Motley Moose – Archive

After receiving a 30-day suspension for wearing a Nazi armband, a cabbie has decided to speak out about his suspension and profess his belief in national socialism.  In the interview with WCBS, Gabriel Diaz claims that Hitler’s record is distorted, that Nazism is not a racist ideology, that he is not an anti-Semite and denies the Holocaust, among other things.

My heart is in my throat. For the last few years (as I’ll demonstrate below) I’ve seen real hatred take root and both Europe and the US. As I wrote a Daily Beast piece about the horrific killing of an off duty soldier in London last week, I was expecting it. But the hundreds of nasty, ignorant hateful comments underneath only confirmed something I’ve seen for years now – phrased less execrably on respectable blogs, by respectable oommentators:

The crass generalities and cultural stereotypes  of Islamophobia have become a normal and acceptable form of current discourse in most public debate.

Words lead to actions. In the aftermath of the killing of Drummer Rigby by two Brits with Nigerian backgrounds – there have been over 200 attacks on Muslims, Mosques and threats of violence

There was nothing like this in 1982, when the IRA killed 16 soldiers in the Mall. There was nothing like this in France, when a lone gunman killed shot French soldiers a few years ago.

A politically acceptable form of bigotry, whipped up the the papers, and given validation by countless intellectuals is now spilling over in backlash much worse than the inciting incident.

Below the follow I’ll link back and quote to some of the previous pieces I wrote on this terrifying phenomenon over the two years ago. I urge all responsible progressives to fight this new tide of hatred – combat its lies and exaggerations – before it’s too late.  

Busy at the Olympics, which has been brilliant, but I thought I’d pass on more sobering news.

The Guardian explains the FBI findings

The FBI is examining ties between white supremacist movements and a US army veteran who killed six people as they gathered at a Sikh place of worship in Wisconsin on Sunday.

The police identified the gunman as Wade Michael Page, 40, who served in a US army psychological operations unit before he was discharged in 1998 for a pattern of misconduct, including being drunk on duty.

The Daily Beast has more details of Wade Michael Page’s past, including some great investigative research into his band:

Band photographs of End Apathy on their band-mix page show Page holding a red electric guitar, wearing a shirt that reads “Definite Hate: Music With Pride,” over a Confederate flag. Swastikas and Confederate flags hang in the background. Definite Hate, another band in which Page played guitar, is also affiliated with the Hammerskins, according to Pitcavage.

The Definite Hate song “Take Action” includes these lyrics: “All the talking is done and now it’s time to walk the walk / Revolution’s in the air 9mm in my hand / You can run but you can’t hide from this master plan.” It has been reported that Page used a 9mm semi-automatic handgun in Sunday’s attacks.

The death of Christopher Hitchens is a loss to the world of letters for, as the many eulogies over the last week have proven, he was clearly a stylish writer, a fantastic orator, and from the accounts of those who knew him, a voluble, generous and compassionate friend.

But as the last line of Some Like It Hot makes clear: “No-one is perfect.” Given that Hitchens never stood on ceremony, and was a great slayer of sacred cows, it wouldn’t be fitting to note his passing without decrying one of his more otiose and unfortunate legacies: as the inventor and populariser of the term Islamofascism.  

If there’s any shred of comfort that come come from the horrors of ten days ago, the bomb attacks in Oslo and massacre of dozens of teenagers in Utøya, it is scant consolation for bereft families or a nation in mourning. The biggest atrocity on Norwegian soil since World War II, and one of the biggest terrorist incidents in Europe in decades, is no occasion for political point scoring. But some good may yet come out of it: the full glare of public scrutiny (and one hopes police attention) has now been turned on the largely ignored growth of extreme right-wing Islamophobia in Europe.

Nearly exactly a year ago, I wrote how Obama had bravely faced up to the Islamophobes in the US during his Ramadan speech and worried that  Europe lacked such leadership.

The rise of Islamophobia in Europe over the last few years – expression of which I have encountered many times in the past, even on LabourList, – has filled me with a kind a foreboding I haven’t felt since the early 90s and the rabid nationalism in former-Yugoslavia, which itself had an anti-Muslim component.

The signs are everywhere to be seen. The US have Palin’s ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ and the threat of Koran burning. We have the French assembly voting to ban niqab, Switzerland banning minarets, and the rise of the English Defence League here in the UK, deliberately targeting Muslim communities with provocation and violence…

We have demagogues like Geert Wilders in Holland getting 33% of the vote by inciting fear and hatred. Meanwhile, opportunist politicians in the UK try to ride the bandwagon, putting forward legislation to ban burkas. This is hardly helped by so-called intellectuals (who should know better) talking about ‘Islamofascism’ or “Londonistan” and trying to yolk together a religion of universalist appeal with racist ultranationalism.

Don’t worry. This is not some gratuitous exercise in ‘I told you so’. My hands are no cleaner than others, and in the rise of Islamophobia I have to share some blame (more below). We do not know yet if Anders Behring Breivik acted entirely alone. He may yet win an insanity defence. Yet there’s little doubt that both his targets and his motivation were avowedly  political. Both the video he uploaded and the European Manifesto of Independence he passed on to sympathisers should place that beyond doubt Though somewhat rambling and derivative, Breivik’s arguments are rational and coherent. He articulates a vision of the ‘Islamisation of Europe’, deliberately smuggled in by Marxists spouting ‘multiculturalism’ as their credo. That vision, and his belief that an incendiary act of violence was needed to trigger the inevitable religious and social conflict make it indisputable: the killings on Friday 21st of July a classic act of political terrorism.

Like many young men who search for some final battle between good and evil, Breivik was a dreamer of the absolute, who found his purpose in sacrificing himself for a cause greater than himself. In this, he resembles the extremist Jihadists he purports to despise, and like many of them, he seems to have been indoctrinated and then motivated into a medieval mindset through a quite modern source: what he read online.  

(This is a draft of an Essay to Appear on Labour List tomorrow)

Ever since Jared Loughner’s murderous attack in Tucson, Americans have been more sensitive to the way extreme political discourse can effect the deranged, paranoid and alienated, and how perverse inflammatory metaphors (gunsights, 2nd amendment solutions, watering the tree of liberty) can actually provide the ideas that feed political violence.

However, in Europe, obsessed as it is with Islamist demons, convinced of its own secular moderate rectitude, we’ve forgotten how easily the thin skin of tolerance is broached. In France, they ban niquab. In Switzerland, they ban minarets. Holland includes an Islamophobe bigot in its ruling parliamentary coalition. The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel talks about how ‘multiculturalism’ has failed. In Britain, the biggest threat to public order in the last few years has been hard line Islamphobic English Defence League which now targets Muslims (though Jews, Blacks and Gays are next in line).

Even the Prime Minister of Britain – itself a multinational, multiethnic, multi-denominational state for hundreds of years –  David Cameron has joined this fashionable chorus of which somehow blames ‘multiculturalism’ as the cause of the rise of Islamist extremism.

Now these alarms have reaped their bitter harvest. With 92 people dead, the vast majority 16-19 year olds at a Labour summer camp, there is no doubt of the political aspect of Anders Brehing Breivik’s crime.

Norway attacks: Utøya gunman boasted of links to UK far right Anders Brehing Breivik took part in online discussions with members of the EDL and other anti-Islamic groups

It was revealed that the 32-year-old former member of the country’s conservative Progress party – who had become ever more extreme in his hatred of Muslims, leftwingers and the country’s political establishment – had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser in May to be used in the bombing. While police continued to interrogate Breivik, who was charged with the mass killings, evidence of his increasingly far-right world-view emerged from an article he had posted on several Scandinavian websites, including Nordisk, a site frequented by neo-Nazis, far-right radicals and Islamophobes since 2009.

The Norwegian daily VG quoted one of Breivik’s friends, saying that he had become a rightwing extremist in his late 20s and was now a strong opponent of multiculturalism, expressing strong nationalistic views in online debates.

Breivik had talked admiringly online about conversations he had had with unnamed English Defence League members and the organisation Stop the Islamification of Europe (SIOE) over the success of provocative street actions leading to violence.

“I have on some occasions had discussions with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use certain strategies,” he wrote two years ago. “The tactics of the EDL are now to ‘lure’ an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already.”

Before the attacks, Breivik uploaded his manifesto to Youtube.

Ever since Jared Loughner’s murderous attack in Tucson, Americans have been more sensitive to the way extreme political discourse can effect the deranged, paranoid and alienated, and how perverse inflammatory metaphors (gunsights, 2nd amendment solutions, watering the tree of liberty) can actually provide the ideas that feed political violence.

However, in Europe, obsessed as it is with Islamist demons, convinced of its own secular moderate rectitude, we’ve forgotten how easily the thin skin of tolerance is broached. In France, they ban niquab. In Switzerland, they ban minarets. Holland includes an Islamophobe bigot in its ruling parliamentary coalition. The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel talks about how ‘multiculturalism’ has failed. In Britain, the biggest threat to public order in the last few years has been hard line Islamphobic English Defence League which now targets Muslims (though Jews, Blacks and Gays are next in line).

Even the Prime Minister of Britain – itself a multinational, multiethnic, multi-denominational state for hundreds of years –  David Cameron has joined this fashionable chorus of which somehow blames ‘multiculturalism’ as the cause of the rise of Islamist extremism.

Now these alarms have reaped their bitter harvest. With 92 people dead, the vast majority 16-19 year olds at a Labour summer camp, there is no doubt of the political aspect of Anders Brehing Breivik’s crime.

Norway attacks: Utøya gunman boasted of links to UK far right Anders Brehing Breivik took part in online discussions with members of the EDL and other anti-Islamic groups

It was revealed that the 32-year-old former member of the country’s conservative Progress party – who had become ever more extreme in his hatred of Muslims, leftwingers and the country’s political establishment – had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser in May to be used in the bombing. While police continued to interrogate Breivik, who was charged with the mass killings, evidence of his increasingly far-right world-view emerged from an article he had posted on several Scandinavian websites, including Nordisk, a site frequented by neo-Nazis, far-right radicals and Islamophobes since 2009.

The Norwegian daily VG quoted one of Breivik’s friends, saying that he had become a rightwing extremist in his late 20s and was now a strong opponent of multiculturalism, expressing strong nationalistic views in online debates.

Breivik had talked admiringly online about conversations he had had with unnamed English Defence League members and the organisation Stop the Islamification of Europe (SIOE) over the success of provocative street actions leading to violence.

“I have on some occasions had discussions with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use certain strategies,” he wrote two years ago. “The tactics of the EDL are now to ‘lure’ an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already.”

Before the attacks, Breivik uploaded his manifesto to Youtube.

Ever since Jared Loughner’s murderous attack in Tucson, Americans have been more sensitive to the way extreme political discourse can effect the deranged, paranoid and alienated, and how perverse inflammatory metaphors (gunsights, 2nd amendment solutions, watering the tree of liberty) can actually provide the ideas that feed political violence.

However, in Europe, obsessed as it is with Islamist demons, convinced of its own secular moderate rectitude, we’ve forgotten how easily the thin skin of tolerance is broached. In France, they ban niquab. In Switzerland, they ban minarets. Holland includes an Islamophobe bigot in its ruling parliamentary coalition. The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel talks about how ‘multiculturalism’ has failed. In Britain, the biggest threat to public order in the last few years has been hard line Islamphobic English Defence League which now targets Muslims (though Jews, Blacks and Gays are next in line).

Even the Prime Minister of Britain – itself a multinational, multiethnic, multi-denominational state for hundreds of years –  David Cameron has joined this fashionable chorus of which somehow blames ‘multiculturalism’ as the cause of the rise of Islamist extremism.

Now these alarms have reaped their bitter harvest. With 92 people dead, the vast majority 16-19 year olds at a Labour summer camp, there is no doubt of the political aspect of Anders Brehing Breivik’s crime.

Norway attacks: Utøya gunman boasted of links to UK far right Anders Brehing Breivik took part in online discussions with members of the EDL and other anti-Islamic groups

It was revealed that the 32-year-old former member of the country’s conservative Progress party – who had become ever more extreme in his hatred of Muslims, leftwingers and the country’s political establishment – had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser in May to be used in the bombing. While police continued to interrogate Breivik, who was charged with the mass killings, evidence of his increasingly far-right world-view emerged from an article he had posted on several Scandinavian websites, including Nordisk, a site frequented by neo-Nazis, far-right radicals and Islamophobes since 2009.

The Norwegian daily VG quoted one of Breivik’s friends, saying that he had become a rightwing extremist in his late 20s and was now a strong opponent of multiculturalism, expressing strong nationalistic views in online debates.

Breivik had talked admiringly online about conversations he had had with unnamed English Defence League members and the organisation Stop the Islamification of Europe (SIOE) over the success of provocative street actions leading to violence.

“I have on some occasions had discussions with SIOE and EDL and recommended them to use certain strategies,” he wrote two years ago. “The tactics of the EDL are now to ‘lure’ an overreaction from the Jihad Youth/Extreme-Marxists, something they have succeeded in doing several times already.”

Before the attacks, Breivik uploaded his manifesto to Youtube.

The rise of Islamophobia across Europe in recent years has filled me with a kind a foreboding I haven’t felt since the early 90s and the Nationalism in Former Yugoslavia. So I salute your President for taking on Palin, the TeaPartyers and Islamophobes over the Mosque Prayer Room in Downtown Manhattan as he celebrated the beginning of Ramadan at the White House last night.