Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia by Sindre Bangstad

Author:Sindre Bangstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2014-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

6 | THE WEIGHT OF WORDS

The treatment of aliens, foreigners, and others in our midst is a crucial test case for the moral conscience as well as political reflexivity of liberal democracies. (Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others. Aliens, Residents and Citizens 2002)

Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate? (Judith Butler, ‘Response to Asad and Mahmood’, in Is Critique Secular? 2009)

Words and acts

This book has provided detailed explorations into the thought of the Norwegian mass-murdering right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik and his fellow ideological travellers. We have explored both Behring Breivik’s own tract, 2083, the writings of his main ideological inspiration, Peder Are ‘Fjordman’ Nøstvold Jensen, and the ‘Eurabia’ genre, which inspired them both. We have also explored the mainstreaming of ideas, arguments and rhetorical tropes of extreme right-wing provenance in and through Norwegian political discourse on Islam, Muslims and immigration in Norway in recent decades. In order to understand the latter process, we must however also explore what has arguably been a sine qua non for the mainstreaming of Islamophobia in Norwegian society and politics, namely the shifting conceptions of freedom of expression and its limits among liberal media, intellectual and legal elites in the same period. In an essay on the Rushdie affair, the social anthropologist Talal Asad notes that modern secular cultures have their own ‘sacred geography’ (Asad 1993: 10). In late-modern Norway, it appears that nothing is more sacred than freedom of expression or speech. In a representative sample taken from an opinion survey from 2010, 96.1 per cent of the Norwegians polled agreed that freedom of expression characterized Norwegian society to a ‘very high’ or ‘high’ degree (IMDI 2010: 27) and freedom of expression was ranked far higher than any other characteristic of Norwegian society, such as, for example, socio-economic or gender equality. In a similar survey, 90 per cent of Norwegians with an immigrant background said that they viewed freedom of expression as a ‘central value’ in Norway. These surveys cannot tell us the extent to which Norwegians regarded the centrality of this value as a desirable state of affairs. But they do seem to indicate that freedom of expression has become a central doxa in Norway, or, in Bourdieu’s words, part of that ‘which goes without saying’ (Bourdieu 1978).

Central Norwegian media editors pre-22/7 declared with pride that they were freedom of expression fundamentalists (ytringsfrihetsfundamentalister) (for such a use of the term, see Åmås 2007) and were able to construe a discursive situation in which those who argue in line with international human rights conventions that freedom of expression is but one of many human rights and as such has to be balanced with other rights were more often than not cast as opponents of freedom of speech and as potentially anti-democratic and illiberal. With reference to both the Rushdie affair (1988–94) and the cartoon crisis (2005/06), those in Norway who argue that there are definite limits to freedom of expression under international human rights conventions and treaties have been

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.