Anders Breivik And The Rise Of Islamophobia

In late July 2011, Norway was struck by the worst terror attacks in its history. In a fertilizer-bomb attack on Government Headquarters in Oslo and a one-hour-long shooting spree at the Labour Party Youth Camp at Utøya, seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers, were killed by Anders Behring Breivik. By targeting young future social democratic leaders, his actions were meant to lead to the downfall of Europe's purportedly multiculturalist elites, thus removing an obstacle to his plans for an ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Europe. In this highly original work, leading Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad reveals how Breivik's beliefs were not simply the result of a deranged mind, but rather they are the result of the political mainstreaming of pernicious racist and Islamophobic discourses. These ideas, currently gaining common currency, threaten equal rights to dignity, citizenship and democratic participation for minorities throughout contemporary Europe. An authoritative account of the Norwegian terror attacks and the neo-racist discourse that motivated them.

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 and a New York Times bestseller, and now the basis for the Netflix film 22 July, from acclaimed filmmaker Paul Greengrass Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us is essential reading for a time when mass killings are so grimly frequent. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young? As in her international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, Seierstad excels at the vivid portraiture of lives under stress. She delves deep into Breivik's childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist, a successful entrepreneur, and then an Internet game addict and self-styled master warrior who believed he could save Europe from the threat of Islam and multiculturalism. She writes with equal intimacy about Breivik's victims, tracing their political awakenings, teenage flirtations and hopes, and ill-fated journeys to the island. By the time Seierstad reaches Utøya and relates what happened there, we know both the killer and those he will kill. In the book's final act, Seierstad describes Breivik's tumultuous public trial. As Breivik took the stand and articulated his ideas, an entire country debated whether he should be deemed insane, and asked why a devastating sequence of police errors allowed one man to do so much harm. One of Us is at once a psychological study of violent extremism, a dramatic true crime procedural, and a compassionate inquiry into how a privileged society copes with homegrown evil. Lauded in Scandinavia for its literary merit and moral poise, One of Us is the true story of one of our age's most tragic events.

This book is about the transformation of Europe into "Eurabia," a cultural and political appendage of the Arab/Muslim world. Eurabia is fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic. The institution responsible for this transformation, and that continues to propagate its ideological message, is the Euro-Arab Dialogue, developed by European and Arab politicians and intellectuals over the past thirty years.--From publisher description.

On 22 July 2011 a young man named Anders Behring Breivik carried out one of the most vicious terrorist acts in post-war Europe. In a carefully orchestrated sequence of actions he bombed government buildings in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths, then carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers’ Youth League of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya, where he murdered sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers. How could Anders Behring Breivik - a middle-class boy from the West End of Oslo - end up as one of the most violent terrorists in post-war Europe? Where did his hatred come from? In A Norwegian Tragedy, Aage Borchgrevink attempts to provide an answer. Taking us with him to the multiethnic and class-divided city where Breivik grew up, he follows the perpetrator of the attacks into an unfamiliar online world of violent computer games and anti-Islamic hatred, and demonstrates the connection between Breivik’s childhood and the darkest pages of his 1500-page manifesto. This is the definitive story of 22 July 2011: a Norwegian tragedy.

Powerful critique of UK and US surveillance and repression of Muslims and prosecution of homegrown terrorism The new front in the War on Terror is the “homegrown enemy,” domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed—at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda “sympathizers,” and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years. Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disperate as Texas, New York and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived anti-extremism.

The Bibles of the Far Right is about a far-right worldview that has taken hold in contemporary Europe. It focuses on the role Bibles have come to play in this worldview. Starting with the case of far-right terrorism in Norway in 2011, the study argues that particular perceptions of "the Bible" and particular uses of biblical texts have been significant in calls to "protect" Europe against Islam. This study proposes new ways to understand political Bible-use today in order to respond to violence inspired by biblical texts.

Human rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar takes on Islamophobia through the lens of the brutal Christchurch slaughter. In March 2019, a heavily-armed white supremacist walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and slaughtered fifty-one innocent Muslim worshippers while broadcasting on Facebook Live for the world to see. After the Christchurch mosque massacre, authorities found the white supremacist’s seventy-four-page racist manifesto called “The Great Replacement,” which railed against Muslims and the idea that brown Muslim folks were ultimately going to “replace” white people in his irrational “Fear of Muslim Planet.” Fear of a Muslim Planet begins with the treacherous legacy of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre. One of the heroes for the Christchurch shooter was the infamous Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist named Anders Breivik, who brutally murdered seventy-seven people in 2011 in Norway’s worst terrorist attack ever and whose own 1,500-page fascist manifesto promoted thr “Great Replacement” worldview that Muslim immigrants posed a danger to Western societies. As the book further illustrates, minority victims of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory are not limited to Muslims alone. In October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was devastated when a white supremacist brutally executed eleven innocent Jewish congregants in a horrific act of anti-Semitic terrorism (it was the single deadliest attack exclusively targeting Jews ever to happen in the United States). The shooter later told police that he was inspired to commit these murders because Donald Trump was not doing enough to stop immigration. “Open your Eyes!” the shooter posted on social media in a disjointed anti-Semitic and Islamophobic manifesto. “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!” The presidency of Donald Trump has only exacerbated the growth of Islamophobia in America today. Fear of a Muslim Planet outlines the blatantly anti-Muslim statements and policies of Trump and his closest political circle. From telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “I think Islam hates us” to calling for a “complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, the Trump presidency has only made the xenophobic specter of Islamophobia grow today. The book will also show that Islamophobia is not simply an American (or Western) problem either. Fear of a Muslim Planet will show the genocidal levels of Islamophobia in places like China and Myanmar. The European fixation on policing Muslim women’s hijab (headscarf) is another focal point. The book ends with a clarion call for mutual understanding and coexistence among people of all backgrounds, if we have the courage to summon our better selves and look beyond each other’s race, religion, and ethnic backgrounds.

As late as the last quarter of the twentieth century, there were expectations that Islam’s political and cultural influence would dissipate as the advance of westernization brought modernisation and secularisation in its wake. Not only has Islam failed to follow the trajectory pursued by variants of Christianity, namely confinement to the private sphere and depoliticisation, but it has also forcefully re-asserted itself as mobilisations in its name challenge the global order in a series of geopolitical, cultural and philosophical struggles. The continuing (if not growing) relevance of Islam suggests that global history cannot simply be presented as a scaled up version of that of the West. Quests for Muslim autonomy present themselves in several forms — local and global, extremist and moderate, conservative and revisionist — in the light of which the recycling of conventional narratives about Islam becomes increasingly problematic. Not only are these accounts inadequate for understanding Muslim experiences, but by relying on them many Western governments pursue policies that are counter-productive and ultimately hazardous for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Recalling the Caliphate engages critically with the interaction between Islam and the political in context of a post colonial world that continues to resist profound decolonisation. In the first part of this book, Sayyid focuses on how demands for Muslim autonomy are debated in terms such as democracy, cultural relativism, secularism, and liberalism. Each chapter analyses the displacements and evasions by which the decolonisation of the Muslim world continues to be deflected and deferred, while the latter part of the book builds on this critique and attempts to accelerate the decolonisation of the Muslim Ummah.

The far right is on the rise across Europe, pushing a battle scenario in which Islam clashes with Christianity as much as Christianity clashes with Islam. From the margins to the mainstream, far-right protesters and far-right politicians call for the defence of Europe’s Christian culture. The far right claims Christianity. This book investigates contemporary far-right claims to Christianity. Ulrich Schmiedel and Hannah Strømmen examine the theologies that emerge in the far right across Europe, concentrating on Norway, Germany and Great Britain. They explore how churches in these three countries have been complicit, complacent or critical of the far right, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Ultimately, Schmiedel and Strømmen encourage a creative and collaborative theological response. To counter the far right, Christianity needs to be practiced in an open and open-ended way which calls Christians into contact with Muslims.

In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilian president has opened the Amazon and watched it burn. In Europe, parties denying the crisis and insisting on maximum combustion have stormed into office, from Sweden to Spain. On the brink of breakdown, the forces most aggressively promoting business-as-usual have surged - always in defense of white privilege, against supposed threats from non-white others. Where have they come from? The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution - closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.