journalist Simon Jenkins. Writing in the Guardian early this week, Jenkins said: “The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify anything and should not be forced to do so. A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shooting dead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brain science, but not to politics.
Such disavowals of political links between the “bourgeois centre” to the atrocity in Oslo have been accompanied by interviews and reports explicitly denying that Breivik is a fascist. Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung a Swedish journalist denies that Breivik is a neo-Nazi, arguing that neo-Nazis are anti-Semitic, while the anti-Islamist movement to which Breivik belonged is pro-Israel.
The espousal of anti-Islamism is not restricted to European political parties. It has been fueled by a number of intellectuals, journalists and ideologues both in Europe and America, who in the wake of the 9/11 bombings, have heeded the call by US President George W. Bush for a “crusade against Islamism.”
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In 2006 the American publicist Bruce Bawer published his book While Europe Slept, which claims to describe the cultural decline of Europe resulting from Muslim immigration. In his own blog, Bawer admits that he developed his racist views following his move to Europe (specifically Oslo) in the late 1990s.
One year later the same theme was revisited by the US author Walter Laqueur, with his book The Last Days of Europe, and again by US journalist Christopher Caldwell in his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. In addition to writing for Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard in America, Caldwell also writes regular articles for the world’s leading finance paper, the Financial Times.
In Europe the ideological campaign against Islamism was spearheaded by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, a former member of the Italian resistance to Mussolini, who wrote no less than three books deploring Muslim migration to Europe. In a 2005 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Fallaci declared that, due to the growing influence of Islamism, Europe should more accurately be defined as “Eurabia”.
In Britain the theme of “Eurabia” was taken up in the same year by the right wing Spectator magazine in an edition with the cover headline “Eurabian Nightmare.”
One of the main contributors to the torrent of anti-Muslim prejudice in the magazine was none other than the aforementioned Boris Johnson. In his contribution Johnson blustered that it was necessary to dispense with “the first taboo, and accept that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.” Johnson then went on to describe Islamism as the "most viciously sectarian of all religions”. This is from the same man who now claims that the anti-Islamist and fascist Breivik operated entirely on personal motives!
In Germany the pernicious campaign against Islamism has been led by the ardent Zionist and former leftist Hendrik Broder, who is cited positively several times in Breivik’s manifesto. Broder pens his anti-Islamist diatribes for one of Germany’s main daily papers, Die Welt, and its most read weekly magazine, Der Spiegel.
Last year Broder received significant support in his campaign from the Social Democratic Party member and former Berlin finance senator Thilo Sarrazin, who wrote his own bigoted tract defaming the country’s Arab and Turkish communities — Germany Abolishes Itself.
