Prejudice towards Islam and Muslims is endemic in the Europe of 2017. The "Muslim Question" is central to the politics of the far right, which has achieved success unprecedented since WWII at the polls this year, from France to the Czech Republic via Austria and Germany.
More significantly, the fear of Muslims as potential terrorists has become an integral part of mainstream European politics and the European security state, as has been identified by Amnesty International, among others. [...]
The similarities between contemporary Islamophobia and 1930s anti-Semitism, in particular, are certainly striking: Panic about a Muslim 'horde' coming from the East; an obsession with Muslim conspiracies against the West; and the generalized depiction of Muslim men as corruptors/abusers of vulnerable Christian women (from sex gangs in the North of England to the sexual assaults in German cities on New Year’s Eve 2016). [...]
And we must not forget that the association between Jews and Communism was a central part of European thinking about Jewry before and after the Second World War (John Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, published in 1961, is testimony to its longevity). The idea of the Judeo-Bolshevik menace, however, has no corresponding concept in contemporary European debates about Islam. [...]
In 2017, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe are on the rise, in different ways. The idea of a global Jewish conspiracy is itself globalizing and has found a new incarnation with, for example, the vicious campaigns against financier and philanthropist George Soros.
No comments:
Post a Comment