Friend or Foe? Contemporary debates on Islam among Swedish right-wing radicals

[The Ripper]

Read it!

Friend or Foe? Contemporary debates on Islam among Swedish right-wing radicals

Excerpt:

This presentation, though, focuses on ideological developments on the margins of Swedish discourse on Islam and Muslim immigration. Much as the shift of focus from immigrants in general to Muslims in particular has resulted in the weakening of the multiculturalist hegemony in Swedish mainstream discourse, among Swedish nationalists on the radical right debates on Islam and Muslims have revealed sharp internal divisions in crucial ideological matters pertaining to national identity and the moral state of modern Swedish culture. While for some nationalists, Islam clearly represents the ultimate Other and the key threat to Swedish culture and society, other nationalists, inspired by wider European identitarian and traditionalist thought, seek common ground with conservative Islamic strands of thought in their critique of key aspects of modern Swedish and Western society.

Simultaneously, the positions on Islam taken by nationalists of various convictions can interconnect with ideas launched by actors in mainstream discussions in the media and in the political field. The anti-multiculturalism of populists such as the Sweden Democrats combines a cultural nationalist and assimilationist agenda with values anchored in the political mainstream such as secularism, individualism and rationalism, a combination which sometimes adds up into fiercely anti-Islamic rhetoric (see e.g. Åkesson 2009). Populist nationalists believe that Muslim immigrants can assimilate into Swedish society provided they shed unwanted parts of their cultural heritage and make no political or cultural claims based on that heritage and keep symbolic expressions of Islamic faith out of public space. The equivalent liberal position seeks to uphold a strict division between “normal Muslims” whose everyday religiosity is to be respected, and “extremists” or “fundamentalists” who are seen as a threat to a society based on secularism and individual freedom and, of no less importance, to the assimilation of Muslim immigrants into that society (although in most texts the word “integration” would still be used). In other words, liberals accept a safe version of Islam that can have a presence in public space provided it does not try to compete with the hegemonic values of society. It can be argued that an important difference between populist nationalists and liberals in this regard is that while the former might prefer assimilation into a distinctly Swedish culture, for the latter assimilation implies succumbing to a general contemporary secular Western cultural framework, but it is does not seem clear what such a clear-cut conceptual division would mean in an actual social context.

Its an interesting analysis for many reasons, not least because it is a university presentation that actually seeks to understand right wing radicalism instead of trying to find as many incriminating connections to "nazism" as possible. It does a fairly good job, too, even if it is still a work in progress. It is very encouraging to see that the system criticism formulated by the good people of Motpol and other Swedish nationalist intellectuals is being given "serious" attention.

[The Ripper]

Read it you bastards.

[poiuytrewq0987]

Read it you bastards.

TLDR

[Svipdag]

You want to know if Islam is a friend or a foe ? READ THE "GORIOUS" QUR'AN !
If you're not a Muslim, you're an infidel. If you're an infidel, you're an ENEMY.
The "glorious' Qur'an makes that abundantly clear. EVERY able-bodied Muslim male is under an obligation to make ceaseless war against infidels.

Allah's mercy, comopassion, and forgiveness are reserved for the faithful ONLY. They are not to be shown to infidels. "The world will never be Dar as-Salaam until it is Dar al-Islam." Those are the words of a modern Muslim cleric.
There will never be peace until the entire world is Muslim. They are committed to that position.

So, the answer to the question is FOE !

[The Ripper]

You want to know if Islam is a friend or a foe ? READ THE "GORIOUS" QUR'AN !
If you're not a Muslim, you're an infidel. If you're an infidel, you're an ENEMY.
The "glorious' Qur'an makes that abundantly clear. EVERY able-bodied Muslim male is under an obligation to make ceaseless war against infidels.

Allah's mercy, comopassion, and forgiveness are reserved for the faithful ONLY. They are not to be shown to infidels. "The world will never be Dar as-Salaam until it is Dar al-Islam." Those are the words of a modern Muslim cleric.
There will never be peace until the entire world is Muslim. They are committed to that position.

So, the answer to the question is FOE !

Do you have anything to comment on the issues the article picks up on?

[SwordoftheVistula]

PDF...eww

[Arrow Cross]

Mostly a foe inside Europe and mostly a friend outside of it.

[Monolith]

It's a start. I think it's positive that such articles can be published without people calling the authors racists, nazis and whatnot. It may be that the multiculturalist grip on academic circles is slowly weakening.

[Fortis in Arduis]

Where Islam becomes another force for globalisation, and wants to 'dominate the world' and marries itself to communism, which was what happened in Iran, resulting in the crappy revolution.

I am a secular nationalist, and I think that it is a terrible shame that secular nationalist movements have not been more successful in the Islamic world and moreover that certain governments and agencies in the West have engineered their demise.

[The Ripper]

These are the points which I would like to see discussed:

Notably, a view of Islam and pious Muslims as potential allies against an individualist, hedonist and consumerist late modern Swedish culture has been promoted by the self-described ‘Indo- European pagan, identitarian traditionalist and right-wing radical’ Motpol blogger Oskorei (www.oskorei.motpol.nu). Arguably the most important Motpol blog with 2-5000 readers every week, Oskorei is a widely quoted source for inspiration for nationalists seeking an arena for discussing matters of identity and ideology in connections with current political, economical, cultural and intellectual trends. The positions taken by Oskorei on Islam in several blog posts have stirred controversy both among fellow identitarian bloggers and nationalists of other persuasions, and have triggered discussions that sometimes can be as multi-faceted and contradictory as the mainstream debates.

Sociologist Mable Berezin (2009:7) argues that right-wing movements in contemporary Europe emerge against the background of processes of European integration, globalisation and individualism, which challenges established national loyalties and perceptions of cultural and socio-economic safety tied to the nation-state. Interestingly, Berezin’s analysis both contextualizes and interacts with another important common theme in Motpol discourse: the fundamental critique of late modern society, a critique which profoundly influences identitarian discourse on Islam and Muslim immigrants. Identitarians here draw inspiration from several sources: traditionalist thinkers such as Julius Evola, identitarians such as de Benoist, conservatives such as Christopher Lasch and paleo-libertarians such as Paul Gottfried. At the centre of the critique is a neo-liberal exploitative economic order that in the framework of globalisation seeks to subjugate all bearers of authentic traditions and erase collective loyalties and values standing between individuals and the markets (financial, work, sexual, identity markets etc.). As globalisation and the breakdown of traditional collective ties convert citizens into consumerists and hedonistic individuals, incapable of and uninterested in collective resistance, a politically correct, “therapeutic” form of liberalism supervised by an emergent “new class” (Gottfried) controls political discourse and the formation of opinions. Identitarians thus conceptualise power as divided between beneficiaries of neo-liberal economic policies and the civil servants administrating state-supported identity politics encouraged by media professionals. Identitarian metapolitics can be conceived of as a form of resistance to this late modern state of society and culture.

In order to provide a glimpse into how mainstream debates provoke counter-discourse on the Motpol blogs, and how their anti-liberal and ethno-pluralist ideological framework shapes identitarian thinking on Islam and Muslims we will look into one specific blog post by Oskorei. The post is called Post-liberal slöjdebatt (Post-liberal debate on the veil) from October 14th 2009. In the post Oskorei argues that Swedish debates on the veil can serve as an illustration to the state of a Swedish society he terms post-liberal, in terms of “free speech, the multi-ethnic situation, post- liberal totalitarianism and the new lines of conflict”.

The post was triggered by debates in the media about an incident in the Stockholm suburb Rinkeby (mainly populated by immigrants, including many Muslims) when what was portrayed as “Muslim religious extremists” tried to convince girls not to enter a disco arguably because it was frequented by both sexes. In connection with the incident, the chairwomen of Social Democratic Women in Sweden, Nalin Pekgul, herself a practising Muslim, argued on public service radio that ‘no one in this country should be able to limit women’s freedom in the name of religion’. This view was supported on the editorial pages of the mainstream liberal daily Dagens Nyheter who condemned “religious fundamentalists – of whatever faith – when they limit other people’s right to live their life as they wish to”, and asked public and private owners of housing facilities to consider if they really should “provide premises for organisations and persons that encourage the oppression of women” (Westerberg 2009-10-10). Oskorei’s comments on the debate were, however, immediately caused by reactions to another article that took a critical stand to the views expressed by Pekgul and Dagens Nyheter. That article was written by a Swedish Muslim student of Iranian origin and published on Newsmill, a website which recently has become important for social and medial debates in Sweden. In the article the author reacted strongly against what he believed is a bias against pious Muslims in Swedish mainstream media, which ultimately seek to deny Muslims the same right to influence Swedish society that it grants to secular forces, liberals and feminists. Why should public space, the author asks, not be open for pious Muslims seeking to convince people to life a righteous life as they see it, while it is open to secular activists trying to change the behaviour of Muslims in Sweden in accordance with their views? Why is it only considered a problem when local Muslims are encouraged by pious believers to dress decently, but not when parents and relatives force young girls not to wear the veil? (Zahedi 2009-10-13). Not surprisingly, the article was followed by comments questioning the main arguments of the author with an often fiercely anti-Islamic rhetoric.

In his post Oskorei sympathises with the author’s criticism of mainstream media’s double standards in celebrating the free life-choices of the young individuals but not respecting the freedom of young Muslim believers to chose and propagate a pious life-style, and that the pressure on young people to conform to the demands of consumer society is as strong as any religious propaganda. Oskorei also takes into account the commentaries on the Newsmill article, and sees them as an illustration of what has happened to the quality of public reasoning after “decades of curbed public debate on questions of “multiculture”, Islam and immigration”:

“A large part of the public is ideologically confused, and confounds its resistance to a demographic/ethnic change of the public space with support for the liberal values that caused the change. Then partly the Muslims, partly the veil become the problem. To be “Swedish” then is to be liberal, atheist, and to be upset when women don’t show their necks.” (Oskorei, Post-liberal slöjdebatt, 2009-10-14)