Abstract: This thesis uses critical discursive psychology to analyse anti-Semitic and Islamophobic discourse on the Facebook pages of two far-right organisations: Britain First and the English Defence League. Using the Charlie Hebdo attack as a time frame, I examine how the far-right manage their identity and maintain rationality online, as well as how users on Facebook respond to the far-right. This thesis demonstrates how Britain First and the English Defence League present themselves as reasonable in their anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic stance following the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Ultimately, I bring together the study of fascist discourse and political discourse on social media using critical discursive psychology, in a novel synthesis. The Charlie Hebdo shooting and the shooting at the kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015 (as well as other attacks by members of the Islamic State) have led to Muslims being seen as a threat to Britain, and thus Muslims have been exposed to Islamophobic attacks and racial abuse. The current climate is a challenging situation for the far-right, as they are presented with the dilemma of appearing as rational and even mainstream, whilst nevertheless adopting an anti-Islamic stance. The analysis focuses on how Britain First and the English Defence League used the shooting at the Kosher supermarket to align with Jews in order to construct them as under threat from Islam, and promote its anti-Islamic stance. I also analyse visual communication used by Britain First to provide evidence that Britain First supported Jewish communities. Discourse from Facebook users transitioned from supportive towards Jews, to questioning the benefits that Jews brought to Britain, and expressing Holocaust denial. Furthermore, I discuss how other far-right politicians in Europe such as Geert Wilders from the Dutch Party for Freedom, portrayed himself as a reasonable politician in the anti-Islamic stance he has taken in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Findings are discussed in light of how the far-right communicate about the Charlie Hebdo shooting whilst maintaining a reasonable stance when projecting anti-Semitic and Islamophobic ideology, and how such discourse can encompass hate speech. I demonstrate how critical discursive psychology can be used to show how various conflicting social identities are constructed and interact with each other online. This thesis shows how the far-right use aligning with Jews as means to present Muslims as problematic, and how such alignment has resulted in the marginalisation of both Jews and Muslims.
Abstract: The more than a million, mostly Muslim, arrivals in the European Union in recent years have given mainstream politicians an opportunity to generate and exploit the public racist, xenophobic and ultra-nationalist urges of the sort that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the extreme right. This successful vote-getting strategy hingeS on disassociating ethno-religious hatred, which Islamophobia is, from its most stigmatized example in Europe: antisemitism. Nowhere has this process been clearer than in Hungary, infamous for ‘solving’ the migration crisis by erecting a wire fence along its borders. Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have stolen the racist thunder of the far-right Jobbik party, but without the latter’s once open antisemitism. Jobbik has responded by also seemingly renouncing antisemitism, ignoring the protests of its more die-hard neo-Nazi supporters. Kalmar’s article focuses on the government’s use of a conspiracy theory about the Jewish financier George Soros as an example of exploiting antisemitism while claiming to oppose it. It suggests that the process of rejecting antisemitism, if disingenuously, in order to legitimize Islamophobic racism in Hungary is a useful model for examining similar processes in much of the Euro-Atlantic world.
Abstract: The objective of this research is to understand the nature and diffusion of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Italy. It is based on 1528 interviews among a representative sample of the Italian population stratified according to age, gender, and residence. The questionnaire used was built by a set of different scales: antisemitic, Islamophobic, and three others scales to take into account authoritarian, ethnocentric, and anomic attitudes. To test assumptions regarding the impact of these predictors of antisemitic and Islamophobic prejudice, it was decided to adopt the statistical technique of path analysis. Outcomes of our research draw attention on the distribution of antisemitism and Islamophobia among Italian people, their nature as a combination of old and new prejudices, and their linking with broader sets of attitudes such as anomie, ethnocentrism, and authoritarianism.
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Circumcision / Brit Milah, Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals, Media, National Identity, Islam, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations, Body
Abstract: This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization.
Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens.
In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.
Abstract: To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon by comparison with the pervasive nature of anti-Muslim racism in French society. This article argues that the two are inseparable, and it focuses on a hitherto overlooked set of connections: in the era since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, at key flash points that question Muslim belonging in France, the position of Jews has repeatedly been invoked in ambiguous, contradictory ways. Participants in these public debates have sometimes forcefully maintained that Jews are unlike Muslims, since they have long been fully integrated French citizens. At other moments, these discussions have raised the specter of Jewish ethnic and religious difference. By emphasizing Jewish particularity, such debates evoke, perforce, the past twenty-five years of controversies about the allegedly problematic attire, food, and beliefs of France’s Muslims. The article focuses on several key moments, from the speech of Prime Minister Manuel Valls before the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, to the kippah and burkini affairs of 2016, to the provocative comments of candidates in the 2017 presidential elections concerning Muslim and Jewish religious and ethnic markers of difference.
Abstract: In the context of the Dutch immigration debate, tributes to the Holocaust and the memory of Europe’s dead Jews increasingly serve to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm and to drive a wedge between a revitalized, redeemed, color-blind, post-racial Europe and disenfranchized immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. Embedded in these invocations of the Holocaust and its moral imperatives is a ‘spectropolitics’ of tolerance, in which tolerance, staged as an essential touchstone of Dutch identity, supplies a differential norm that measures the civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans, minorities, and Muslims, and validates the new dual paradigm of Dutch citizenship and immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration. The centrality of the Holocaust as paradigmatic of Dutch and European racial history meanwhile sidelines the colonial past as constitutive of European identity; displaces an alternative understanding of race as (bio- and necro-political) instruments of colonial rule; and disavows the continued application of these instruments of racial rule in Dutch and European post-colonial societies.
Abstract: The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent’s Muslim population have received increasing attention. In Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in this debate. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion.
According to Bunzl, anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. With the declining importance of the nation-state, traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course, while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new, unified Europe. By ridding us of misapprehensions, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia enables us to see these forces anew.
Abstract: In this contribution, I examine the Catholic political practice of “intercessions” (shtadlanut) as a means to control and manage relations between state power and Jewish communities by means of a privileged elite. While governmental techniques or mechanisms of minority management are only part of a broader question of majority–minority power relations, the theological-political roots of such “management” strategies are often overlooked because the problem is assumed to be secular. In my analysis of shtadlanut, I show how Jewish communities were internally divided between “good” and “bad”, “managed” by the ruling powers, and homogenized. It is precisely this type of enforced collaboration with power, in combination with reduced agency and de-politicization, that I claim goes beyond the “Jewish Question”. Rather, we must turn our gaze on Europe and consider how, and why, it continues to make 'others' into problems. By doing so, we can challenge the frame of the contemporary "Muslim Question".
Abstract: This article explores contemporary images of Jews and Muslims in Norway by using qualitative empirical data, namely the answers to an open-ended question that was included in a quantitative survey on attitudes towards Jews and other minorities in Norway, conducted in 2012. The target group for the survey consisted of Norwegian residents aged 18 and above. A total of 1522 people answered the questionnaire. The results of the survey can be considered as representative of the Norwegian population with respect to age, gender, education and geographical distribution.
Respondents were asked what they regarded to be the reasons for existing negative attitudes towards Jews and Muslims respectively. This article analyzes whether the perceptions reflected in the respondents’ answers represent stereotypical views and partly include traces of conspiracy beliefs. The article also discusses these perceptions within the broader perspective of Norwegian society, asking in which ways the data reflects ideas of inclusion and exclusion.
The analysis exposes differences regarding traditional stereotypes and prejudices against the two minorities and the ways in which these prejudices are linked to (perceived) contemporary conflicts and tensions – both within Norwegian society and internationally. Negative attitudes towards Jews are often explained with reference to the role played by Israel in the Middle East conflict, and almost never with specific reference to Norwegian society. The material contains few examples describing Jews as scapegoats for current social problems in Norway. On the contrary, respondents’ answers indicate social distance. Approximately half of the answers claim that negative attitudes towards Jews are due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The images of Jews presented in connection with this conflict are predominantly negative and characterized by topics such as oppression, ruthlessness and power. The analysis shows how these statements serve to reduce complexity by effectively equating “Jews” with “Israelis”. As a consequence Jews seem to be excluded from the notion of the Norwegian national collective.
The statements about Muslims show that they are regarded to be citizens and as such part of Norwegian society, but with characteristics perceived as problematic and threatening. Respondents often connected negative attitudes towards Muslims with a “foreign culture”. Many statements describe Muslims as oppressive to women, as harboring undemocratic attitudes or as criminals.
The data shows how people develop generalizations, describing something as “typically Muslim” or “typically Jewish”, reflecting current debates and media coverage. Such generalizations derive their strength from placing the speaker in a morally superior position. In the present material these attitudes represent the antithesis of an implicit notion of the Norwegian community as a liberal, egalitarian and peace-loving society. Despite the differences, a clear picture emerges that the characterizations of both Jews and Muslims seem to serve a common function: to provide a contrast to this national self-image. Such polarized notions of “us” and “them”, however, undermine the values generally constructed as “Norwegian”: when “the other” bears problematic features that we do not want to acknowledge in ourselves or our communities, we lose the ability to critically reflect on who we are. While maintaining an idealized notion of “us”, we become increasingly dependent on a rejection and denial of the “other”.
Abstract: Relations between Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam grew tense after the conflicts between Gaza and Israel in 2014, the violent attacks on Jewish targets in Brussels (2014), Paris (2015) and Copenhagen (2015) and local incidents of online, verbal and sometimes physical discrimination. Nevertheless, these factors also inspired Jews and Muslims to launch cooperation projects and strengthen the bonds already existing between them. Cooperation in turbulent times is not always easy. The data collected for this research show how Jews and Muslims in cooperation projects use to strategies to solve some of the problems confronting them. The three most widely used strategies that were found are ‘searching for similarities’, ‘decategorizing’ and ‘avoidance’. These strategies do not emerge in a vacuum, however, but at a certain moment in time, in specific fields. Therefore, this article, will describe the usage of the three strategies and explain the interaction between strategies and their contexts.
Abstract: En France, les juifs sont inquiets, ils constatent que l'antisémitisme dans le pays s'étend et revêt un tour meurtrier. Les musulmans, eux, sont soupçonnés de passivité ou de compréhension pour le djihadisme, leur intégration bute sur le racisme et les discriminations, et leur seule existence sur notre territoire a relancé les passions relatives à la laïcité. Enfin, notre république est en crise, impuissante bien souvent à se conformer à son propre idéal d'égalité et de fraternité.
Il est temps de transformer cette crise en débat et de repenser le vivre-ensemble. C'est ce que propose ce livre, à partir d'une hypothèse originale : les juifs et les musulmans, au-delà de ce qui les sépare, ne sont-ils pas les mieux placés pour réfléchir à l'aggiornamento du modèle républicain français ? Pour permettre à la France de mieux affronter les grands périls actuels – le terrorisme, le racisme, la haine et l'intolérance – et pour préciser les contours d'un nouveau modèle à même de conjuguer les valeurs démocratiques et le respect ou la reconnaissance des particularismes ?
Farhad Khosrokhavar est spécialiste de la question de l'islam et de la radicalisation, Michel Wieviorka de la violence et de l'antisémitisme. Tous deux montrent par l'exemple comment musulmans et juifs peuvent contribuer à rebâtir activement notre république.
