http://www.juancole.com/2011/07/when-extremism-learns-to-blow-things-up.htmlNorwegian right wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik
kept a diary in which he obsessed about the dangers of cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and the “Islamification” of Europe ... Breivik saw Muslim immigration in particular as a threat to the very identity of Europe. That is, if the immigration from the Middle East were allowed to continue, then ultimately there would be no Europe, just a big Iran on all sides of the Mediterranean.
Breivik’s thinking is not new under the sun. Protestant Nativists of the
“Native American” and later “Know-Nothing” (i.e. secret society) movement in the 1830s through 1850s in the United States felt exactly the same way about Catholic immigrants to the US. America wouldn’t be America if this went on. Their values were inherently incompatible with the Constitution.
Catholic immigrants to the US, like Muslim immigrants to Europe, cannot in fact be characterized in a black and white way. Catholics in the contemporary US are politically and socially diverse, but on the whole are
more socially liberal than evangelical Protestants. That is, if the Know-Nothings were afraid of an anti-Enlightenment religious movement, it would have been to their own, Protestant ranks, that they should have looked.
As for contemporary Muslims in Europe, they are diverse. Overwhelmingly, e.g.,
Parisian Muslims say that they are loyal to France. About half of the Turks in Germany are from the Alevi sect, a kind of folk Shiism, and most of those are not very religious and politically are just social democrats (oh, the horror of Breivik’s nightmare– Muslim progressives in Europe!) That the few hundred thousand Muslims in Spain (pop. 45 mn.) , or the 4 million in Germany (5 percent of the population) could effect a revolution in European affairs of the sort Breivik fears is frankly absurd...
Unfortunately, some
unscrupulous billionaires, Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers prominent among them, have honed
their propaganda skills in the media and public life.
The promotion of hate, panic, and fear, especially if it is tied to specific political, ethnic and religious groups, always risks violence.