Abstract
Since the terror attacks in Oslo and at Utøya in Norway in which 77 civilians lost their lives on 22 July 2011 there have been a number of attempts to provide explanations for the atrocities committed by Anders Behring Breivik. This chapter contends they cannot be understood without reference to the ideology with which he legitimated his actions. It explores the intersections between extreme and populist/radical right-wing discourses on Islam and Muslims in Norway since the 1980s through the methods of critical discourse analysis and shows that among politicians in Norway’s most popular political right-wing party The Progress Party (PP) there is a long record of utilising rhetorical tropes of extreme right-wing provenance and/or distribution when it comes to immigration, multiculturalism, Islam and Muslims. Central PP politicians in Norway have, for 25 years, cast Muslims in Norway as an ‘existential threat’ to Norway and Norwegians. In so doing, some of the central PP politicians have endorsed and promoted a discourse which, even though it did not directly incite violence, have certainly advanced ideas about Muslims and Islam which are of extreme right-wing provenance and are taken by some extreme right-wingers to offer tacit support for their cause. From an analytical point of view, extreme and populist/radical right-wing discourses on Islam and Muslims form part of a continuum, rather than being discourses clearly demarcated from one another. Whilst there is no direct and unmediated link between rhetorical ‘fighting words’ and behavioural ‘fighting acts’, the ideology that drove the terror of 22 July 2011 cannot be understood without exploring these intersections which Anders Breivik came to construe as legitimating specific courses of violent action.
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Notes
- 1.
Part of Sørensen’s analytical confusion on this point appears to stem from Behring Breivik’s reference to a ‘Guardian Council’ of experts which in the Muslim and ‘Multiculturalist Elite’–free Europe he envisions in some passages of his tract. Behring Breivik makes no reference whatsoever in his tract to the Islamist Iranian regime’s ‘Guardian Council’ (velayat e-faqih), introduced on the basis of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s dubious and inventive interpretation of Shi‘i fiqh ‘jurisprudence’ in Islamist Iran after the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as a mechanism for ensuring the political dominance of the religious scholars in Iran. The fact is, of course, that the idea of an elite presiding over and guarding a return to conservative ‘Christian’ norms and values is hardly novel in European fascist thought, and that to the extent that Behring Breivik was influenced by any Muslims when it comes to means and strategies, it is the Sunni Salafi-jihadists of al-Qa‘ida who provided the main inspiration.
- 2.
This term appears in the work of the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola (1991).
- 3.
See Griffin (1995, 3).
- 4.
There is undoubtedly a data bias in this, but for the purposes of this chapter, I am not interested in analysing or evaluating the complete record of public statements by the PP on these topics; there is simply not enough space to undertake such a project.
- 5.
As exemplified in the PP party rhetoric about the party being a party of and for folk flest ‘most people’ in recent decades.
- 6.
In regular opinion surveys among media people in Norway, the level of expressed support for the Progress Party is generally among the lowest among established parties in Norway. In a web-based survey of 605 members of the Norwegian Journalist Union Norsk Journalistlag in 2013, a mere 3 % reported that they intended to vote for the PP in the coming elections. This figure is far lower than the general level of expressed support for the PP in the population at large, and has been relatively stable for the past 10 years. See Nordiske Mediedager (n.d.) for the survey.
- 7.
A copy of which is available from: http://goo.gl/JWT5vw.
- 8.
The ‘Eurabia genre’ is a conspiratorial genre in popular literature and documentary films in which the central rhetorical trope is that Europe is in the process of being taken over by Muslims wanting to establish continent-wide Islamic control over a future Eurabia (see Carr 2006 and Bangstad 2013). The main means of achieving this is, in the eyes of Eurabia authors, the maintaining of higher fertility rates among Muslim women living in Europe as well as mass immigration. According to the doyenne of the genre, Gisèle Littman (1933–), who writes under the pen name Bat Ye’or, the European Union has through the Euro-Arab Dialogue secretly conspired with the Arab League to bring about a Eurabia ever since the 1973 petroleum crisis. The author Øyvind Strømmen has advanced the view that the Eurabia genre starts with the Eurabia books of Oriana Fallaci and Bat Ye’or in 2004 and 2005 respectively (see Strømmen and Indregard 2012, 23). This analysis, however, fails to account for the fact that the central rhetorical tropes of the Eurabia genre circulated widely in extreme-to-radical/populist right-wing circles in Europe and the USA well before Fallaci’s and Ye’or’s books attempted systematising these tropes. In Norway, the fabricated ‘Mustafa’ letter used by PP leader Carl I. Hagen in the parliamentary election campaign of 1987 contains some of the most central rhetorical tropes of the Eurabia discourse. See Carr (2006) Bangstad (2013), Larsson (2012), and Pilbeam (2011) for analyses of the genre.
- 9.
Bruce Bawer (1956–) a US-born gay Republican literary critic settled in Norway with his Norwegian partner in 1999. Bawer has a long-standing relationship with the former newspaper reporter and secularist-feminist civil society activist Hege Storhaug, who with state-funding proposed by the Progress Party established the NGO Human Rights Service (HRS) in Oslo in 2001. HRS has long acted in an advisory capacity to the PP’s parliamentary caucus, and has strong links with Lars Hedegaard and Helle Marie Brix of the International Free Press Society (IFPS) in Denmark, as well as with the Swedish Democrats in Sweden. The HRS website www.rights.no regularly reproduces texts in the Eurabia genre. Bawer, who translated a number of Storhaug’s pamphlets on immigration, integration, Islam and Muslims into English, was employed as a text writer for HRS between 2009 and 2011. In Bawer (2012) he writes openly about having introduced Anders Behring Breivik’s main ideological inspiration, Peder Are ‘Fjordman’ Nøstvold Jensen to counter-jihadist circles in 2006. For an analysis of Bawer’s contributions to the Eurabia genre, see Bangstad (2013). For more details on Hege Storhaug and HRS, see Razack (2004).
- 10.
Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), the son of a Church of Norway pastor from Fyresdal in Telemark, seized power in a coup d’état on 9 April 1940, the day that German Nazi forces invaded Norway. Quisling, a military officer who served under Fridtjof Nansen during the famine in Ukraine induced by Stalinist collectivisation efforts in 1921, was Minister of Defence for the Norwegian Agrarian Party from 1931 to 1933. In 1933, inspired by Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, Quisling founded the Norwegian Nationalist–Socialist Party (Nasjonal Samling). Quisling was Minister President in German-occupied Norway from 1942 to 1945. He was executed for treason in 1945. The term ‘quisling’ entered the international lexicon as a by-word for treason in the aftermath of World War II.
- 11.
The puritan-activist Salafist group Islam Net, established in 2008, has an estimated 2000 members, and propagates interpretations of Islam and engages international Salafist preachers who are patriarchal, homophobic and anti-Semitic; the Salafi-jihadist groupuscule Profetens Ummah ‘The Prophet’s Ummah’, which started to coalesce in 2010, and which is estimated to have 30 core members, also engage in legitimation of violence and terror. The latter group has provided the ideological inspiration for many of the estimated fifty to seventy Norwegian Muslims who, since 2011, have travelled to Syria as recruits for mostly Salafi-jihadist outfits such as the Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS.
- 12.
Øyvind Strømmen (1980–) is a Norwegian freelance journalist and former spokesperson for the Green Party in Norway, who specialises in the coverage of right-wing extremism, particularly on the Internet.
- 13.
For an overview of Norwegian court practice regarding §135(a) - which after the introduction of a revised Norwegian General Penal Code in 2015 has become § 185 - see Bangstad (2012).
- 14.
A copy of the letter that Hagen alleged he received is available at: http://goo.gl/NCm8Sm.
- 15.
Verdens Gang (VG) is Norway’s second largest print newspaper as measured in circulation. It is a politically independent tabloid established in 1945, and owned by the Schibsted Group. It is the most widely read newspaper among PP voters.
- 16.
This is a contention also supported by the findings of Ellinas (2010).
- 17.
The demand by a prospective female Muslim applicant to the Norwegian Police Academy (Politihøgskolen) to be able to use a hijab as part of her uniform was initially welcomed and supported by the Norwegian Police Directorate and the Norwegian Ministry of Justice in 2009. It was quickly shelved, however, when extensive media coverage made popular opposition to it overwhelmingly clear, and the Norwegian Police Union made their members’ general opposition to it clear. The Norwegian Armed Forces, by way of the paradoxes of official policy making in this field, managed to keep new uniform regulations permitting female Muslim military recruits to wear the hijab as part of their uniform from the media and political limelight when this was introduced in 2012. It received a prize for best integration practices from the Progress Party Cabinet Minister Solveig Horne after the PP came to power in Norway in 2013.
- 18.
- 19.
Document.no, established in 2003 by Hans Rustad (1950–), formerly a radical leftist and a reporter with the Norwegian National Press Agency NTB who covered the War in the Balkans in the 1990s. It bears the name of a publishing outlet Rustad ran in the 1990s. By 2011, Document.no had 40,000 regular readers. It was one of Anders Behring Breivik’s favourite blogs: strongly pro–Israel, anti-immigration, and critical of Muslims and Islam. It regularly features texts and publications in the Eurabia genre. Rustad, now a self-declared ‘Christian conservative’, has close associations with Lars Hedegaard of the International Free Press Society (IFPS) in Denmark.
- 20.
For the posts that Behring Breivik left on the Document.no website in the years leading up to 22 July 2011, see Document.no (2011).
- 21.
Tajik, who left the island of Utøya a few hours before Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre there on 22/7 is a former Minister of Culture for the Labour Party 2012–2013, the first ever cabinet minister of Muslim background in Norway and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Justice. She is the second child of a Pakistani-Afghan migrant-labour couple who arrived in Norway in the 1970s, and not only has a degree in law from the University of Oslo completed whilst serving as an MP, but is also known for her vocal opposition to Salafi-jihadism.
- 22.
See Blindheim (2014) for this.
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Bangstad, S. (2016). Norwegian Right-Wing Discourses: Extremism Post-Utøya. In: Pratt, D., Woodlock, R. (eds) Fear of Muslims?. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29698-2_14
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