Expo and the Islamophobes

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.


The Swedish far-Left, anti-racist organization Expo recently released a publication ( pdf, in Swedish) entitled “Kriget mot islam,” “The war against Islam,” in which they worried about an increasing trend towards “organized Islamophobia” in the West. According to them, “Parallel with the growth of SIOE, a new anti-Islamic network of academics, bloggers and politicians is taking shape. The network has no formal name, but meets at so-called anti-Jihad conferences. The first known meeting was in Copenhagen on the 14th of April this year. Behind the event was the network Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF).”

As the publication says: “According to one of the most influential bloggers in the anti-Islamic blogosphere, Baron Bodissey, CVF functions as a ‘network of networks. The idea is to gather all counter-Jihad groups under one umbrella to ease the gathering of information and experiences.’” The publication mentions the Brussels meeting in October, and states that “among those attending were a number of well-known right-wing extremists.” An example of these “right-wing extremists” is Israeli politician Arieh Eldad. Expo also talks about Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard and author Robert Spencer, the founder of Jihad Watch.

The text continues: “During the Cold War the extreme Right joined in on the anti-Communist rhetoric. In connection with the increased immigration to Europe it was suddenly Multiculturalism that made up the external threat. In the aftermath of the War on Terror and increasing distrust of Muslims, now suddenly it is the anti-Islamic rhetoric that makes up the new platform for the extreme Right. But there is a problem: Despite the fact that there is great acceptance for xenophobic parties within the anti-Islamic networks, they don’t want to be dirtied by having too clear attachments to openly Fascist groups.”

Notice how Expo compares the criticism of the “extreme Right” regarding Communism, which threatened world peace for generations, to today’s criticism of Islam. I suppose former US President Ronald Reagan, who called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” and helped bring down the Berlin Wall, is among these right-wing extremists? Expo’s founder Stieg Larsson was a long-time Communist who met his future wife during a support meeting for the FNL, the pro-Communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. It’s interesting that they think Multiculturalism has now taken the place which Communism used to occupy. Some of us have been arguing this before, but with a different emphasis.

Expo again: “The anti-Islamic bloggers and activists see themselves as defenders of European values. Nazi, Fascist and homophobic groups simply do not fit into this self-image. But with a promise of respect for human rights and a clear pro-Israeli policy, right-wing populists and right-wing extremists are welcomed into the fold.”

So, these alleged “right-wing extremists” have a clear pro-Israeli policy. That’s good to know.

“Out of the 45 [Islamophobic] websites and blogs Expo has discovered, more than half have been created during the past two years. Put together, these websites have created a new Islamophobic universe where visitors are quickly drawn into a world of frightening images of suicide bombers and cartoons mocking women wearing veils. Texts that should be banned, about how Muslims cannot adjust [to our societies] and how politicians are doing Islam’s bidding, are being published daily.” Moreover, “Expo’s investigations show that 22 of the 45 anti-Islamic websites are run by persons who have chosen to remain anonymous.”

Yes, they have. And has Expo reflected on exactly why so many people in their “free” country now dare not use their own name? Is it possible that Expo and their comrades have contributed to this repressive political climate?

Expo again: “Anti-Islamic blogs and websites exploit the legitimate debate about extreme Islamism. They use the religious fundamentalism as proof that all of Islam and/or all of the world’s Muslims are a threat to democracy, to freedom of speech, to ‘our’ ( i.e. non-Muslims’) very existence.” They mention Swedish journalist and blogger Kurt Lundgren as well as the Danish blog Snaphanen as examples of Islamophobic websites.

“Among the Nordic states, Denmark is the country where Islamophobia has gained the strongest roots. The Danish People’s Party have, with the demagogue Pia Kjærsgaard in a leading role, [verbally] harassed Muslims for years. Just like in Sweden, a number of extreme Rightist and openly Nazi groups spreading Islamophobic propaganda exists.” In Sweden, “it’s the equivalent of the Danish People’s Party, the Sweden Democrats, who have made Islamophobia into politics.”

Expo is worried about the international connections of these sites: “The Swedish bloggers gain inspiration from their foreign counterparts. Little Green Footballs was among the first who, depending upon your viewpoint, warned against extreme Islamism or started spreading modern Islamophobia. Lately, however, the site’s criticism of Islam has turned into pure hatred of Muslims. The journalist RJ Smith of Los Angeles Magazine for instance wrote in an article last year that Little Green Footballs is a ‘dysfunctional mix of beautiful photos that [blogger Charles] Johnson takes during his bicycling trips and constitutionally protected hate speech’ which ‘assumes all Muslims to be terrorists until proven otherwise.’”

Expo also states that Gates of Vienna is another leading and frequently cited English language blog, which just like LGF fronts conspiracy theories and prejudice against Islam.

One of the co-founders of Expo, Tobias Hübinette, wrote in 1996 (Creol no 1 1996 and “Svartvitt”): “To feel and even think that the white race is inferior in every conceivable way is natural with regards to its history and current actions. Let the Western countries of the white race perish in blood and suffering. Long live the multicultural, racially mixed and classless ecological society! Long live anarchy!”
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I found several references to this quote online and asked Swedish blogger Kurt Lundgren if he could get his readers to check out the original, written source. One of them did, and could confirm that the quote was authentic. He posted an image of the original text from 1996. According to his own CV, Tobias Hübinette worked for Expo until at least 1997. In other words, he continued doing research for this “anti-racist” organization after having publicly advocated the extermination of the white race and the violent destruction of an entire civilization. Nobody seemed to mind. During this time period he did research about “Nazis.” He has openly defended the use of violence for political reasons, even against children and the elderly, and has also been convicted of violence.

Meanwhile, the left-wing extremist group Antifascistisk Aktion has for years made numerous attacks against immigration-skeptics, including members of the Sweden Democrats which Expo has published a critical book about, with near-impunity from the authorities and the media. Members of AFA marched alongside senior members of the Swedish police, the government and the media during Gay Pride Parade in 2007 in Stockholm, and beat up a couple of people they deemed to be insufficiently tolerant.

Hübinette has been controversial for some of his views, for instance comparing Western adoptions of Korean children (he is of Korean origin) to the transatlantic slave trade. However, in traditionally and still majority white Sweden, calling for the majority, indigenous population to perish in blood and suffering is not enough to halt your career. Hübinette has continued promoting “Multiculturalism,” even received awards, and is currently working for the The Multicultural Centre of Botkyrka, Sweden.

The founder and editor of Expo magazine from 1995 until his death in November 2004, Stieg Larsson, worked with Hübinette for years, but was apparently never negatively affected by this collaboration with a person calling for genocide against his people. Larsson has been cited as a credible source regarding the extreme Right, and Expo’s material has been reprinted by leading newspapers Expressen and Aftonbladet. Larsson left behind three unpublished thrillers, which have proceeded to become major bestsellers in Sweden after his death.

Upon writing this, I came to think of a mandatory University of Delaware program in the United States requiring students to acknowledge that “all whites are racist,” offering them “treatment” for incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion or culture. A civil rights group cited excerpts from the university’s Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents, including the statement: “A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination.” The education program also notes that “reverse racism” is “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.”

I’ve been trying to understand exactly what this “white privilege” consists of. In Sweden, if you are a native and in the mildest terms possible object to uncontrolled mass immigration which is sure to render the natives a minority in their own country within a few decades, you will immediately be branded a racist and vilified. Most likely, your career will be over. But “anti-racist Multiculturalists” can collaborate closely with persons calling for the destruction of Western civilization and the annihilation of the white indigenous population, and it doesn’t even register in the eyes of the political establishment. The situation is only slightly less extreme in other countries in Western Europe, where the natives are de facto disenfranchised and are supposed to meekly fund their own colonization and applaud their cultural eradication. If this is “privilege”, then privilege is vastly overrated these days.

It is more than a little ironic that Tobias Hübinette claims to be an “anti-Nazi” at the same time as he advocates the violent destruction of hundreds of millions of people. It is a strong indication that the term “Nazi” has by now become seriously distorted.

Most of the political violence in Europe, both verbal and physical, comes from Muslims and their supporters on the Left. The first political murders in the Netherlands for centuries were either committed by a Muslim, in the case of Theo van Gogh, or a Leftist supporter of Muslims, in the case of Pim Fortuyn. Some members of the Western Left support the suppression of free speech, the use of street violence against rivals, systematic demonization not just of political opponents but of entire groups who are branded as evil, should have their assets stripped away from them, and if necessary be eliminated. In all of these cases, many of the left-wing comrades of Expo are closer to Nazism than Islamophobes like me, but they get away with this because they are Leftists, and left-wingers and good, right-wingers are evil; a powerful demonstration of the fact that Socialists never truly lost the Cold War. “Nazism” is reduced to simply having a white, European background and refusing to surrender your land and your culture to outsiders.

In this text, Expo casually mentions racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and homophobia in the same sentence, and conveniently forgets to point out that the recent increase in anti-Semitism in Europe is intimately linked to Muslim immigration and the pro-Islamic policies of the European Union, that most of the street violence targets native Europeans and that a sharp rise in violence against gays is caused by mass immigration of Muslims in particular.

Expo also resorts to blatant distortions regarding the nature of Islamic oppression of non-Muslims: “Centuries ago, a dhimmi was the non-Muslim inhabitant of a state run according to sharia law, where non-Muslims had fewer rights than Muslims. The anti-Islamic blogs believe Islam’s expansion in Europe needs to be halted, otherwise we risk ending up in the same situation once more.”

The dhimmi system is an integral part of sharia, Islamic law, which is timeless according to Islamic theology because it has been instituted by Allah. It wasn’t valid only “centuries ago,” it remains valid today and will do so for all eternity. The Armenian genocide by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims took place only a few generations ago. It happened precisely because Armenians, as did other Balkan Christians, rebelled against the Islamic apartheid system and the status as semi-slaves they have been granted according to sharia. Muslims responded by Jihadist massacres, as they should according to Islamic doctrines.

This massacre is still forbidden by law to discuss in Turkey. Several murders of the few Christians still left in a country that was once predominantly Christian proves that Christianophobia is very much alive there. Expo talks about opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union as a sign of extremism. Do they agree with the current Islamist Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has stated that Islamophobia should be treated as a crime against humanity?

In December, 2007, a university professor named Fuat Deniz was murdered in the town of Örebro, the first time that a lecturer has been killed at a university anywhere in Sweden. Deniz wrote and lectured on the Ottoman Turkish genocide of their Christian subjects. Other researchers working in the field have been threatened, according to David Gaunt at Södertörn University College. “On several occasions at our seminars people would attend claiming to be journalists only to then walk around photographing delegates,” Gaunt told Svenska Dagbladet. It is reported that researchers have been harassed, received death threats and been labeled terrorists. Gaunt reports having been followed by security police on trips to Turkey and describes being subjected to a smear campaign by a Turkish newspaper. “All those interested in Christian minorities in Turkey are considered a threat.”

A Dutch scientist who wishes to remain anonymous confirms this. “I felt the eyes of Turkish spies on my back during a couple of lectures I gave in Holland.” He fears that he, too, is at risk, and therefore publicly speaks as little as possible about the genocide in public. The investigation of the murder of Fuat Deniz has been remarkably sloppy. It is tempting to view it as an extension of the global Jihad and the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, which is now slowly spreading to Western Europe.

At the same time that Muslims are colonizing Western nations while complaining about Islamophobia, the few remaining non-Muslim communities in the Middle East are being systematically eradicated. As Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch writes in his book Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t , “Christian communities throughout the Middle East that date back to the dawn of Christianity are decreasing so much that they are on the verge of disappearing from the area altogether. In Iraq half of the nation’s prewar 700,000 Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Overall the Middle Eastern Christian population has dropped from 20 percent in 1900 to less than 2 percent today.”

How come left-wing organizations are so concerned about “Islamophobia” in the West, but care so little about Muslim infidelophobia? Is it because the extreme Left sees this as a continuation of their struggle against their own civilization, of which Christianity is a part?

As we speak, Muslims are driving Christians out of the birthplace of Jesus Christ, Bethlehem, but Western media choose to blame this on the Jewish state of Israel, a fellow victim of Jihad. Some of this persecution of Christians — and Jews — committed by Arabs is done by Hamas, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of the MB have inspired or founded many of the most violent Islamic organizations in recent decades, among them Sayyid Qutb, the spiritual father of Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders.

The largest party on the political Left in Sweden, the Social Democrats, have announced their cooperation with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, for the mutual benefit of both, but the left-wing organization Expo sees nothing wrong in this. They concentrate their fire on those who want limit mass immigration and thus impede Socialist efforts to import voters from abroad.

The Swedish Social Democrats were pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi during the 1930s and 40s, and appeased the Communists during the Cold War. Now they forge an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, another organization with close ideological ties to the Fascist and Nazi movements. The Social Democrats agree to continue allowing Muslims to colonize the country in exchange for their votes. In the old days this would be called treason. Now it’s called tolerance. Two Fascist-inspired movements cooperate on exploiting the native population of a country, force them to fund and applaud their own colonization and denounce them as bigots, racists and Fascists if they resist. The strategy is as clever as it is evil.

Sweden has witnessed an explosion in rapes and all kinds of violent crime in the past decades. This is a direct result of mass immigration. Malmö, their third largest city, will soon become the first Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority. Native Swedes are fleeing while gangs of Muslim immigrants openly brag about waging a war against Swedes, and leading academics are now talking about the end of the Swedish nation state as a likely result of the ongoing immigration. The fact that Expo in this situation chooses to focus on “Islamophobia” speaks volumes about where their loyalty lies.

Moreover, if the far-Left organization Expo labels somebody as “Islamophobes,” which to many apparently is the same as racists, members of a more violent far-Left organization, AFA, could take this as a licence to harass these individuals. When Kurt Lundgren, who runs one of the most popular political blogs in Sweden, is labelled an “Islamophobe,” this is thus indirectly a warning to him about possible future harassment.

I once heard a blog reader point out that there is no good form of Socialism: While the “hard” Socialism earlier championed in Eastern Europe turns society homicidal, the “soft” Socialism of the West turns society suicidal. Sweden certainly demonstrates the truth in this: It has no colonial history, and its current disintegration thus cannot be blamed on any “post-colonial guilt complex.” It is caused purely by ideology. Sweden, which views itself as an ideological beacon for mankind, happily embraced the new post-Western paradigm where anti-nationalism was the order of the day, and its leaders decided to excel at it.

Expo is, in my view, a symbol of the forces that have turned Sweden into perhaps the most totalitarian and politically repressive country in the Western world. Let it serve as a warning to others about what happens when Multiculturalism, Socialism and anti-nationalism gain power.