Fanning the flames of hatred

No-one can claim we have not been warned.

Anders Behring Breivik's horrific massacre of scores of young social democrats in Norway stands as an appalling alarm of the filth that is being dredged up from the dark underbelly of European society as it spasms from one crisis to another.

It ought to serve as an urgent call to arms against the fascistic and racist forces that have been gaining ground from one end of the continent to the other. But European governments and elites show precious little sign of heeding the call.

Of course, the outrage and expressions of sympathy for the dead have been near universal. It was left to the likes of the grotesque, pig-like Glenn Beck in the US to pour bile over the victims, sickeningly likening the labour youth camp where they were shot to a "Hitler Youth rally."

He may be on the extreme with his barbaric, bestial reaction. But the right-wing forces he speaks for on both sides of the Atlantic share a culpability, and nothing captured it more than the knee-jerk reaction of the right-wing media which defiled the memory of the slain even as they lay dying.

From Rupert Murdoch's Sun to the Greek daily Ta Nea, the immediate and baseless reaction was the same - this was the work of an Islamic extremist, most likely a splinter of al-Qaida and most likely homegrown.

We don't know how many hijab-donning women got harassed or how many bearded Middle Eastern and Asian men got beaten in the hours that followed - hours in which the populist rags stuck to their prejudice despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

And this is the heart of the matter - Breivik meticulously planned his murder under his own steam.

But he swam in a cesspit of right-wing fanaticism, topped up with the sewage of Islamophobia and racism that is pumped out daily by so much of the political class and their hangers on.

So accepted has that respectable version of racism become that it has penetrated the thinking of many even liberal commentators.

Norway and Scandinavia generally have a far right problem so pronounced that it registers in the detective fiction that has become such a popular genre. But it was not only the rabid right that leapt to the conclusion that this monstrous crime must have been connected somehow to Islamism rather than Islamophobic hatred. It was the default position of many commentators. 

And now we have the soul-searching, the anguished questioning on rolling news bulletins about how this could possibly happen.

But we need look no further than Breivik himself and his 1,500-page manifesto. He cited with approval the English Defence League in Britain, the racist thugs who have gone from city to city trying - and sometimes getting frighteningly close to succeeding - to launch pogroms against Muslim communities.

And yet far too often the authorities have treated those communities themselves, and those who have stood with them against the torrent of hatred, as the problem. The steer has come from above.

Earlier this year the government relaunched Prevent, the counter-terrorism initiative of the previous administration.

It was replete with dire warnings about "Muslim extremism."

It amplified the attacks on civil liberties that have simply ripped up rights that were won half a millennium ago and which survived the state of national emergency forced on this country during the second world war and the 30 years in which violence in the north of Ireland spilled onto the streets of Britain. But it went further and added a new twist.

Resources were to be directed against "non-violent" extremism, based on the refuted thesis that radically questioning the political set-up in Britain or fundamentally opposing our foreign policy and siding with its victims in some sense puts Muslims on a conveyor belt that leads to committing a 9/11 or 7/7.

There's much that can be said to demolish the thinking behind this policy, which went hand in hand with David Cameron echoing his European counterparts and declaring in Munich - yes, just a couple of hundred metres away from the site of Hitler's failed Bierkeller putsch in 1923 - that multiculturalism had failed and that diversity was in some sense a seedbed for terrorism.

But after the Norway atrocity, the bankruptcy of this policy should be plain to all. In all its pages - like similar counterterrorism documents in Europe - it does not even mention the threat of violence from the extreme right.

This despite the fact that in Britain we had our very own Breivik, the nailbomber David Copeland who targeted the symbols of a diverse and multiethnic Britain a decade ago in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho.

For terrorism had come to mean not the nihilistic violence that can issue from various political ideologies. Rather it came to be synonymous with Islamism.

Conversely, Islamic identity and political engagement arising from it came to be seen as tantamount to or a stepping stone towards terrorist violence. 

So the possibility of far-right terrorism did not even enter the picture. This despite the fact that viciously violent right-wing formations have been growing across Europe.

You don't need to presume some conveyor belt leading from the far-right to murderous violence.

The EDL and other groups are explicit in their calls for violence against Muslims, the left, trade unionists and even students who took to the streets at the end of last year against the rise in tuition fees.

The links ought to be obvious, because what we are talking about here is simply fascism, a hallmark of which is inchoate violence carefully directed against minorities and all those who stand for greater freedom, civil rights and equality. 

How has it come to this, that fascistic forces who inspired the horror in Norway could be allowed to march, threaten and spread poison with nary a peep from the authorities?

To answer that I'm afraid we need to look beyond the lunatic fringe and even beyond Cameron's imitation of Margaret Thatcher's infamous "swamping speech" of 1978.

It has become commonplace for otherwise liberal commentators to identify not the far-right, but Europe's embattled 20 million-strong immigrant - often Muslim - minority as the real threat to our freedoms.

The fascism they rail against is the perverse neologism "Islamofascism," used almost as a place-saver for Muslims who base their engagement in politics on their faith.

Sure, there are the usual disclaimers - that what they are opposed to is not Muslims per se, but to extremism.

But the definition of what is extreme is so elastic that it comes to include the core beliefs of most Muslims.

The forces driving this are very deep-seated and we should not expect this tide to be thrown back even by the tragedy in Norway, despite its scale.

Britain and Europe are at a moment of profound crisis and scapegoating is becoming the norm.

Where, for 25 years, borders came down within - though they rose ever higher between Europe and the lands to its south and east - they are now being reinstated.

Neither the centre right nor the centre left is capable of identifying the failings of capitalism itself as the reason for this age of austerity and insecurity.

Hence the resort to nasty, racialised and false explanations ranging from chauvinist slurs that blame the financial crisis in southern Europe on the supposed laziness of its peoples to the echoes of the anti-semitism of the inter-war years now identifying Muslims as an internal enemy, the fifth column of an external, existential threat.

So even as the condolences poured in to Oslo from other European capitals, the political classes were continuing to pursue the policies and scapegoating that sows the seeds for further horrors.

And those commentators who have shamefully helped to create the anti-Muslim climate showed little sign of repentance, but instead vast amounts of sophistry in maintaining that this had nothing to do with them at all.

Despite all that, the awful meaning of last month's massacre is so clear that it is leading many more people to question where we are going. That's something that all progressives and leftists need urgently to build on.

Part of that is ensuring the most unified and massive response to the attempt by the EDL to gather in Tower Hamlets on September 3 and rampage through one of Britain's most diverse areas.

Another aspect is drawing together all those considerable strands of opinion - from the trade unions, through Muslim organisations to community and campaign groups - which have tried to resist this slide towards reaction.

The Convention in Defence of Diversity and Against Islamophobia this October deserves the support of all who can see where the constant drip-feed of attacks on Muslims and on our multicultural society is leading us.

We have been warned - it's time to gather ourselves and organise into a coherent force that can start to change the balance of public debate.

Mutual respect, valuing diversity and defending the vulnerable are far too important to be left in the hands of an Establishment which, despite its protestations, is not only failing to uphold them but is presiding over the conditions where it is xenophobic extremism that is tolerated in the name of liberalism.

Defending liberal values is far too important to be left to liberals.