Mainstreaming the Extreme: the British Media and Far Right Islamophobia

Whether through propagating theories about ‘Eurabia’ or the Great Replacement, mainstream publications have helped radicalise public opinion, says Julian Petley

According to draft extracts of the Prevent review leaked to the Guardian, the government’s counter-terrorism programme has been too heavily focused on right-wing extremism and insufficiently concerned with Islamist extremism.

The leaked documents claim that “there has been a ‘double standard’ approach to tackling different forms of extremism, with individuals targeted for expressing mainstream right-wing views because the definition of neo-nazism has expanded too widely, while the focus on Islamist extremism has been too narrow”. They also argue that it has taken a view on right-wing terror which has been “so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation”.

But as Sir Peter Fahy, the former police lead for Prevent, asked: “How are the police supposed to judge what is mainstream?” As he explained,  the police are concerned primarily with the likelihood of people being drawn into violence, not whether their views are mainstream. 

Given that the review is being undertaken by William Shawcross, whose antipathy to Islam hardly needs stressing, such sentiments are entirely unsurprising. They also need to be seen in the context of the growing assault on the numerous critics of Prevent. This is being spearheaded by Policy Exchange, of which Shawcross is a senior fellow, whose recent report Delegitimising Counter-Terrorism insists that “the biggest terrorist threat still emanates from Islamist, not far-right, extremism” and that “Muslim individuals who may present a security risk are being under-represented in referrals, given that Islamist terrorism is by far the greatest security threat”.

This is despite of the fact that in July 2021, Ken McCallum, the director-general of MI5, warned that extreme right-wing terror accounted for one in five of all counter-terror investigations, a threat that had ‘grown and morphed quite substantially over the last five to ten years. A particular problem he identified was the ‘high prevalence’ of teenagers in right-wing terror investigations, which he suggested was because youngsters were being swept up in a ‘toxic ideology’ of ‘online extremists and echo chambers’. 

As Nafeez Ahmed has already pinpointed the report’s authors’ own imbrication in elements of the far-right, I want here to argue that much “right-leaning commentary” in sections of the national press in Britain goes far beyond the “mildly controversial or provocative” and has long been a key conduit by means of which the idea of “Islamisation”, long associated with far-right extremism, has been enabled to enter mainstream political discourse.

As the then UK Counter Terrorism Policing Lead, Neil Basu, pointed out in an open letter in March 2019:

“The reality is that every terrorist we have dealt with has sought inspiration from the propaganda of others, and when they can’t find it on Facebook, YouTube, Telegram or Twitter they only have to turn on the TV, read the paper or go to one of a myriad of mainstream media websites struggling to compete with those platforms.”

However, in order fully to understand how such ideas have entered the mainstream, we first need to make a brief detour into history.

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‘Islamisation‘

As is abundantly clear from the “manifestos” of mass murderers such as Anders Breivik, Patrick Crusius, Peyton Gendron and Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrators of the majority of far-right terrorist attacks on people of colour, and particularly Muslims and those who support them, have all seen themselves as foot soldiers in the war against “Islamisation”, whose latest guise is the “Great Replacement”.

This was actually the title of the manifesto of the Christchurch mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant. This notion was popularised by the philosopher Renaud Camus in Le Grand Remplacement (2012), which warns against the Islamisation of Europe and strongly influenced both Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, the latter warning of mass immigration in Le Suicide Francais (2014). 

In The Strange Death of Europe (2017) it was cited by Douglas Murray, who warned that “Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide … As a result, by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home”.

There is in fact nothing essentially new in such ideas, which date back at least as far as the Reconquista – the centuries-long process in which the Christian Iberian kingdoms opposed and conquered the Muslim kingdoms. Much more recently, President de Gaulle argued in 1959 that it was better to grant Algeria independence than to offer Algerians full French citizenship, as that would turn France into an “Islamic country”, famously declaring that “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux Eglises but Colombey-les-Deux Mosquées”.

Also worth noting is Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel Le Camp des Saints, in which France is overthrown by Indian refugees. Significantly, this became a best-seller in 2011, is much admired by Steve Bannon and Donald Trump and is discussed at length by Murray in The Strange Death of Europe.

In 1993, during the Muslim genocide in the Balkans, the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic told the journalist Paul Koring that “the Islamic world does not have the atomic bomb, but it has the demographic bomb”, and in the same year the Serbian academic Darko Tanaskovich, in an article headlined “Europe Will Not Avoid the Demographic Jihad”, warned in a Serbian newspaper of “an economic, diplomatic, and especially a demographic jihad”. Nor were such sentiments limited to Serbia. For example, in America Alone (2006), Mark Steyn, who had by then been a regular columnist for the Telegraph for several years, appeared to suggest that genocide was an understandable reaction to demographic change, stating that: 

In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

In this respect, it is surely highly significant that Tarrant live-streamed the Christchurch assault to the backdrop of Serbian nationalist music, including a piece which glorified the Bosnian Serb nationalist leader, Radovan Karadzic.

The notion of ‘Islamisation’ informs in one way or another books such as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West (2002), Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan (2006), Michael Gove’s Celsius 7/7 (2006) and Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV (2007). And in the first decade of the new millennium, the idea of “Eurabia” became fashionable in anti-Islamic circles. One of its most prominent early exponents was the journalist and author Oriana Fallaci, who attacked what she called “Islamofascism” in The Rage and the Pride (2002) and The Force of Reason (2004). In an interview published by the Wall Street Journal on 23 June 2005 she stated that “Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia’, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense”.

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Eurabia

However, the notion of Eurabia found its fullest expression in Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005) by Bat Ye-or (Hebrew for ‘Daughter of the Nile’), the pseudonym of an Egyptian-born Jewish woman, Gisèle Litmann, who fled Cairo for Britain after Suez and now lives in Switzerland.

This advances the truly bizarre thesis that Eurabia was a deliberate political project whose roots lie in the European Community’s establishment, during the 1973 oil crisis, of the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD). This was intended to forge closer political, cultural and economic links between Europe and the Arab world, but to Ye’or, however, this was the sinister means whereby European politicians and civil servants willingly laid the groundwork for the subjugation of Europe and its irreversible transformation into Eurabia.

Through EAD, European media, universities and schools were converted into channels for Arab propaganda and historical disinformation that exalted the Islamic contribution to European civilisation and negated Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage. The process allegedly begun by EAD continued with EU initiatives such as the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations established by the European Commission in March 2002, and, in Ye’or’s view, the results are clearly evident in Europe’s “resurgent anti-Americanism”, “Judeophobia” and, most of all, in the “cult” of “Palestinianism” which “poisons Europe”

The Eurabia thesis has been aptly described by Matt Carr in the journal Race an