The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy (Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons) by David Tyrer

Author:David Tyrer [Tyrer, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849648745
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2013-11-07T18:30:00+00:00

KEINE EINBÜRGERUNG VON VERBRECHERN UND

SOZIALHILFEEMPFÄNGERN!

Klare Forderungen an Einbürgerungswillige!

Stopp der Verschleuderung des Schweizer Passes!

Keine Einbürgerung von Verbrechern, Sozialhilfeabhängigen und

Asylsuchenden! (SVP 2011)

Using highly emotive language the leaflet purported to campaign on race neutral grounds, railing against the squandering of the Swiss passport and the naturalisation of criminals, welfare dependents and asylum seekers, although the associated imagery moors it to a clear racial politics: the front page depicts a caricatured Black man sitting in a hammock with a huge, smoking appendage (a spliff? a cigar?) hanging from enormous, caricatured lips, wearing sunglasses, shorts and sandals, and clutching a Swiss passport while money rains down on him. The second page of the leaflet depicts a similarly caricatured huge Black man holding up a smaller, shaking, white man (clad in a red cap emblazoned with the Swiss flag) at gunpoint.

But just as the mainstream attack on multiculturalism and the formal disavowal of racism have been framed by the logic of post-politics, so too is the far right’s denial of racism. Thus, we see the increasing trend among the far right not only to deny its extreme right ideological bases, but also its racism. This has increasingly involved attempts by far-right groups to even claim support among members of minority groups, a tactic used by France’s Front National (Karpf 2012) and the British National Party. Even the Lega Nord can point to such support after the biological sister of Mario Balotelli, a leading international footballer who experienced shocking racism in Italy, has declared that she would vote Lega Nord (while noting that she does not actually have voting rights despite having lived in Italy since the age of 12) (Marchetti 2011).

The attempts by the far right to deny its racism frequently operate as a weak parody of liberal tokenism, through reference to token support from small numbers of Black and minority ethnic people to underline the impression that they are not racist. Some parties of the far right have more recently attempted to gain support from some sections of Jewish communities, and although the Vlaams Belang (Moreau 2012) and the Front National (Zaretsky 2011) stand as examples in this respect, elsewhere there have been appropriations of the Star of David on banners in far-right street demonstrations and even in some cases the establishment of tiny Jewish groups within populist right-wing movements. But do such moves necessarily demonstrate that the far right has moved beyond its racial politics or traditional anti-Semitism? While some far-right groups laud Israeli democracy, the attempts to mobilise Jewish support by far-right groups increasingly appear to draw on a heavily caricatured and essentialist representation of Israel as though it is a homogenous and racially pure state. In this there is a parallel with the anti-Semitism of the left, the most obvious example being attempts to institute academic boycotts of Israel, a move that ignores the huge variation of opinion within Israel and writes out oppositional voices. In December 2010 the leaders of the Vlaams Belang, Germany’s Die Freiheit [Freedom] party, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei

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