Madame Thursday

Sep. 23, 2012 at 1:12pm with 845 notes

“

When it became clear that the terrorist was not a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, bearded Middle Eastern Muslim who hated the West, but a blond, blue-eyed, clean-shaven Norwegian Christian who hated Muslims, a remarkable shift occurred. No-one urged Christian Scandinavians to take exception from their religion and culture; UK Prime Minister David Cameron stopped talking about hunting down the murderers to overcome evil; NATO rethought the wisdom of responding to the attack by military intervention; and the Sweden Democrats suddenly found the idea of making politics of such a tragedy indecent. The mainstream media also suddenly replaced their terrorism experts with psychiatrists trying to explain the attacks, which were now thought of as the actions of a deranged individual.

—

On the rise of a militant anti-Muslim far right in Europe

Islam returned to the fore as the arch-enemy of the West in the 1990s after having been temporarily overshadowed by communism during the Cold War. In Scandinavia, the rising tide of anti-Muslim fever arose concurrently with, firstly, the introduction of neoliberal policies that gradually undermined the Scandinavian model and, secondly, the anxieties produced when national independence gave way to the construction of Europe as a new political community. Of course, migration from countries in which Islam is an important discursive tradition had been going on for decades, but during the Cold War such immigrants were not referred to as Muslims but as Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Iranians, Yugoslavs, Albanians and so on. If they were lumped together, they were called ‘blackheads’ (svartskallar) or ‘blots’ (blattar), epithets they shared with nominally Catholic immigrants from Latin America and southern Europe. At the time, xenophobic opinion knew no religious borders.

Go read this.

(via mehreenkasana)