Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia

In late July 2011, Norway was struck by the worst terror attacks in its history. In a fertilizer-bomb attack on Government Headquarters in Oslo and a one-hour-long shooting spree at the Labour Party Youth Camp at Utøya, seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers, were killed by Anders Behring Breivik. By targeting young future social democratic leaders, his actions were meant to lead to the downfall of Europe's purportedly multiculturalist elites, thus removing an obstacle to his plans for an ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Europe.

In this highly original work, leading Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad reveals how Breivik's beliefs were not simply the result of a deranged mind, but rather they are the result of the political mainstreaming of pernicious racist and Islamophobic discourses. These ideas, currently gaining common currency, threaten equal rights to dignity, citizenship and democratic participation for minorities throughout contemporary Europe.

An authoritative account of the Norwegian terror attacks and the neo-racist discourse that motivated them.

Auteur

Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian social anthropologist. He worked as an associate professor at Oslo University College in Oslo, Norway from 2008 to 2010, and from 2010 to 2013 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of the award-winning book The Faces of Secularism.

Contenu

Preface

1. Human Terror
2. Muslims in Norway
3. The Fear of Small Numbers: On Reading a Terrorist Tract
4. Convergences
5. Dusklands: The Eurabia Genre
6. The Weight of Words