The Ottoman army besieging Vienna (1529), Hüner-nāme, Topkapi-Serail-Museum, Hazine . Wikicommons/ Nakkaş Osman. Some rights reserved.2015 was the year that anti-Muslim sentiment
officially moved from the margins to the mainstream of political discourse in
Europe.
It was a year of perfect storms. Ideas and
rhetoric traditionally confined to blogs, websites and street protests of the
so-called ‘counter-jihad movement’ (CJM) were echoed by European prime ministers and
presidents.
There has been worrying data emerging on attitudes to
Europe’s Muslims for some time. A Pew Research Center study of seven EU countries in 2014 found that at least
half of those surveyed in Italy, Greece and Poland had a negative opinion of
the Muslims who lived in their country, while public opinion remained divided
in Spain.
The news out of Britain and Germany was more
positive, with a majority having positive views of Muslims. The most favourable
ratings were registered in France (72%), which among the seven nations surveyed
has the highest percentage of Muslims in the national population.
A year later, in spring 2015, YouGov conducted a poll across several countries in Europe and found
worsening results. By now, 40% of French people held negative views of Muslims,
the same level as in the UK. The most negative attitudes were held by the
Danish and Finns, while the least negative feelings, at 36%, were held in
Germany and Sweden.
However, 2015 kicked off with the attack on the
Charlie Hebdo office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris, which left 12 people
dead. These attacks were followed soon after by an armed assault on a ‘free
speech’ event in Denmark and Muhammad cartoon exhibition in Texas.
Sadly, whatever local Muslim communities do to remind society that these extremists don’t
represent them, there are media and social media commentators, as well as
right-wing politicians, constantly fostering a narrative of collective
responsibility.
However, it was the refugee crisis that has brought
many of these strands together in a deadly cocktail of anxiety and fear. The
huge numbers of refugees entering Europe are viewed, by some, as posing an
economic threat; for others their arrival has been perceived as a cultural
threat.
The result of all this is that last year saw the
counter-jihad narrative move increasingly into the mainstream. Suddenly, talk
of a ‘Muslim invasion’ and a ‘threat to western civilisation’ moved from the
social media echo chambers and blogs of anti-Muslim political activists into
the parliamentary chambers of Europe.
This phenomenon is most pronounced in eastern and
central Europe, where high-profile figures are openly expressing anti-Muslim
beliefs. One such example is the former Romanian President Traian Basescu, who
vehemently opposes settling any Muslim refugees, claiming: “as recent history
has showed us, most Muslims are terrorists”.
Meanwhile the Polish government has used the Paris
attacks to refuse Muslim refugees and the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said that: “mass migration of Muslim immigrants who
would start to build mosques will not to be tolerated”, and called for the “restriction
of the freedom of Muslims in Europe”.
The Hungarian PM Viktor Orban has worryingly
started to use counter-jihad conspiracy theories to explain the migrant crisis stating that: “you
cannot get around imagining that some kind of master plan is behind this.” He
has also drawn historical parallels between the current arrival of Muslim
immigrants into Europe and the invasion of the Ottomans which is a central
pillar of current ‘counter-jihad’ rhetoric. (The Gates of Vienna blog, a
central forum of the CJM, is named after the 1529 siege of the city by Suleiman
the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.)
As such it is no surprise that Orban’s utterances
have made him a figure of adulation within the CJM and his name has been
exulted over and chanted by hundreds at anti-Islam Pegida rallies in Germany.
This already worrying trend of mainstreaming
anti-Muslim sentiment was then compounded by the horrific Paris attacks in
November last year, which once again brought the very real danger of Jihadi
violence into stark relief.
In the wake of the attacks Miloš Zeman, the President of the Czech Republic, spoke at an anti-Muslim demonstration organised by the Bloc Against Islam group in Prague
at which thousands of Czech protestors – many wearing racist badges – were
joined by a contingent from Pegida in Germany and Stephen Lennon, founder and
former leader of the English Defence League and now leader of PegidaUK.
In Britain, while David Cameron has shamefully
talked of “swarms” of migrants, our politicians have on the whole avoided such
extreme sentiments. However, the mainstream press has shown no such reticence.
A case in point is Katie Hopkins’ now infamous piece in The Sun that
described immigrants as ‘vagrants’ and ‘cockroaches’. Then in November the Daily
Mail depicted immigrants as rats swarming across the border in a cartoon
with striking parallels to the dehumanising propaganda of the 1930s. These are
just two examples of an increasingly hostile mainstream press.
Similar troubling trends are visible across the
Atlantic with Fox News providing a platform for a number of prominent ‘counter-jihad’
activists, including Robert Spencer, who has previously been banned from entering the UK because of his
extremist views. Most worrying of course was Donald Trump’s calls to ban all Muslim immigration from America.
No longer does one have to stand in a fenced-off
car park at an English Defence League demonstration to hear of a conspiratorial
plot to ‘flood’ Europe or America with Muslims. Now exactly the same ideas are
being articulated by the prime ministers of some member states of the European
Union or prospective Republican presidential candidates.
Whether it was politicians or the press, 2015 was
the year that anti-Muslim rhetoric entered the mainstream. Fuelled especially
by the migrant crisis and then the horrifying Paris attacks, prejudiced
rhetoric traditionally confined to the far right or the counter-jihad movement
has found a voice in ‘respectable’ circles.
Whether this will result in a more widespread and
pervasive anti-Muslim feeling in society, only time will tell – in Britain at
least some polling encouragingly suggests it may not – but it seems that at the very
least 2016 will see a continuation of the worrying shift of anti-Muslim
sentiment from the margins to the mainstream.
There is an acute and growing tension between the concern for safety and the protection of our freedoms. How do we handle this? Read more from the World Forum for Democracy partnership.