The Danger of Islamophobia

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


A note from the Baron: Fjordman brought my attention to the newspaper editorial translated below. Our Danish correspondent TB did the initial bulk translation, and Fjordman adjusted it to produce the final result. Fjordman’s insertions are in square brackets.

Notice that Ms. Michelet refers disparagingly to Counterjihad Brussels 2007, a conference that Fjordman and I both attended.

From Dagbladet, Monday March 17th:

Muslim Whore
by Marte Michelet

Islamophobia is the most dangerous ideology of our time and we must be brave enough to call a spade a spade^*, Marte Michelet writes.

“If Islam is so wonderful, then how come you walk around [looking like] a whore?” This was what a representative of [the small party] Demokratene in Akershus wrote to me in an email last week. He reacted to the article I had written on Women’s Day regarding how brown [i.e. Fascist, right-wing extremist] forces use rhetoric of gender equality as a pretext for racist attacks on Muslims. Another confused guy, who also gave his full name, wrote: “I hope you burn in hell, you bloody whore [for Muslims]!”

I have earlier received funny hate mails from Norwegian men who first accused me of not seeing how oppressive Muslim men are, and then demanded that I should put on the burka because I am so ugly that I should not be seen during daylight.

These reactions are marginal and extreme, but at the same time they are indicators of the very trend that I tried to warn against on March 8: That many of those who claim to be champions of gender equality and the rights of Muslim women in reality are archetypical racists and sexists. What many people refuse to acknowledge is that we are not just dealing with a few scattered lunatics, but that all right-wing populist parties in Europe have now discovered how convenient it is to swap the mantra “the immigrants steal our jobs” for “the immigrants oppress their women.”

In Norway, there has until now been little debate about this turnaround. There has been remarkably little focus on the growing anti-Muslim movement in general — we didn’t pay attention to it. In contrast, the Swedish organization Expo (where the now deceased writer Stieg Larsson was a driving force) has. Expo keeps an eye on the extreme Right and dedicated the latest issue of their magazine to an analysis of the new Islamophobic political scene in Europe. It does not make for pleasant reading. Expo demonstrates how a broad network of counter-Jihadists made up of academics, bloggers, politicians and activists have united in the fight to “stop the Islamization of Europe.” The core of this network consists of well-known extreme right-wing parties such as the Front National in France, Geert Wilders and his Dutch Freedom party and the Vlaams Belang from Belgium.

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In October last year they arranged a large “Counter-Jihad Conference” in Brussels where people from these parties could meet with like-minded people from Europe, the USA and Israel. One of the participants Expo presents is the Norwegian Jens Tomas Anfindsen, who runs the Islam-critical website honestthinking.org and who is also an earlier advisor to Hege Storhaug’s Human Rights Service (HRS). Now his brother Ole Jørgen Anfindsen works for HRS. Every day he posts Islam-critical texts on the homepage of this organization, with frequent links to questionable “counter-Jihad” websites. The main speaker at last year’s conference in Brussels was the amateur historian Bat Ye’or, the author of the Islamophobic Bible, the book Eurabia, which warns of a Muslim conspiracy against Europe. The book is probably as trustworthy as the anti-Semitic idea of the Jewish conspiracy ZOG, but is highly recommended by HRS.

Storhaug and the brothers Anfindsen are Norway’s most vocal critics of Islam, and many people consider what they do to be sensible and necessary criticism of religion in a good liberal tradition. To point out that they promote an Islamophobic agenda in close cooperation with racist and right-wing populist forces is considered an unjust smear. But it is actually totally unnecessary to associate them with these forces. They do so themselves, quite voluntarily.

The peculiar thing about the Norwegian debate is that they are not criticized for this. It is never demanded that Storhaug & Co should distance themselves from their spiritual friends, from racist forms of criticism of Islam or from violent attacks against Muslims. They do not need to take responsibility for the [mental] climate they participate in creating. In the furious debate on the Internet which followed my article on March 8, not a single person among those who criticized Islam distanced himself from the example I quoted where English racists beat up bypassing “whores for Muslims.”

Of course it is not the case that all criticism of Islam can be dismissed as Islamophobia. But the problem today is not that “Islamophobe!” is being shouted time and again. The problem is that the growing Islamophobia is being ignored. It is essential to understand that this ideology is not only mortally dangerous to the vulnerable Muslim minority in the West. It can provide the basis for extreme right-wing changes of power which we should all have nightmares about. And when we this week pass the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq it is appropriate to remind people how essential Islamophobia has been in justifying a “war on terror” which has made the world a lot more dangerous for us all.

Fjordman’s commentary:

Marte Michelet is the daughter of the Communist writer Jon Michelet, and was until 1998 the leader of the Red Youth, the country’s “revolutionary youth league.” She now writes for Dagbladet, a left-wing pro-Multicultural newspaper which champions sexual liberation, the EU, the UN, radical feminism and mass immigration, also of Muslims. The political editor of Dagbladet, Marie Simonsen, in 2007 advocated that free migration should be considered a universal human right for every human being across the world. The newspaper has for decades aggressively accused those critical of mass immigration of “racism.”

The embarrassing thing about this article, apart from the ideological madness it betrays, is that Ms. Michelet doesn’t even manage to get simple facts straight. The FN from France were not invited to the conference in Brussels. I know. I was there.

She also manages to mix up the two brothers Anfindsen. Jens Tomas Anfindsen works for Rights.no, while Ole Jørgen Anfindsen still writes for HonestThinking.org.

I would advise Michelet to have a look at my essays about Expo. She could also benefit from following some Islam-critical blogs, starting with Jihad Watch, Gates of Vienna, The Brussels Journal and Atlas Shrugs. Maybe some of the readers of GoV can invite her? She can be reached at mmi@dagbladet.no. And please, no impolite or threatening emails, just invite her here.


* The literal translation of the original Norwegian idiom is “put the tail on the pig”, which means roughly “name a bad thing for what it is.”