European
Islamophobia
By Lee Sustar
01 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
European
politicians from London to Moscow are bashing Islam and immigrants,
legitimizing politics previously limited to the anti-immigrant extreme
right.
The latest high-profile venture
in Islamophobia is taking place in Britain, where Labour Party minister
Jack Straw suddenly announced in an October 5 newspaper column that
he felt "uncomfortable" speaking to Muslim women wearing the
full-face veil known as the niqab, calling it a barrier to community
relations. Prime Minister Tony Blair chimed in days later, calling the
niqab a "mark of separation."
The Labour Party's intervention
represents the liberal version of Islamophobia, a complement to the
right-wing variant, which has included Pope Benedict's speech portraying
Islam as a violent religion, George W. Bush's tirade against "Islamofascism,"
and the publication of racist anti-Islamist cartoons by a right-wing
Danish newspaper.
In Italy, another leading
liberal, Prime Minister Romano Prodi, followed Blair in speaking out
against the niqab.
Meanwhile, British authorities
reported several incidents in which women were verbally harassed for
wearing the niqab or a head covering known as the hijab, following Straw's
comments. There were violent attacks as well, including an October 21
assault carried out by three men on those attending prayers at a mosque
in the city of Manchester.
The same day, right-wing
media amplified Straw and Blair's attacks on Islam, with the Daily Express
tabloid running a front-page photo of a woman in a niqab under the massive
headline "BAN IT!" A 24-year-old school teaching assistant,
Aishah Azmi, won $2,000 in a labor tribunal case involving her suspension
for wearing a niqab in class--but her complaints of discrimination and
harassment were dropped.
The backdrop for all this
is a series of raids and arrests of Muslims since August involving an
alleged plot to hijack British airliners--even though they had taken
no action toward doing so.
The Labour Party's role in
stoking Islamophobia has given political cover for neo-Nazis and far-right
politicians in Europe, who have already made anti-Islamism their focus,
as a brief look across the continent makes clear:
France
Four Muslim baggage-handlers
at Charles De Gaulle Airport recently lost their jobs when a local government
revoked their security clearances.
The crackdown follows publication
of a book--by Philippe de Villiers, the candidate of the right-wing
Movement for France (MPF) party in next year's presidential elections--that
claims to detail Muslim "infiltration" of the airport. "I
am the only politician who tells the French the truth about the Islamization
of France," he told an interviewer earlier this year.
A police union affiliated
with de Villiers' MPF recently called for more weapons to fight what
it called an ongoing "intifada" in the heavily Muslim immigrant
suburbs of Paris, which erupted in riots a year ago after two youths
died while being chased by police.
De Villiers is positioning
himself as a more palatable alternative to National Front leader Jean-Marie
Le Pen, the Holocaust-denying, anti-immigrant neo-Nazi who came in second
in the 2002 presidential election.
Islamophobia has been a staple
of French politics for years, with parties of the mainstream right and
left backing the ban of the hijab of public schools in 2004. The mainstream
right is also counting on anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant politics to
maintain control of the presidency, as Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy
combines his law-and-order policies in the Paris suburbs with new laws
cracking down on undocumented immigrants.
Germany
The neo-Nazi National Democratic
Party (NDP) scored its biggest success ever in September's election
in the depressed Eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, giving
Germany's extreme right representation in four German states.
A few weeks later, Ronald
Pofalla, the head of Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor
Angela Merkel, wrote a newspaper column claiming that "the problem
of religiously motivated violence is today almost exclusively a problem
of Islam." Earlier this year, the eighth of Germany's 16 states
voted to ban the hijab in public schools.
Belgium
The far-right Velaams Belang
nearly captured control of the Antwerp city government in mid-October
on an openly Islamophobic platform, winning 33.5 percent of the vote,
compared to 35 percent assembled by a Socialist coalition.
Bulgaria
Volen Siderov, candidate
of the ultranationalist Ataka (Attack) party, bested the country's other
right-wing parties by winning 22 percent of the vote in the first round
of presidential elections October 22. Running on a platform of banning
Turkish parties and cracking down on the Roma people, known as gypsies,
Siderov will contest a runoff vote with incumbent president Georgi Parvanov
of the Socialist Party.
Russia
The growing Nazi and far
right are mobilizing behind the Movement Against Illegal Immigration--and
the organization's politics recently got the blessing of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
Following raids and mass
deportation of Georgians after Russia's spy scandal involving that former
republic of the USSR, Putin gave a speech in which he declared that
Russians are being "terrorized" by gangs of "criminals"
from the Muslim countries of former USSR republics in Central Asia,
the Caucasus and the large Muslim population of Russia itself.
Islamophobia has replaced
anti-Semitism as the focus of the European far right, according to Glyn
Ford, a British member of the European Parliament and author of a book
on neo-fascism in Europe. "Europe is in danger of seeing its extreme-right
parties move into the mainstream," he said, adding, "Islamophobia
has become the prejudice of the day, but the threat from the extreme
right is real and it is found across the European Union."
Lee Sustar
can be reached at: [email protected]
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