EUROPE

The rise of hate

Immigrant-bashing right wing parties have made sweeping electoral gains across Europe. A survey of a continent awash in anger.

  By KAREN THOMAS LONDON

In June, a dozen white youths surrounded a mosque in Llanelli, Wales. Aged between 20 and 25, the men had allegedly been drinking. Eyewitnesses saw the youths hurl abuse at a group of elderly Muslims, spraying them with beer cans and trying to remove an elderly cleric’s headgear, hurling punches and spitting in his face. Mosque treasurer Mohammed Ashraf went home, pale and distressed. He collapsed at his wife’s feet and was rushed to hospital. Medical staff could not save him. Ashraf, 60, died of a suspected heart attack.

Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe. The year since September 11th has seen right-wing groups find a new, worryingly mainstream audience for anti-Muslim hatred. The result has been a sharp increase in attacks on Muslims across Europe – attacks that cannot be separated from their wider political context.

Europe’s far-right parties have launched a crusade to shield white Europe from a supposed tidal wave of Third World asylum seekers, singling out “foreign” Muslim values as the focus for their hatred. In the last three years, right-wing groups have made electoral gains in the Netherlands, France, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland and Spain, exploiting growing anti-immigrant and Islamophobic feeling.

Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party swept to power in Austria in 1999. Haider’s media-friendly campaign used soft-focus photographs and talk of “traditional” values. But his message was old-school racist: Austria must be protected from uberfremdung – being “swamped” by non-white, non-Christian foreigners.

Since then, Europe has lost ground to the racist right. Last November, People’s Party leader Pia Kjaersgaard joined Denmark’s ruling right-wing coalition after declaring an unholy war against Islam. People’s Party posters ran the slogan: “By the time you retire, Denmark will be a Muslim-majority nation.”

Europe’s far right is split between those who primarily hate Jews and those who direct their hatred towards the continent’s 20 million Muslims. Parallel to Muslim-hating Kjaersgaard is the anti-Semitic French right-wing leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. A vehement Holocaust denier, Le Pen polled 18 percent of the vote in the first round of recent presidential elections. He adores Arab food, admires Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gadhafi, and has fielded a French-Lebanese National Front candidate. But a racist is a racist. Le Pen’s political agenda is anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic and viciously anti-immigrant.

When Dutch right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn was assassinated, the media portrayed him as a libertarian, highlighting his scorn for Le Pen’s anti-Semitism, and playing down his hatred of Muslims. But Fortuyn’s message was both racist and Islamophobic. “Islam is simply a backward culture,” Fortuyn said, blaming third-generation Moroccans “who won’t live by our values,” Turks and Surinamese for 90 percent of Rotterdam’s street crime. Muslims make up less than five percent of the Dutch population.

The British National Party (BNP) won two local council seats this spring, campaigning on an anti-Muslim platform, after clashes between white and South Asian youths the previous summer. The BNP has launched an ethnic liaison committee, headed by Anglo-Turkish activist Lawrence Rustem, recruiting “non-whites” to give the party’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim stance a respectable veneer.

Campaigns. In a report published this summer, the Vienna-based European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) slammed the BNP’s new strategy. “The far-right British National Party has launched an explicit Islamophobic campaign,” EUMC reported. “It reasserted Christianity being under threat from Muslims in the UK, including isolated Sikh and Hindu voices in the campaign, despite [opposition from their] wider respective communities.”

The EUMC studied attacks on Muslims between September and December 2001 in 15 European countries. Compiled by a network of researchers, the report is a catalogue of physical assaults, racial slurs, hate campaigns and media bias. In nearly every country, veiled Muslim women were assaulted and forced to unveil, and Sikh and Hindu men were attacked after being mistaken for Muslims.

Belgian researchers noted an increase in harassment of Moroccan families, running parallel to an increase in anti-Semitism. In Denmark, a national poll reported that more than half of all Danes believed that US strikes in Afghanistan had “religious connotations.” Far-right party Dansk Forum launched a boycott of Muslim businesses.

France reported growing hostility towards veiled women and bearded men. A soccer match between France and Algeria sparked endless column inches about young North Africans’ willingness to integrate. The National Republican Movement linked immigration to Islamic “fanaticism.” In Athens, the far-right Greek Front party declared that all Muslims should be incarcerated to await deportation. In Ireland, Dublin’s Islamic Cultural Centre received abusive phone calls.

Several attacks on Muslims and their businesses were reported in Italy, where racists sent a paper bomb to an outspoken imam. The EUMC slammed Italian newspapers for legitimizing anti-Islamic comment and reported that “an ongoing, subtle feeling of Islamophobia seems to have remained.” Arsonists attacked mosques and an Islamic school in the Netherlands. A newspaper poll claimed that most Dutch people see Muslims as a “threat.” Mosques were defaced and firebombed in Britain. The EUMC criticized the media for highlighting extremist Muslim views, while ignoring moderate, mainstream Muslims.

“The hijab seems to have become the primary visual identifier as a target for hatred,” the report concluded. “Muslim women [were] being routinely abused and attacked in those countries where Muslim women could be identified in this way.”

British-born South Asian student Sara studies law in London. Early one evening, three men approached her at a bus stop. “They were drunk and aggressive,” Sara recalls. “They called me a Muslim bitch, and yelled at me to go home to my own country.” The men ripped off Sara’s veil, tearing out a chunk of her hair. Sara is now afraid to leave home alone. “Other English people passed by, and only one old lady intervened,” Sara says. Sensing an anti-Muslim consensus, she did not report the assault to the police.

The British-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has reported a 13-fold increase in Islamophobic incidents – 200 alleged incidents, ranging from violent assaults to verbal abuse and discrimination at work – immediately after September 11th. Few victims reported these incidents to the authorities. “Since September 11th, initial violent attacks have given way to more sophisticated, subtle discrimination,” says IHRC chairman Massoud Shadjareh. “Now, we are seeing more workplace discrimination against Muslims: people not being promoted, or being dismissed. We are putting together a report to quantify this.”

Legal aid. “Large numbers of individuals are coming forward, claiming discrimination at work. But there is no legal aid, or any other funding, to support these victims. Unless you are rich enough to fund your own legal action, you suffer in silence. This is the greatest injustice.”

Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, chairman of the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR), says that slurs against Muslims and sweeping generalizations about Islam go unchallenged, post-September 11th. “Islamophobia is no longer confined to the far-right and lunatic margins, but flourishing across the political spectrum in European culture and society,” he says. “It would be unthinkable today, and rightly so, for a European leader to pronounce publicly that Jewish civilization was inferior to Western civilization, but . . . the Italian prime minister declared soon after September 11th that Islam was inferior to the West.”

Post-September 11th, heightened hostility towards Muslims has merged with resentment against asylum seekers. Yet the alarmist headlines in European newspapers mask the fact that the “refugee problem” is a myth. The world’s poorest countries absorb the majority of refugees. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s refugees – 6 million people – live in the Middle East. A further 3.3 million live in Africa. Far from being “economic migrants,” the largest number asylum seekers in Europe are from war-torn Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.

The failure of mainstream political parties to challenge stereotyped views of Muslim culture and misplaced fears about immigration has given a new platform to prejudice. Some European media owners give carte blanche to the most virulent anti-Muslim views. “Wake up, people, wake up!” the former left-wing writer Oriana Falluci ranted in Italy’s Corriera della Serra in September 2001. “Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the tide and appearing racist . . . you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a crusade in reverse is under way.”

Falluci provoked outrage in France when Le Monde serialized her book, The Anger and the Pride. It asserts that “Muslims annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying and not praying, our way of eating and drinking, and wearing clothes, and having fun.”

Syrian writer Rana Kabbani was among the outraged. “Had this book’s victims been anyone other than Muslims, it would not have been published,” Kabbani says. “Muslims are fair game now, and to defame them en masse has become not only respectable, but highly profitable.”

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