Tarring Jihad's Opponents

The British organization HOPE not Hate (HnH), a group formed in 2005 to oppose the "politics of hate" of the British National Party and the English Defense League in the service of the "anti-racist and anti-fascist movement" and enjoying the "support of the Daily Mirror, trade unions, celebrities and community groups across" the United Kingdom, has published on its website a Counter-Jihad Report. HnH's chief executive Nick Lowles writes in the report's online introduction that the "Counter-Jihad" (CJ) movement "is a broad church of people and ideas embracing neo-Conservatives, Christian evangelicals, hard-line racists, football hooligans, nationalists, right wing populists and some former leftists." This "new face of the political right in Europe and North America" has replaced the "old racial nationalist politics of neo-Nazi and traditional far right parties" with an "anti-Muslim and anti-immigration message" based on "cultural and identity wars" in order to be "more mainstream and respectable." Already "increasingly ... poisoning the wider political and media discourse," the CJ will, in HnH's leftist materialistic analysis, "only grow" as "economic hardship bites and insecurity breeds fear."

Although "numerically small," the CJ's rhetorical "poisons" can have "deadly effect." The "Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik[,]" infamous for his bloody July 22, 2011 attacks, for example, was "inspired by many of the 'counter-jihadists' we profile in this report" and, accordingly, features with his personally created fantastical military attire and assault rifle on the Counter-Jihad Report's masthead. Fellow counter-jihadists outlets include Robert Spencer's well-known Jihad Watch website as well as pictures of Spencer's sponsor, the American conservative political activist and publisher David Horowitz, and Dutch politician Geert Wilders. "Almost a quarter" of Breivik's "1,500 page Manifesto" (available in PDF form here) comprised quotations "from other people-the overwhelming majority from people featured in this report" such as the "'counter-jihadist' blogger Fjordman" (Peder Nostvold Jensen), who alone provided "[h]alf of these 375 pages of quotes." "Perhaps," concedes Lowles, Breivik "would have gone on a killing spree without reading their work but it is clear their writings had an important impact on the creation of his political mindset." In response to this threat, HnH "is establishing a permanent 'Counter-Jihad' Monitoring Unit." (...)