Bangstad, Eurabia Comes To Norway

Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations
ISSN: 0959-6410 (Print) 1469-9311 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cicm20
Eurabia Comes to Norway
Sindre Bangstad
To cite this article: Sindre Bangstad (2013) Eurabia Comes to Norway, Islam and
Christian–Muslim Relations, 24:3, 369-391, DOI: 10.1080/09596410.2013.783969
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Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2013
Vol. 24, No. 3, 369–391, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2013.783969
Eurabia Comes to Norway

Sindre Bangstad*
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway
Andres Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 22/7/11 terrorist attacks in Norway, was
profoundly inspired by what has become known as the Eurabia genre. Behring Breivik’s
1516-page cut-and-paste tract, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, makes
extensive reference to Eurabia authors, and most prominently to the blog essays of the
Norwegian extreme right-wing blogger “Fjordman,” also known as Peder Are Nøstvold
Jensen. A popular transnational genre found in both film and literature, the Eurabia genre is
central to understanding the worldviews of extreme right-wing “counter-jihadists.” It is a
conspiratorial genre in which a central rhetorical trope is that Europe is on the verge of
being taken over by Muslims. It alleges that European Muslims want to establish continent-
wide Islamic domination in the form of an Islamic state or a caliphate, using higher fertility
rates and immigration as their main means of achieving this. The Eurabia genre has,
however, hitherto received limited academic attention. In this article, I use the insights of
critical discourse analysis in order to analyse some central contributions to this profoundly
Islamophobic genre and its popularization and political mainstreaming in Norway in the past
decade.
Keywords: Eurabia genre; counterjihadism; extreme right-wing discourse; Muslims in Europe;
Islamophobia
Critical discourse analysis

First, what for the purposes of this article is understood by critical discourse analysis needs to be
made clear. Critical discourse analysis or CDA “emerged as a programmatic development in
European discourse studies in the late 1980s spearheaded by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak,
Teun van Dijk, and others” (Blommaert and Bulcaen 2000, 447). The purpose of CDA, in the
words of one of its main proponents, Wodak (1995, 204), is to analyse “opaque as well as
transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as
manifested in language.” Within critical discourse analysis “discourse is seen as a means
through which (and in which) ideologies are being reproduced” (Blommaert and Bulcaen
2000, 450). For Fairclough (1992, 93), “the articulation and re-articulation of orders of
discourse is correspondingly one stake in hegemonic struggle.” Critical discourse analysis was
from its very outset centrally concerned with racism (ibid.). Though this article is inspired by
the general framework of CDA, for reasons of space it will not make use of linguistic analysis
in the detailed manner propounded by CDA.
Islamophobia
In describing the Eurabia genre as Islamophobic, I have opted to use a term that, in Norway as
elsewhere in Western Europe, is to say the least highly contested. I shall use the term
“Islamophobia” to refer to “indiscriminate negative attitudes and sentiments concerning Islam
*Email: sindre.bangstad@sai.uio.no
© 2013 University of Birmingham

370 S. Bangstad
and Muslims” (Bleich 2011, 1581). Whilst the term itself has been traced back to the work of two
French Africanists in ca. 1910, in its contemporary usage it was first introduced in academic
discourse in English by the late Edward W. Said in 1986, and popularized by the Runnymede
Trust Report into Islamophobia in 1997 (López 2011). The contemporary contestation of the
term has to do with the fact that it is not a neutral term (see Bowen 2005, 524) and that it has
a dual function as both a denunciatory and an analytical term (see Bangstad 2012). Zúquete
(2008, 328) argues that there is a lack of clarity regarding its meaning and to what exactly it
refers, and Bowen (2005, 524) laments that the term has come to be used in an “overly broad
way” and is “highly polemical.” Zúquete (2008, 328) consequently calls for a “restrained
usage” of the term by social scientists. My decision to use it here is first and foremost a
pragmatic choice. Though the term itself may certainly not be ideal, inasmuch as it risks
conflating negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslims, may seem to pathologize such
attitudes, and may of course be misused and instrumentalized by Muslim actors who want to
denounce any negative attitude towards Islam or Muslims as “phobic,”1 it is by now a term
that has come of age (Klug 2012) and, furthermore, seems more appropriate than the available
alternatives. Lest my usage of the term be misunderstood, let me therefore at the outset make
it clear that Muslims who endorse violence and terrorism or are anti-democratic, misogynistic,
homophobic or anti-Semitic clearly do exist, and that my usage of the term Islamophobia does
not imply that it is in any way “phobic” to fear or resent what they represent. This is why the
emphasis on “indiscriminate negative attitudes” in Bleich’s definition of Islamophobia is useful
and necessary.
Introducing Eurabia
Bat Ye’or, née Gisèle Oreibi, but now known as Gisèle Littman, the daughter of an Italian-French
Jewish couple, was born in the upper-class area of Zamalek in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933. The Oreibis
were forced to leave Egypt in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War and they arrived as stateless
refugees in London in 1957. Oreibi attended University College London (UCL). In 1959, she
married the historian David G. Littman (1933–2012), whose surname she adopted, and she
became a British citizen. In 1960, she moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, with her husband.
The canard that Gisèle Littman is a qualified “historian” or “scholar of Islam” is central to her
faux-academic promoters, from Robert Spencer via Bruce Bawer to Irshad Manji.2 Though she
attended undergraduate courses at both UCL and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, in
actual fact Gisèle Littman never obtained a degree from either of these institutions (see
Washington Times, October 30, 2002). She is, in other words, “not an academic and has never
taught at any university” (Haaretz, June 20, 2006). However, this has not prevented her from
being called as an expert witness in hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in the USA in 1997 and 2002, or from being invited
to lecture at Georgetown, Brown, Yale and Brandeis universities in the USA in 2002. She also
appeared at academic conferences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel in 2006.
Littman writes and publishes primarily in French, and a number of her books and articles were
translated by her late husband, David G. Littman. David G. Littman, who, unlike his wife, was
a qualified historian, shared his wife’s convictions concerning Eurabia and dhimmitude.3 In the
USA, Gisèle Littman’s work has for a long time been published by Farleigh Dickenson
University Press. In Israel, her work is published in Hebrew translations by Schocken
Publishing House. Though a 1980 French publication of hers was referenced by Bernard
Lewis (1984, 194) in a footnote to his monograph The Jews of Islam, Littman’s work by and
large existed in a state of pseudo-academic obscurity before the terrorist attacks on the USA
by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. It would be an understatement to assert that the work of
Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 371
Gisèle Littman/Bat Ye’or is regarded among most qualified historians of Islam and the Middle
East as failing to meet basic standards of academic research,4 yet the pseudo-scientific
appearance of her work, replete with academic paraphernalia such as extensive footnotes and
references, is central to its ability to convince readers (see Linton 2012, 121 for this). The work
of Gisèle Littmann/Bat Ye’or is cited approvingly and at length by writers from Harvard
historian Niall Ferguson (New York Times, April 4, 2004)5 to Bruce Bawer (2006) and Robert
Spencer (2008), to Anders Behring Breivik’s favourite ideologue, the extreme right-wing
counter-jihadist Norwegian blogger Peder Are “Fjordman” Nøstvold Jensen (see Enebakk 2012).
Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (2005a) is, if anything, the standard work of the
Eurabia genre. Other key Eurabia writers are: the Italian Oriana Fallaci (The Rage and the Pride
(Fallaci 2004); The Force of Reason (Fallaci 2006)), the British Melanie Phillips (Londonistan:
How Britain Has Created a Terror State Within (Phillips 2006)), the American Robert Spencer
(Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs Spencer
(2008)), the Canadian Mark Steyn (America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (Steyn
2006)) and the American-Norwegian Bruce Bawer (While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is
Destroying the West From Within (Bawer 2006); Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing
Freedom (Bawer 2009)) (see Carr 2006). Less well known is the Swiss author Sylvain Besson
(La Conquête de l’Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (Besson 2005)). Strong echoes of
the Eurabia thesis are also found in the work of the Somali-born atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2010),
and that of her husband, Professor Niall Ferguson (2011), and Christopher Caldwell (2009).
Ye’or herself draws the term Eurabia from the polemical tract by the late Oriana Fallaci
(1929–2006), The Force of Reason (La Forza Della Ragione), first published in 2004 and
translated into a number of languages. Here, Fallaci described Europe as having already turned
into a Eurabia.6 However, the term originates with neither Fallaci nor Ye’or, but with an
obscure and by the available evidence largely unsuccessful publication (only four issues in
1975) with the same name, published by a European Committee for the Co-ordination of
Friendship Associations with the Arab World (Comité européen des associations d’amitié avec
le monde arabe) in Paris in the 1970s.
Ye’or (2005a, 9) describes “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization”7 into a
“post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic
powers that propagate it.” This shift, contends Ye’or
came as a result of the oil crisis of 1973 when the European Economic Community (EEC),8 at the
initiative of France and the Arab League, established the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD). Since then,
the EAD has been in the vanguard of engineering a convergence between Europe and the Islamic
states of North Africa and the Middle East. (10)
Ye’or’s version of the Eurabia thesis is a strongly conspiratorial one, in which a formal
co-operation between Muslim states in the Middle East and the EU that is hidden from the
European general public and aimed at establishing “Eurabia” has allegedly been operating
since the petroleum crisis of 1973.9
Eurabia is, according to Bat Ye’or, ultimately directed against Israel and the USA and reflects
“increasing Islamic penetration of Europe and its growing influence on European policy” (10).
For Ye’or, “Euro-Arab culture is permeating, even overwhelming, all levels of West European
society” (11). The EU’s “Eurabians” are allegedly key to this development, for “faceless
networks of a huge administration uniting the EU and OIC (Organization of the Islamic
Conference)”10 have managed to create “a Kafkaesque world functioning as a totalitarian
anonymous system” that maintains “political correctness and censorship” (Ye’or 2011, 20).
By 2011, Ye’or, in Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate, writes as if the
final Islamization of Europe is already nearing its completion.11
372 S. Bangstad
A key concept for Bat Ye’or is dhimmitude. Though derived from the Arabic term dhimmī,
referring to historically protected, though ultimately subordinate, non-Muslim peoples, the
term “dhimmitude” is in fact a neologism. For Ye’or (2005b, 148), the term refers to “[the]
obligatory submission [of non-Muslim peoples] by war or surrender to Islamic domination.”
“The study of dhimmitude, then, is the study of the progressive Islamization of Christian
civilizations” (149). Ye’or first introduced the term in her 1996 book The Decline of Eastern
Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, which had five years previously
appeared in French. In a review of this book in Middle East Policy in 1997, Robert Brenton
Betts (1997, 200) noted that its title was misleading, since it was “in equal, if not greater
measure” about Judaism as about Eastern Christianity. This is not entirely coincidental, for
Ye’or (2005a, 156) is centrally interested in advancing the ahistorical notion of a “common
[historical] condition of Jews and Christians [under Islam]” to generate support for Jewish–
Christian alliances in support of Israel in the present. Dhimmitude, in Ye’or’s conception,
refers to “the whole web of disabling political, historical, sociological and cultural
circumstances that enmesh a Christian or Jewish population that has been brought under
Islamic hegemony” (Griffith 1998, 620). Dhimmitude, as applied to contemporary Western
societies, also on Ye’or’s conception, refers to a state of mind. “The civilization of dhimmitude
does not develop all at once,” but “is a long process that involves many elements and a
specific mental conditioning” (Ye’or 1996, cited in Spencer 2005, 31). One can even be living
in a state of dhimmitude without ever realizing it. Hence, due to “the psychological impact of
intellectual terrorism,” the entire West, Ye’or proclaimed as early as 1996, has “entered into a
phase of dhimmitude without realizing it” (1996, 219). Living in a state of dhimmitude whilst
failing to realize it ultimately leads to “self-destruction” (Ye’or 1996, cited in Spencer 2005, 31).
Manji (2004, 61) thinks that Ye’or “coined the word dhimmitude to describe Islam’s ideology
of wholesale discrimination against Jews and Christians” (my emphasis). Spencer (2005, 31)
argues that Ye’or has “pioneered the study of dhimmitude as a distinct phenomenon.” The
etymology of the term seems uncertain: Griffith (1998, 620) suggests that it was first coined
by the Lebanese Maronite warlord and Phalangist (Katāʾib) leader Bashir Gemayel (1947–82).
The suggestion is not as specious as it may seem. As a matter of fact, for Bat Ye’or/Gisèle
Littman, as for Eurabia authors in general, Lebanon is central, as a purported harbinger of
Europe’s future of “dhimmitude,” lest Muslim immigration and demographic increase be
stopped in its tracks. For in Bat Ye’or’s rendering, the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990,
in which Israel invaded its northern neighbour to prop up its Maronite Christian proxies and to
forcibly expel the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its Lebanese bases in June
1982, only for it to be bogged down in a sectarian spiral of violence that led to its withdrawal
to a security zone in South Lebanon in May 1983, meant nothing short of a “destruction of
Lebanese Christianity” (Ye’or 1996, 218). This profoundly distorted view of recent Lebanese
history also appears in Anders Behring Breivik’s tract.
Another key term for Ye’or is taqiyya. Such is the very nature of Muslims that whatever they
do and wherever they do it, whether they happen to be Shi‘a or Sunni, they practise taqiyya or
“dissimulation.” A standard reference work on Shi‘a Islam argues that the doctrine of taqiyya
or religious dissimulation was developed during the imamate of the sixth imam, Jaʿfar
al-S.ādiq (c. 83–148/699–765), in Medina, in order to protect the followers of al-S.ādiq from
the “brutally repressive campaign” against the descendants of Imam ʿAlī by the Abbasid
Caliph al-Mans.ūr (Momen 1985, 38–39). But in Ye’r’s work, and in the understandings of her
followers, taqiyya is rather perceived as systematic “lies” or “deceptions” through which
Muslims everywhere in the world “conceal” their “real” intentions to establish Islamic
dominance over non-Muslim peoples. Accordingly, Muslims, whatever their orientation or
beliefs, are never to be trusted, and Muslims and Islamists (whether radical or moderate) are
essentially part of the same plot, even if their means vary. As Martha C. Nussbaum notes in The
New Religious Intolerance (2012, 12), the notion that Muslims are concealing their real intentions
regarding world domination is in fact strikingly similar to one of the most central rhetorical tropes
of classical anti-Semitism. When the then leader of the Norwegian Progress Party (PP;
Fremskrittspartiet – FrP), Carl I. Hagen (1944–) protested in August 2004 against the
Norwegian Conservative Party-dominated government permitting the Pakistani politician MP
Qazi Hussein Ahmed of the Islamist Jamaat e-Islami to visit Norway and Oslo for Pakistani
national day celebrations, he alleged to the liberal tabloid Verdens Gang that “according to the
Qur’an, it is perfectly acceptable to lie to and deceive the infidels, including us Christians”
(Verdens Gang, August 10, 2004). In a following letter to the editor at Verdens Gang, Hagen
(Verdens Gang, August 8, 2004a) would refer to the “so-called tactic of taqiyya,” which
“permits fanatical Islamists to walk around in Western attire, drink alcohol, behave like well-
integrated immigrants, in short, to conceal their real aims to their surroundings and Western
police.”
It is not only Lebanon that has exercised Bat Ye’or’s mind over the years, however. In the
midst of the Balkan wars in the 1990s, she gave a speech in Chicago at the invitation of an
organization called the Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies. This foundation had been
established by the one-time political advisor to Margaret Thatcher, Alfred Sherman (1919–
2009) and Sjrda (Serge) Trifković (1954–), a once close associate and political advisor to the
Serbian ultra-nationalists Radovan Karadžić and Biljana Plavsić. It promoted ultra-nationalist
Serbian agendas. Sherman was convinced that, by recognizing independent Bosnia, Western
powers had allowed a “European Islamistan” to be established. Ye’or had by this time started
to be read by Serbian ultra-nationalists, for as early as 1994 she had declared in an interview
with Midstream, a Jewish monthly journal in the USA, that Bosnia was a “spearhead” for the
Islamization of Europe (Sells 2003, 362, 382). Ye’or’s speech in Chicago in 1995 was titled
“Myths and Politics: The Tolerant Pluralistic Islamic Society: Origin of a Myth” and is
reproduced in its entirety in the tract produced by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011, 2083:
A European Declaration of Independence. Here, Bat Ye’or claimed that the UN’s decision to
recognize a “Muslim state in the former Yugoslavia” was “a compensation offered to the
Islamic world for the devastating 1991 Gulf War” that would bring “sufferings, miseries and
trials in its wake.”12
“A decent conspiracy theory is made up of hard facts; the invention lies in drawing the
connections,” argued Thomas Jones (2005) apropos of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia book. “It would be
a stretch of the historical record” to suggest that the EAD “amounted to European
subservience to a monolithic Islamic ‘cause’,” writes Jonathan Laurence (2012, 47). But this is
precisely what Bat Ye’or implies that it does. In its strong version, the Eurabia thesis amounts
to a classical conspiracy theory (Keeley 1999) in which a highly tendentious selection of
historical data and facts are marshalled in support of the notion that Europe and its cultures
and values are slowly being undermined by the presence of Muslims in their midst. The main
villains in the plot are “The Left.” After the collapse of Communism in 1989, “Third
Worldists, neo-Communists, and Islamists” have created “a powerful jihadist coalition against
Western democracies and their allies.” The power possessed by this clandestine alliance is
vast: according to Ye’or, European universities are “controlled by the Palestinians” (see
Haaretz, June 20, 2006). This coalition is so “deeply rooted in the Euro-Arab political
alliance” (Ye’or 2005a, 12) that the “International Left” is, in the words of Eurabia author
Bruce Bawer, “the new quislings” (Bawer 2012). Central to any conspiracy theory is the
notion that the truth is being hidden from the common man and woman by a powerful elite
and that only a privileged few are sufficiently knowledgeable and clear-eyed to see the coming
storm. Ye’or sees herself as one of the chosen few: “While Europeans live within Eurabia’s
374 S. Bangstad
constraints, few are really conscious of them on a daily basis, beyond a somewhat confused
awareness. Eurabians are the agents and key enforcers of this all-encompassing new Eurabian
policy and culture” (Ye’or 2005a, 12). As pointed out by Carr (2006), central to the popular
credibility of the claims of the Eurabia genre is the contention of its authors that, whatever the
context, Muslims – regardless of their backgrounds, levels of religious belief and practice, or
political views – are essentially one and the same: instruments of a 1400-year-old Islamic
struggle to establish Islamic control over Europe. Individual Muslims may or may not be
aware of this “fact.” In line with the arguments of the Orientalist historian Bernard Lewis in
his post-9/11 tract What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Lewis
2002), it is axiomatic in this genre that Muslims hate “us” and have been hating us for a very
long time, and not for anything “we” might have done, but on account of what “we” are (see
Lyon 2012).
The letters to Lady Liberty

The first book in the Eurabia genre written by a Norwegian was Letter to Lady Liberty: Europe in
Danger (Amerikabrevet: Europa i fare) (Berg 2007). Its author Hallgrim Berg (1945–) was a
prominent Norwegian politician and Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party Høyre
from 1977 to 2001. In this book, Berg cites with approval Eurabia authors including Oriana
Fallaci, Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Bruce Bawer and the Norwegian blogger “Fjordman.”
Berg’s book is designed as a series of letters sent to “Lady Liberty,” who is, of course, the
USA. In the context of the US “war on terror,” the book hails the USA as the “foremost
symbol of freedom in the world,” holding out the torch of “freedom and enlightenment” (Berg
2007, 7). It is to the United States with its “power and will to stand up against totalitarian
ideas” (26) that Europeans must now turn if European civilization is to survive the onslaught
of “Islamic expansionism” (27). Berg also admires the United States for its close relationship
with Israel in the context of the turbulent Middle East.13
On the book’s very first page, we learn that contemporary Europe “is exposed to a Muslim
invasion and a galloping Islamization” (Berg 2007, 1). Democratic Europe is “at the verge of
developing into a new Arabia, a Eurabia” (8). “Step by step,” European tolerance for the
intolerant Muslims “who want to destroy democracy and replace it by sharia laws” leads us
into “cultural and national suicide” (9). There is a decay in liberal democracy that may lead to
the very “dissolution of Western civilization such as we have known it up until now.”
Attempting to establish academic credentials for Bat Ye’or, Berg claims that she is a “lecturer
at Columbia, Georgetown and Yale” in the United States. Struck by a rare modesty, Berg
writes that, in an address to the European Council in Strasbourg in 1991, he had warned
against “some of the aspects referred to by Bat Ye’or” (23). But at that time, he had “no
inkling of the documentation that this woman has provided concerning what happens in and
from Brussels.” For EU bureaucrats “constantly promote an ‘EU ideology’ called
multiculturalism.” It might be news to the same EU bureaucrats, but under the rubric of
multiculturalism, furthermore, all “ethnic, cultural and religious particularities” are to be
endorsed as “equally important and valid”; “anyone wanting to preserve democracy at the
level of the nation-state is to be portrayed as suffering from xenophobia”; and “one may refer
to all those wanting to limit immigration from the third world as ‘racists’.”14 The “Euro-Arab
dialogue” in which the EU allegedly engages constitutes “treason,” according to Berg’s logic.
Whilst endorsing all the central tenets of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, it appears that Berg’s rendering
of its contents is, by and large, based on a summary provided by “the well-known blogger
Fjordman presented in a series of detailed articles, The Eurabia Code.”
For Berg, as for most of the other popular authors in the Eurabia genre, time is fast running out
for a Europe faced with an existential threat: “Spain is already at the point of being lost” to the
“Islamic invasion” (Berg 2007, 32). Next in line is a “wavering France” that “no longer knows
what to do” (33) and “may easily have a Muslim majority in twenty-five years.” Berg ominously
predicts that by 2050, “at the very latest,” France will officially be known as “Arance or
Frarabia.” At this point, it is worth noting that the centrality of fictive demographics is a
characteristic of the Eurabia genre. By virtue of this logic, which one also finds expressed in
Anders Behring Breivik’s tract, France is in the “weakest position” of all European countries
because it has a higher percentage of inhabitants of Muslim background than any other
European country. But Norway, with 3.6% of its population being of Muslim background, is far
from safe from “Islamic expansionism.” If the projections of serious demographers at Statistics
Norway (Statistisk Sentralbyrå – SSB) render the scenario of a Muslim demographic takeover of
Norway in the near future statistically impossible (Morgenbladet, August 26, 2011), there are of
course demographic projections from other people, such as Ole Jørgen Anfindsen at the right-
wing blog HonestThinking, who have “with clear logic claimed that Norway […] may have a
Muslim majority as early as around 2040 or 2050” (Berg 2007, 52). As is the case with the
Eurabia genre in general, there is a certain circularity to the arguments being advanced,
inasmuch as authors and intellectuals who happen to share the worldview being advanced are
cited approvingly over and over again as authoritative sources of highly tendentious data and
statistics. The main threat to European civilization, according to most Eurabia authors, emanates
from the demographic strength of Muslims (see also Pilbeam 2011 and Larsson 2012), yet the
statistics cited in Eurabia literature for fertility rates, demographic trends and percentages of
Muslims appear, without exception, to be seriously flawed.
For Berg, as for “Fjordman” and Behring Breivik, al-Qaeda represents Islam: the terrorist
attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, according to Berg (2007, 37), “led to cheers and
applause in the Muslim ghettos surrounding Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Paris, Stockholm
and Torino” as well as “cries of jubilation and joy in multicultural classrooms in Oslo, the city
of the Peace Prize.” Berg provides no sources for these undocumented claims.15 Like US
neo-conservative commentator Norman Podhoretz, from whose work he gets the term, Berg
(148) conceives of himself as engaged in a “fourth world war”: a war between “democracy”
and “Islamic forces.”
Berg’s targets are not only Islamists or radical Islamists, but ordinary Muslims: “Almost 60%
of Muslims are illiterates who get their main information through censored television, reactionary
imams, and grotesque [i.e. anti-Semitic] cartoons” (Berg 2007, 99). Furthermore, Berg (55)
contends that “everyone who knows Islamic social milieus is struck by the prevailing
absolutism”; that inhabitants of the West are referred to as “infidels and dogs” in Muslim
“popular speech” (44); and that “the more loyal to the Qur’an a Muslim happens to be, the
more concerned he is with mixing religion and politics into the same dough” (57).
Berg also shares a central tenet of extreme right-wing discourse, found in the work of
“Fjordman” and Behring Breivik, in which “the Left” in Western countries are conspiring with
the “totalitarian Islamic right” to undermine liberal democracy. Media reporters, editors and
academics are involved in this conspiracy: “Four out of five active journalists and editors are
to be found way out on the ideological left” (Berg 2007, 81) and “the apparatuses of power
and the media are shot through with cultural relativism” (151).
Connecting the US–European dots: Bruce Bawer

The Eurabia genre is, if anything, a transnational genre. Bruce Bawer (1956–) has been central in
the attempt to mainstream the Eurabia literature. However, Bawer provides his readers with
376 S. Bangstad
Eurabia literature with a twist. For when he settled in Oslo West in 1999, it was with a background
as a gay Republican literary critic. Bawer’s gay identity is key in his books, as it is a key to his
understanding of Islam and Muslims as an “existential threat” to Europe. In this, he is reflective of
a significant shift on the extreme and populist right-wing in Western Europe in the past decade, in
which political movements that were until only recently overtly homophobic have in many
countries come to endorse liberal values and the rights of gays and lesbian as an intrinsic part
of their Islamophobic agendas. The central figure in this transition is the late Dutch politician
Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant homosexual, who was assassinated in 2002 by Volker van der
Graaf, a 32-year-old Dutch animal rights activist. Bawer expresses a great deal of admiration
for Fortuyn in his Eurabia books (see, for example, Bawer 2006, 165–169).
Bawer is throughout his books staunchly pro-Israel and a passionate defender of the “war on
terror” under George W. Bush (2000–8). Yet even though his books rage against the “liberal
elites” of multicultural USA and Europe, his gay identity makes him an ambivalent partner for
extreme right-wingers. One of those who perceived this was Anders Behring Breivik, who, in
comments posted on his favourite right-wing blog in Norway, Document.no (www.document.
no), noted that, in light of the need for a broad “cultural conservative” consolidation, “Bawer
may not be the right person for the work of bridge building.” For Bawer, in Behring Breivik’s
conception, was a liberal anti-jihadist, and not a cultural conservative. “I suspect,” wrote
Behring Breivik, “that Bawer is too paranoid (in regard to his gay orientation).” Furthermore,
“it appears that he fears that ‘cultural conservatives’ may constitute a threat to gays in the
future” (Document.no 2011).
Soon after settling in Oslo, Bawer appears to have established contact with the Norwegian
secular feminist Hege Storhaug. Storhaug, a former newspaper reporter, established the NGO
Human Rights Service (HRS) in Oslo in 2001 (Fekete 2009, 93). State subvention for the
HRS was initially secured through a special state budgetary allocation initiated by the PP
under the Bondevik II Government (2001–5). Storhaug and HRS has since its very inception
maintained a close relationship with the populist right-wing PP in Norway, acting as
consultants to the PP’s Parliamentary Caucus Commission on Immigration and Integration’s
Report in 2007 (see acknowledgements in Fremskrittspartiet 2007, 1) and for speeches by PP
MP Christian Tybring-Gjedde (see Tybring-Gjedde’s own admission of input from HRS for a
virulently anti-Muslim speech he gave to the PP’s national caucus in 2010 in Verdens Gang,
May 13, 2011). HRS, set up in order to assist immigrant women (see Razack 2004), has
through its website (www.rights.no) long served as a conduit for the mainstreaming of counter-
jihadist literature, including works in the Eurabia genre (see Dagbladet, August 12, 2011a and
Dagbladet, August 9, 2011b for documentation). It has promoted the works of the blogger
“Fjordman,” Bat Ye’or/Gisèle Littman and Robert Spencer. When the Norwegian ministry in
charge of integration in Norway reduced the HRS’s budget allocation by half some months
after the terrorist attacks of 22/7/11, the municipal government in Oslo, controlled by the
Conservative Party Høyre and the Social Liberal Venstre Party, was forced by the PP to make
up for the cut in return for the latter’s political support.
Bawer has been responsible for translating much of Storhaug’s work into English since 2001.
In 2009, Hege Storhaug’s HRS announced that it had formally employed Bawer as a text writer
and translator. Bawer’s last translation of an item appearing on the HRS website (www.rights.no)
is dated November 19, 2011. In Bawer’s books and columns, Storhaug – “an embattled hero”
(Bawer 2009, 235) – appears as an authoritative source on Islam and Muslims in Norway. As
is apparent from the acknowledgements in his books and the individuals he cites as
authoritative sources in his books after 2005 (see for example Bawer 2009, ix), among other
right-wing actors in Norway with whom Bawer established close contacts were Hans Rustad
of Document.no and Walid al-Kubaisi. In Denmark, he established close links with Lars
Hedegaard and Helle Merete Brix, who also have close links with Hege Storhaug and Rita
Karlsen of HRS in Norway.
In 2009, Lars Hedegaard, director of the Danish Trykkefrihetsselskapet (Free Speech Society)
and a former member of the populist right-wing Danish People’s Party (DPP), established a group
called the International Free Press Society in Copenhagen, Denmark. Its Danish precursor had
been established in 2005 in response to the cartoon crisis (Lehman 2011, 33).
The list of advisors to the International Free Press Society is a virtual “who’s who” of European
and US anti-Muslim right-wing activists and Eurabia authors, from Bat Ye’or/Gisèle Littman to
Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer and Geert Wilders.16 As is evident from the writings of Storhaug
and Bawer and newspaper interviews with “Fjordman” after 22/7/11, the many extreme-right
groupings with which Hedegaard and Brix are involved have served as important Scandinavian
nodes for the dissemination of Islamophobic speech and the anchoring of Islamophobic
networks. After July 22, 2011, the Swedish anti-racist magazine Expo named Hedegaard as one
of the ten most influential individuals in Europe and the United States among those spreading
anti-Muslim hatred (Lehman 2011). For Norwegian anti-Muslim activists, Hedegaard’s networks
have certainly been important. It is also known that Hedegaard’s autodidact books on Islam and
Muslims have been referred to by the former Norwegian PP chairman Carl I. Hagen (see
Verdens Gang, September 7, 2004b). In Denmark, Hedegaard is known for a long series of
inflammatory statements about Muslims. In an interview published by the Danish website
Snaphanen (www.snaphanen.dk) in December 2009, for which he would be charged with
criminal offences under the Danish General Penal Code § 266 B, Hedegaard made the claim that
Muslim men routinely rape young female members of their families. Having been first sentenced
for violations of § 266 B by a lower court in Copenhagen in 2011, Hedegaard was ultimately
acquitted by the Danish Supreme Court in 2012 on the technical grounds that his statement,
which the court found to violate § 266 B, had not originally been intended for publication
(Danish Supreme Court 2012). In an as yet unresolved assassination attempt, Hedegaard was
shot at by an armed intruder in his home in Copenhagen in February 2013.
In a series of books after September 11, 2001, Bruce Bawer argued that Europe and the United
States had similar interests in the “war on terror” – if only the European political, media and
academic elites would realize it. While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the
West From Within was published by Random House in 2006 and Surrender: Appeasing Islam,
Sacrificing Freedom was published by Doubleday in New York in 2009. Bawer (2009, 77)
focused his attention on Islam and Muslims because of 9/11, which was “utterly transforming
– and clarifying.” Or maybe not: in Surrender, he asserts: “my own wake-up call about all this
came in 2000,” when he supposedly discovered that “all you had to do to travel from a
modern post-Enlightenment democracy to a strict patriarchy out of seventh-century Arabia was
to walk a few blocks” (35) in the cities of Western Europe. Like many other Eurabia authors,
Bawer casts the net of “radical Islamists” and “Islamists” on the path to undermine Western
freedoms and civilization extremely wide. For “Islam” rather than “Islamism” is Bawer’s
concern. “Islam … doesn’t flavor – it transforms, subdues, conquers,” Bawer asserted in While
Europe Slept (2006, 28). Young European Muslims are “alien intruders” in Bawer’s
conception, and they do not change according to circumstances and the societies in which they
live: “Their neighborhoods … are embryonic colonies that will continue to grow as a result of
immigration and reproduction” (32).
Note Bawer’s terms: if areas in which European Muslims live are “colonies,” then their
growth through reproduction and immigration is part of a long-term “colonization” of
European territory. At this point, Bawer (2006, 32) introduces the work of Bat Ye’or, who,
according to Bawer, has “introduced a useful term to designate the geographical entity that is
taking shape as a result of Europe’s Islamicization [sic]: ‘Eurabia’.”
378 S. Bangstad
The main threat is demographic; for, according to Bawer (2006, 33), “within a couple of
generations, many [European] countries will have Muslim majorities.” Not so, according to
serious demographers (see Pew Research Center 2011), but serious research matters as little
for Bawer as anyone else in the Eurabia genre. (See also Saunders 2012 for documentation of
the demographic fabrications characteristic of the genre.) Bawer (2006, 32) also makes the
entirely unsubstantiated claim that 20% of Switzerland’s population is Muslim, while Swiss
census figures from 2000 reported 4.3% (Pilbeam 2011, 156). Yet for Bawer (2006, 39), the
reality is grim, for “in some urban areas of Europe, all order has broken down” by virtue of
the presence of Muslims. European children are regularly “dumped in Koran schools” (58),
and “some estimates17 suggests that 90 per cent of European Muslim wives are physically
abused” (59). Many of Western Europe’s “large immigrant communities” are in fact “led by
fundamentalist Muslims” looking forward “to the establishment in Europe of a caliphate
governed according to sharia law” (3). In Bawer’s view, young European Muslims to a large
extent support radical Islamism: “On 9/11 [2001], young Muslims across Europe had
applauded al-Qaeda in the streets; when Madrid was struck [in 2002], there were more
festivities; after the murder of [Theo] van Gogh [in 2005], still more” (200). It matters little, of
course, that few if any Europeans registered such “celebrations,” “applause” and “festivities”
“across Europe” on the part of European Muslim youth on these occasions. What matters is
that Bawer tells his readers that this is so. Muslims are never to be trusted: Even some
“successfully assimilated” Western Muslims have “alien mindsets” (Bawer 2009, 40). It is
male Muslim youth in particular who represent a threat to “order,” “freedom” and
“civilization,” and they do so by virtue of embodying “Islam.” For the “marauding [Muslim]
kids ‘embody’ their parents’ values,” have been “raised to be belligerent” and “taught that God
[has] given them authority over women, and made them superior to infidels.” “They see
Western society as the enemy, European men as wimps, European women as sluts” (38).
While Europe Slept weaves a narrative of a defeatist Europe with European governments’
“passivity in the face of al-Qaeda’s terrorism, Saddam’s [Hussein] tyranny, and the rise of
Islamism within their borders” (Bawer 2006, 150). “The Western European multicultural elite”
is supposedly “almost without exception, allied with the Islamic right” (212). The future will
be a “Europe ruled by sharia law” (229). In Surrender, Bawer (2009, 64) extends the
argument, so that it is no longer only Europe, but the entire West that is “on the road to
sharia.” And we all know what that means: “converts from Islam to other religions would be
executed,” “thieves would have their arms amputated,” “adulterous women would be stoned to
death” and “so would gay people” (25).
It matters little here that few but the most hardline and doctrinaire Islamic states in the world
(Iran, Saudi Arabia) actually practise such interpretations of the Shari‘a provisions for criminal
punishment (known as the h.udūd punishments), let alone that all survey data suggest that few
European Muslims actually favour such interpretations of the Shari‘a. Norway, Bawer’s home
since 1999, is particularly ineffective when it comes to “dealing with” immigrants in general
and Muslim immigrants in particular: for in Norway, “political correctness … reigned
supreme” (Bawer 2009, 35); Bawer and his gay partner are faced with a “wiry youth … raving
at us in a Middle Eastern language, his eyes ablaze with rage” when walking the streets of
Oslo (37);18 “Oslo cops” “back off from dealing with immigrants” (40–41); and establishment
politicians are “vigorous in their misrepresentation and ridicule of America” (115), since they
are social democrats marked by “nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet Communism”
(118). Not that Norwegian or European social democrats have historically been known for
their sympathies for Soviet Communism, of course, breaking as Norwegian social democrats
did with the Comintern in the early 1920s, in order to become staunch allies of the USA
within NATO during the Cold War from 1948 (see Sejersted 2011). But in the eyes of many
Americans unfamiliar with Norway or Scandinavia, it would of course be hard to tell the
difference.
In Eurabia literature, mainstream media are often cast as the unwitting allies of
multiculturalists and Islamists. They also appear as such in Bruce Bawer’s 2006 and 2009
Eurabia books. In Surrender, Bawer (2009, 64–65) asserts that “on the road to sharia” “the
media is in the driver’s seat,” “helping the jihadists.” And the prime example of this, for
Bawer, as for “ Fjordman” and Behring Breivik, is the suburban riots in France in 2005. These
riots, we are informed, were “in large parts assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim
neighborhoods, and thus jihadist in character” (65). But the media “covered up” or “drastically
de-emphasized” “the rioters’ Muslim identity.” The liberal media in the United States and
Great Britain are particularly bad in this regard: the New York Times and the BBC play the
part of “Dhimmitude Central” with regard to Islam – in other words, willing allies in the
struggle to “Islamize” the West (89).
But all is not lost: all over Europe there is a nascent European populist right-wing. Denmark in
particular inspires hope in Bruce Bawer; things changed there with the parliamentary elections of
2001 (181). In Denmark, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (at present the Secretary-
General of NATO) is one of “a few individuals who refuse to accept Islamization without a
struggle” (132). In “downtown Copenhagen,” Bawer meets other heroic “resisters” in the
persons of Lars Hedegaard and Helle Merete Brix (185). Hedegaard tells Bawer that there is
an ongoing “Islamicization [sic]” of the Nordic countries, and that Denmark is being
“surrendered to Muslims” (186). Hedegaard is in a dystopic mode, and argues that “native
Europeans, after enough daily doses of anti-Semitic and pro-Muslim propaganda, might reach
a point at which they’d actually accept Muslims’ right to execute Jews” (187). Note the terms
here: Hedegaard and Bawer imply that Islam “commands” Muslims to “execute Jews” for no
reason other than their being Jews. Hedegaard, like “Fjordman” and Behring Breivik, sees
clouds of war emerging on the horizon as a result of the presence of Muslims in Europe: its
future “will be war … like Lebanon” (188–189). Europe is, according to Bawer, facing its
“Weimar Moment” (193), with European Muslims cast in the role of the German Nazis who
brought the liberal German Weimar Republic to heel in 1933.
Across the straits from Copenhagen, multicultural Sweden, however, is “going to hell in a
handbasket” with “the number of ghettos rising at a dizzying speed” and “a murder rate twice
that of the United States” (Bawer 2009, 205). Sweden’s murder rate of 1.21 per 100,000 did in
2005, pace Bawer, compare extremely favourably with most states in the USA in 2005.
However, there are heroic “resisters” there too: the Swedish Democratic Party (Swedish
Democrats; Sverigedemokraterna), which has strong roots in the Swedish neo-Nazi movement
(see Strømmen 2011c, 102–113), and which after its electoral breakthrough in 2010 has seen
both a number of defections back to neo-Nazi organizations and a number of resignations by
MPs found to have made racist statements in public, is “the one party that acknowledged the
problems and wanted to put them on the national agenda.” In Norway, it is the PP, with which
Bawer’s close ally Hege Storhaug has had strong links for a long time, that represents “the
silent majority” of “ordinary citizens tired of being governed by elites who for decades had
mocked their national pride, taxed them heavily to support an inefficient welfare state, and
endangered their national security through reckless integration policies” (222). And in the
Netherlands, the late Pim Fortuyn (Bawer 2006, 165) and Geert Wilders (Bawer 2009, 22) are
cast by Bawer in the role as the “heroic resisters.”
In the aftermath of July 22, 2011, Bruce Bawer’s rhetoric concerning the political, media and
academic elites of his adopted country would become ever more strident and libellous. “Inside the
World of the Oslo murderer,” an op-ed by Bawer published in the Wall Street Journal on June 25,
2011 (Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2011) offered few words of comfort to the many Norwegians
380 S. Bangstad
bereaved and in mourning, let alone to the survivors. For the “real victims” of 22/7/11, according
to Bawer, were none other than Bawer and his fellow “critics of Islam.” For their case had “been
seriously damaged by Anders Behring Breivik,” a “murderous madman” who had now become
“the poster boy” for “criticism of Islam.” Bawer nevertheless took the opportunity to express a
faint hope that “Norwegian leaders would respond to this act of violence by taking a more
responsible approach to the challenges they face in connection with Islam.”
Note the paradoxes: the same Bawer who in While Europe Slept (2006, 156–157) had argued
that Spanish voters had succumbed to terrorism after the Madrid bombings in 2002 was in 2011
calling for Norwegian political leaders to allow themselves to be blackmailed into a specific
course of action in regard to Islam and Muslims by an extreme right-winger. The very same
Bawer had in his 2006 book taken Dutch newspaper reporters to task for attempting to cast
Volker van der Graaf, the left-wing assassin of Pim Fortuyn in 2002, as a “lone madman”
(169), which was of course exactly what Bawer was attempting to do with Behring Breivik.
Norway, lest those Norwegians in mourning over the worst massacre and acts of terrorism in
their country’s history allow themselves to forget it, was “like the rest of Europe”: “in serious
trouble” due to the presence of Muslims. Noting that Behring Breivik “considered the Labour
Party, Norway’s dominant party since World War II, responsible for policies that are leading to
the Islamization of Europe – and thus guilty of treason,” Bawer omitted any reference to the
fact that this was more or less the view he himself had advocated in the years preceding July
22, 2011. That much became clear in Bawer’s later book, published in February 2012, The
New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate about
Islam. Here, Bawer would claim that on Utøya in the days and hours leading up to Behring
Breivik’s massacres there on July 22, members of the Labour Party Youth Organization AUF
had been engaged in “Israel-bashing” and urging Labour Party youth to “support groups that
are internationally recognized as terrorists – and therefore, to embrace the idea that the cold-
blooded murder of innocent men, women and children is a legitimate means of achieving an
ideological end” (Bawer 2012). Bawer here slurs as anti-Semitic Norwegian social democrats’
opposition to the continued Israeli occupation of, and settlement expansion in, the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, and copious Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians. However,
a national representative survey by the Norwegian Holocaust Centre in 2012 demonstrates that
it is Norwegian adherents of the strongly pro-Israeli populist right-wing PP, with which Bawer
through the HRS had close contacts, and not social democrats, who happen to hold the most
negative attitudes towards Jews in Norway (HL Centre 2012, 63). Inasmuch as this party’s
adherents, according to the same survey, also happen to hold the most negative views of other
minorities in Norway, such as Muslims and Roma (31), there are valid reasons to suggest that
negative attitudes towards various minorities are closely interlinked.
With reference to the Nazi Prime Minister during the German occupation of Norway during
World War II from 1940 to 1945, Vidkun Quisling, Bawer also applied a standard rhetorical
device of extreme right-wing discourse to Norwegian social democrats,19 who were now, in a
momentous distortion of historical logic whereby the extreme right becomes centrist-left in
Norway, designated “Quislings.” In the aftermath of 22/7/11, these “Quislings” had, according
to Bawer, attempted to “silence debate about Islam.” Not that anyone living in Norway in the
months after 22/7/11 and reading Norwegian mainstream newspapers regularly had registered
that the “debate about Islam” had disappeared, let alone been silenced. Norwegians, of course,
know very well that use of this term in criticism of political opponents implies an incitement
to violence against those so named: Quisling was one of only eleven Norwegian Nazi
collaborators who were executed for their treason in the aftermath World War II. Use of this
term in this context also implies that those so designated are collaborating with “latter-day
Nazis” in the form of Norwegian and European Muslims. The rhetorical designation of
contemporary Muslims as akin to “Nazis” is of course also part of the standard repertoire of
extreme right-wing Islamophobes, from Robert Spencer in the USA to Peder Are “Fjordman”
Nøstvold Jensen in Scandinavia.
More disturbing to Norwegian readers, though, was that in his 2012 The New Quislings,
Bawer lifted two fabricated assertions straight off the pages of Behring Breivik’s tract. Bawer
approvingly cites Behring Breivik’s fabricated claim that members of the radical leftist-
anarchist group Blitz are the “storm troopers” of the Labour Party and his unsubstantiated
claims that “over the years, innumerable Norwegian teenagers have been killed by Muslims.”
Some might also take issue with Bawer’s characterization of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia from 2005
as “a sober work of solid documentation,” with the equally fabricated claim that the term
“Islamophobia is a … term invented by the Muslim Brotherhood” and his admittance of close
social contacts with “Fjordman.” In the passages on his relationship with “Fjordman”
(a “polite, friendly, smart, serious” man “who knew what he was talking about when he talked
about Arabic culture and Islam”), Bawer also admits that he was the one who introduced
“Fjordman” to Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer at a conference in the Hague in the Netherlands
in 2006. Bawer’s usage of the term “quisling” led his erstwhile admirers in the Norwegian PP
to distance themselves from him. The PP’s former spokesperson on immigration and
integration issues, MP Per Willy Amundsen, acknowledged that he knew Bawer’s writings
well from previous years and sympathized with Bawer’s critique of Norwegian elites, but said
that the linking of these elites with Quisling was “tendentious and ahistoric.” Amundsen also
said that he felt confident of having the support of PP voters in taking exception to such
linkages (Brandvold and Simenstad, Klassekampen, February 1, 2012). Bawer has since
resorted to writing on various counter-jihadist websites. He writes under his own name in
David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine, and is believed to be writing under the pen name
“The Observer” on Gates of Vienna (http://gatesofvienna.net/), where his “reports” on Norway
appears alongside those of Hege Storhaug and Peder Are “Fjordman” Nøstvold Jensen.
Mark Gabriel: a Christian-evangelical Eurabia author

In a speech to the Christian-evangelical congregation Levende Ord (Living Word) in Bergen in
2004, the then PP leader Carl I. Hagen argued that “small [Muslim] children are used as
suicide bombers [by Muslims] in order to Islamize the world.” “We Christians,” Hagen
continued, “are very concerned with children”;20 “Let the little children come to me, said
Jesus.” “I cannot understand that [the Prophet] Muhammad could have said the same [roars of
laughter from the audience]”; “In case he had said anything reminiscent, it would have been
‘let the little children come to me, so that I can exploit them in my struggle to Islamize the
world’” (Alstadsæter 2004). The congregation that Hagen addressed is part of what Oddbjørn
Leirvik (2006, 151) has characterized as the “New Christian Right” in Norway (see also
Leirvik 2011). This is a Christian right that strongly identifies with similar political and
religious movements in the USA, is staunchly pro-Israel, and sees itself as being involved in a
worldwide struggle with Islam.
We know from Hagen’s reading recommendations to a newspaper reporter later that year that,
in making the linkage between ordinary Muslims and terrorism, he was inspired by the blood-
curdling book Islam and Terrorism by the Egyptian-born convert to Islam turned evangelical
Christian polemical author Mark A. Gabriel (2002;21 see also Leirvik 2006, 152; Dagbladet,
November 20, 2004). Originally published by the evangelical Christian publisher Charisma
House in Florida in the USA (a self-designated publisher of books for “spirit-filled Christians
who are passionate about God”), the book was published in a Norwegian translation by the
evangelical Christian publisher Prokla-Media in 2003. By 2004, the book had sold so well that
382 S. Bangstad
it went into a second print run. The Norwegian publisher Prokla-Media has close links with the
evangelical Christian proselytizing movement Youth With a Mission in Norway. Copies of Mark
Gabriel’s book were sent to a number of Norwegian MPs by people sympathetic to the book’s
message.22 In the Norwegian publisher’s introduction, readers learn that the book is written by
a “man who has grown up with Islam, who knew the Qur’an by heart from childhood, who
has been an imam in the Egyptian city of Giza and a professor in Islamic history in Cairo”
(Gabriel 2002, 5). Yet even if the publisher’s introduction admits that Mr Gabriel describes
Islam in his book as a “religion of hatred,” he somewhat paradoxically argues against “hate
and all forms of discrimination against Muslims” (6). Mark Gabriel’s narrative about Islam and
terrorism is anchored in a personal coming-of-age-narrative that traces the authentic Muslim’s
turning from the “darkness of Islam” to the “light of evangelical Christianity.” The message of
the book is quite simple: al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 9/11 were not an aberration in Islamic
history, but a logical consequence of it. For “hatred is inherent to Islam” and Islamic history
can “only be characterized as a river of blood” (25). Violent jihad “is prescribed by the
Qur’an” as an order to all Muslims (59), and there is a direct historical lineage between the
Prophet of Islam and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda (133). Islam’s final goal is “Islamic rule
throughout the world” (63, 107). “Islamists,” described by Gabriel as “those who practice
violence and terror,” practise “the authentic Islam such as the Qur’an prescribes” (66). Note
here the collapsing of any distinctions between Islam and Islamism, and between moderate
Islamists who oppose the use of violence and radical Islamists who endorse it, a rhetorical
collapsing also ubiquitous in the Eurabia literature. When Islam is portrayed as a “religion of
peace,” this, Gabriel informs his readers, is “propaganda” and as such, “wishful thinking” or
“deliberate deception” (67). Islamists, we learn, happen to think that war includes “deceit” and
therefore hold that “lies are an important part of the war led by Islam” (117). There are “three
stages” to the colonization of non-Western lands by Muslims – again, “according to the
Qur’an.” When Muslims are in a minority, and weak, they adhere to the law of the land, but
work untiringly to increase their numbers. In the second stage, they prepare for “jihad” or
“holy war” against infidel non-Muslims, which is the third stage (111–113). Muslim
immigration to Europe or the USA, on this conception, is nothing less than part of a grand and
deceitful scheme for “Islamizing” the West. Mosques are furthermore “centers of war
planning” (124), and as such inherently dangerous in non-Muslim lands.
Introducing Eurabia to Norwegian television viewers

Books written for a popular market have their limitations in terms of reach, especially given that
adherents of extreme right and populist right-wing parties and movements in Western Europe are
often poorly educated, male, and not necessarily avid readers of books in English. Television,
then, provides a much more powerful medium for Eurabia propagandists. In this section, I will
analyse what is arguably the most central contribution to the domestication and mainstreaming
of the Islamophobic Eurabia genre in Norway in recent years: a documentary co-financed and
screened by the second largest television broadcaster in Norway in late 2010.
On Monday, November 29, 2010, the private Norwegian TV channel TV2 screened the
documentary “Frihet, Likhet og Det Muslimske Brorskap” (Freedom, Equality and the Muslim
Brothers) by the Iraqi-born émigré author and filmmaker Walid al-Kubaisi (1958–). It was
financed by the Norwegian Freedom of Expression foundation Fritt Ord, Vestnorsk Filmsenter
and TV2, directed by filmmaker Per Christian Magnus,23 and produced by Norway’s Agitator,
and argued for the existence of a plot directed by the Islamist al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (Muslim
Brotherhood) in Cairo, Egypt, to establish an Islamic caliphate in Europe and Norway, through
the use of “baby pushchairs, the hijab, democracy and freedom of expression.”
I will explore how the ideas articulated in the documentary illustrate the social, political and
ideological convergences that in recent years have crystallized in widely shared, cross-political
and cross-sectional concerns over the purported threats to supposedly “Norwegian values,”
such as gender equality, freedom of expression, tolerance of homosexuals and homosexual
practice, human rights, democracy and secularism, represented by Norway’s comparatively
small Muslim minority – an estimated 3% of Norway’s population of 4.6 million in 2009
(Jacobsen and Leirvik 2010, 387). With Scott (2007, 9), I argue that “the situation of Muslim
immigrants in Europe can be fully grasped only if the local[ized] context is taken into
account.” Nevertheless, I also contend that Norwegian public debates about Islam and
Muslims must be seen in the context of a general shift to the right in European politics since
2001, in the sense that the topoi central to anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic discourses in Norway
draw a great deal of inspiration from similar debates in other European countries, such as the
United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and France. As in other European countries, anti-
Muslim and anti-Islamic discourses in Norway are the crystallization of gradual processes of
dissolution of traditional left–right divides in politics and society (see Bangstad and Bunzl
2010). Using their claim to “cultural authenticity,” so-called secular Muslims such as Walid
al-Kubaisi are able in this area of discourse to avail themselves of potential openings by
carving out spaces as prominent authenticators of Islamophobic and right-wing discourses (see
also Ahmed 2011; Dabashi 2011; Mahmood 2011). To the informed, al-Kubaisi’s contacts
with Norwegian right-wing extremists are nothing new: as early as 2004, he had established
contacts with FOMI (Forum Against Islamization), the precursor to the right-wing extremist
group SIAN (Stop The Islamization of Norway), whose central members included a
Norwegian Nazi and Holocaust denier, a Norwegian apartheid supporter and anti-immigrant
activist, and a Norwegian convicted for sending out thousands of racist e-mails about Muslims
after September 11, 2001 (see al-Kubaisi, Klassekampen, February 5, 2005). Since al-Kubaisi
published a newspaper commentary about this contact in 2005, it is likely that many of the 34
senior Norwegian academics, authors and intellectuals who signed a letter (penned by his
long-time friend Professor Gunnar Skirbekk at the University of Bergen in 2006) in support of
his ultimately successful application for a lifelong state scholarship from the Norwegian
Ministry of Culture and Churches knew about this too.24
The documentary
Walid al-Kubaisi’s documentary starts ominously, with a shot of the filmmaker in his self-styled
role as a bohemian Parisian intellectual, proclaiming to the viewer that Europe’s historical sins,
in the form of colonialism, racism, the Holocaust and so forth, have hereby been forgiven.
Invoking the traditions of the European Enlightenment, and rhetorically positing himself
throughout the documentary as its heroic defender against a European Muslim “fifth column”
wanting to submit Europe to Islamism and the introduction of Shari‘a law al-Kubaisi provides
an interesting instantiation of “conservatives defending a superior Western culture who claim
the Enlightenment as their source of inspiration” (Todorov 2009, 122). Like the popular
Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, al-Kubaisi is eminently useful for the populist right-
wing’s anti-Muslim discourses precisely by virtue of his personal claim to cultural authenticity.
As the documentary’s producer Per Christian Magnus (Klassekampen, December 18, 2010)
has expressed it:
Through his adolescence in Iraq, Walid al-Kubaisi is among the Norwegians who know this [Islamist]
ideology well. He has followed the debate in Arab media for a number of years, has himself attended
an imam school, and has contacts in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Morocco.25
384 S. Bangstad
According to the ﬁlm, the riots in the banlieues of Paris in France in 2005 (Fassin 2006) as well as
Muslim protests (l’affaire foulard) against the banning of the wearing of “conspicuous signs” of
religious affiliation in state schools (the Loï Stasi from, 2004) in France in 2003 (Bowen 2007;
Scott 2007), and the worldwide protests against the publication of cartoons in Denmark and
Norway deemed offensive by many practising Muslims, were orchestrated by the Muslim
Brotherhood as part of the same “plot.” Academic researchers who have explored the
background to these riots in some detail (see Mucchielli 2009 and Cesari 2005, in particular)
have found no evidence whatsoever of specifically Muslim – let alone Islamist – religious
incitement of these riots.
According to al-Kubaisi (Klassekampen, November 27, 2010a), the original manuscript of the
film had been titled Djevelens verksted (The Devil’s Workshop) and was designed to spread sunn
frykt (“healthy fear”) (Bisgaard, Morgenbladet, December 3, 2010) of the snik-islamisering
(“stealth Islamization”) of Norwegian society. The term “stealth islamization” was introduced
by the PP’s chairwoman Siv Jensen in a speech to the party’s congress in February 2009 and
from then on became a staple of populist right-wing vocabulary on Islam and Muslims in
Norway. According to Cora A. Døving (2012), the term in its Norwegian version can be
traced to Danish websites as early as 2001, and has for the past decade been central to extreme
right-wing discourse on Islam and Muslims in Europe. The documentary was, according to
al-Kubaisi’s own assertion, “an anti-racist movie” (Bergens Tidende, November 25, 2010)
inspired by nothing less than the European fight against Nazism in the 1940s. “I have made a
film warning against the fascism of our time,” said al-Kubaisi during the launch (Bisgaard,
Morgenbladet, December 3, 2010).26 Featuring interviews with a number of Egyptian and
Arab secularist intellectuals,27 and satellite television footage provided by MEMRI (Middle
East Media Research Institute),28 the documentary was launched amidst a flurry of newspaper
op-eds by al-Kubaisi and interviews with him in Norwegian mainstream media. When the
Cairo correspondent of the left-wing newspaper Klassekampen, Amal Wahab, interviewed a
number of the Egyptian intellectuals featured in the documentary, however, it became clear
that all of those she had been able to contact felt misrepresented in the documentary
(Klassekampen, December 4, 2010). From the documentary itself, it is quite clear that none of
them had been informed of the central plot line of the documentary, namely a Muslim
Brotherhood conspiracy to establish Islamic rule in Norway and Europe. To the extent that
these secularist intellectuals’ fears concerning the influence of the Brotherhood feature in the
documentary, they are related exclusively to their fears for Egypt’s future. In a media
campaign devised by the self-styled “radical rightist” newspaper reporter Jon Hustad,
al-Kubaisi managed to generate an enormous amount of attention over a period of
approximately two weeks with select and deliberate provocations directed against a
generalized Norwegian “Left” that was accused of being either “defeatist” over or
“accommodating towards” Islamism (Klassekampen, November 25, 2010) or by implication,
being “Islamist sympathizers” (al-Kubaisi, Dagbladet, November 24, 2010b). Furthermore, his
provocations targeted the mainstream Islamic Council of Norway (Islamsk Råd Norge) and
Muslim public intellectuals of a documented secular orientation, who were cast as “errand
boys for the Islamists” (løpegutter for islamistene) (Bergens Tidende, November 25, 2010) or
“secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Norway” (hemmelige medlemmer av det
Muslimske Brorskapet i Norge) (Klassekampen, December 4, 2010).29 The Norwegian
tripartite government was taken to task by al-Kubaisi (Dagbladet, November 24, 2010b) for
allegedly engaging in “dialogue with Islamists” through its regular contacts and consultations
with the Islamic Council of Norway. An interesting rhetorical shift on al-Kubaisi’s part had
also occurred: having publicly declared himself an apostate from Islam shortly after his arrival
in southern Norway in 1987, and having publicly described himself as an “atheist”30 in 2008
and a “humanist and a free-thinker” as late as in 2009 (cf. al-Kubaisi, Fritanke.no, February 11,
2009), al-Kubaisi now declared in a launch interview with Klassekampen that he was “a practising
Muslim” (Klassekampen, November 25, 2010).
For those who knew little about al-Kubaisi’s strong networks in the Norwegian media and
academia, the intellectual support that the documentary received from prominent Norwegian
public intellectuals and academics was perhaps the most surprising aspect of it all. At the
launch at Vika Cinema, Professor Terje Tvedt from the University of Bergen spoke in
laudatory terms about the film, for which he had acted as an academic consultant. Professor
Unni Wikan expressed her support for the documentary in a letter to the editor at the liberal
weekly Morgenbladet (October 24, 2010).
Exploitation of attention
Through his documentary and statements, al-Kubaisi provided ample opportunities for his ideas
to be politically exploited. In op-ed articles in mainstream newspapers, he invoked the concept of
“Islamization by stealth” that had been introduced in Norwegian political discourse by the PP in
2009, and singled out the hijab as a symbol through which the Muslim Brotherhood was allegedly
establishing control over Europe and Norway. In an interview with the regional liberal newspaper
Bergens Tidende, al-Kubaisi said that the hijab was the main symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood
and that it was the Islamists who thought it was God’s command that all women should wear it
(Bergens Tidende, November 25, 2010). Those who expected a political instrumentalization of the
attention generated by the documentary did not have long to wait. The day after TV2 screened it,
Aftenposten featured a prominently placed commentary by Mazyar Keshvari (1981–), who had
been born to refugee parents from Iran, and who was at the time a PP member of Oslo’s City
Council. In an article entitled “The Dangerous Grip of the Islamists” (Islamistenes Farlige
Grep), Keshvari (Aftenposten, November 30, 2010) cites al-Kubaisi’s documentary in extenso
and argues that massive immigration into Norway and Europe, and the “fact”31 that Muslim
women have a lot of children and European women few, means that “we are now faced with
the most important and determinative struggle over values … a struggle between liberal
humanistic values and totalitarian Islamist values.” According to Keshvari, the Islamists’ main
“characteristic” was the hijab.
By the following week, it was clear that the PP would use al-Kubaisi’s documentary as a
platform for another attempt to push legislation through the Norwegian Parliament (the
Storting) prohibiting the wearing of hijab and other forms of Islamic attire by women and
children in Norway’s schools. Few Muslims in Norway expressed any support for the hijab
ban, except for a small group of self-declared “secular” and “liberal” Muslims organized in the
network called LIM (Likestilling, Integrering og Mangfold or Gender Equality, Integration,
Diversity), which had also publicly commended the documentary (see Verdens Gang,
December 3, 2010), and had sent letters to a number of MPs expressing their support for the
PP’s parliamentary motion on the hijab. Unbeknown to either the Norwegian media or
politicians from parties other than the PP, the PP’s parliamentary motion on the hijab had in
fact been drafted by the LIM board (see Aftenposten, June 27, 2012, for an admission of this).
The LIM network, by the admission of one of its central members, mainly consists of atheists
and agnostics of Muslim background.32 Their positioning as “Muslims” in the mediated public
sphere in Norway is therefore often seen by practising Norwegian Muslims as an act of
manipulation. By 2012, al-Kubaisi had become an LIM board member.
The fixation on the symbolic politics of Muslim female attire is not a new one for the PP. In the
shifting terrain of late modern politics across Western Europe, the veil or Islamic headscarf is
“implicated in a meta-discourse of nationalized liberalism versus Muslim illiberalism” (Lentin
386 S. Bangstad
and Titley 2011, 94). And this nationalized liberalism, one might add, is one in which populist
right-wing parties have increasingly been able to focus on women’s rights to broaden their appeal.
The PP’s then spokesperson on immigration and integration, MP Per Willy Amundsen
(1971–), followed up with an op-ed (Dagsavisen, December 6, 2010) in which he referred to
al-Kubaisi’s film, arguing that the Islamists in it wanted Norway to be “more like Iran and
Saudi-Arabia” and that it “had warned that the hijab, the niqab and the burka were symbols
for radical Islamists.” Echoing al-Kubaisi’s declaration of the onset of a “struggle against the
Muslim Brotherhood” (Dag og Tid, November 11, 2010), Amundsen issued marching orders
for “the struggle for freedom” and ominously warned that unless “we … take up the fight
against the Islamists and their totalitarian ideology, … freedom will be lost.” The PP’s
parliamentary motion on the need to prohibit the wearing of the hijab in Norwegian state
schools, built around arguments drawn explicitly and implicitly from Walid al-Kubaisi’s
documentary and public statements (see in particular al-Kubaisi, Aftenposten, February 3,
2004), made the spurious claim that the hijab had been “invented” by the Islamist Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt,33 and dramatically argued that “women from Muslim countries cry out
for help from the West.” It ultimately failed to convince anyone but the PP’s own MPs when
the Norwegian Parliament finally voted on it in April 2011.
Conclusion
In this article, I have analysed some of the most central contributions to the Eurabia genre in
Norway, as well as its popularization and mainstreaming in Norway in the past decade. On the
evidence available from Norway, it would be hard to conclude that Norwegian media prior to
the terrorist attacks on July 22, 2011 were particularly conscious of the fact that the genre
promotes an Islamophobic conspiracy theory structurally similar to the conspiracy theories of
classical anti-Semitism. Nor does it seem that Norwegian terrorism researchers had much
knowledge of the genre and the incitement to violence against Muslim found among Eurabia
authors such as Peder Are “Fjordman” Nøstvold Jensen prior to 22/7 2011.34 Influential
politicians aligned with the populist right-wing Progress Party in Norway – its third largest
party in terms of adherents and a serious contender for governmental power after the
parliamentary elections of 2013 – have on numerous occasions referred to in this article been
involved in promoting and legitimizing the genre. Its discourse on Islam and Muslims is
indicative of an extreme to populist right-wing continuum, rather than a sharp delineation. In
order to understand the popular attraction of conspiracy theories such as those promoted by the
Eurabia genre in a relatively mature and stable liberal democracy in Norway, one would have
to explore the interlinkages between a popular perception of widening distance between
government and the governed; popular fears unleashed by the unprecedented levels of
immigration to Norway in the past decade; and widening socio-economic inequalities. That,
however, lies beyond the scope of this article.
Notes
1. It should be noted here that, as far as contested analytical concepts go, the term “Islamophobia” is in no
sense unique in these respects: Terms such as “homophobia” and “anti-Semitism” are also not ideal for
analytical purposes, and may also be misused and exploited. However, at least in the Norwegian context,
these terms are much more readily accepted, and far less contested, than the term Islamophobia.
2. To her close friend and associate Spencer (2005, 31), Bat Ye’or is “the great historian of dhimmitude”; to
Manji (2004, 61), she is “an Egyptian-born European scholar”; and to Bruce Bawer (2006, 32) who has
also been in close contact with her over the years, she is “an historian.” Academic laurels come easily in
the mutual admiration society of Eurabia authors. Hence to Bawer (218), Robert Spencer, who has no
academic qualifications whatsoever in Islamic studies or related fields, is an “Islam expert.”
3. See David G. Littman’s contributions to Spencer 2005 for details on this.
4. For two reviews of her work by a historian, see Betts (1997) and Griffith (1998). See Sells (2003) for a
critical exploration of her work.
5. Ferguson’s commitment to Bat Ye’or’s work in particular and the Eurabia genre in general is long
standing. His op-ed “Eurabia” was published in 2004. In company with Martin Gilbert, Daniel Pipes
and Bruce Bawer, Ferguson provided a cover comment for Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
(2005): “no writer has done more than Bat Ye’or to draw attention to the menacing character of
Islamic extremism. Future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term ‘Eurabia’ as
prophetic. Those who wish to live in a free society must be eternally vigilant. Bat Ye’or’s vigilance
is unrivalled.”
6. The publication of Fallaci’s tract led to several unsuccessful lawsuits for racist speech being brought
against her and her publishers in various European countries, but not in Norway. See Margaret
Talbot's article “The Agitator” (The New Yorker, June 5, 2006) for a profile of Fallaci in her last years.
7. The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization is, as Mark Silk (1984, 70–71) has demonstrated, a
quintessentially modern one, invented by liberal Protestant theologians in the USA since the 1930s.
Though having the laudable aim of achieving unity and reconciliation between Christians and Jews
after the horrors unleashed by European Nazis against Jews in that period, the very notion of a
“Judeo-Christian” civilization risks underplaying the extent to which European Jews were construed
as “the other” of European nationalism until our own age, and persecuted and stigmatized in far
wider circles.
8. That is, the precursor to the European Union.
9. Vaïsse (2010) provides a short and precise rebuttal of the main claims of the Eurabia genre.
10. The OIC, established in 1969, is an inter-state organization of 57 mostly Muslim countries,
headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 2011, it was renamed the Organisation of Islamic
Cooperation.
11. I thank Paul Norheim for this point, made in a critical review of Ye’or’s work published in a Norwegian
journal (Norheim 2011).
12. For the original text, see http://www.dhimmi.org/LectureE1.html.
13. In recent years and since his retirement from Norwegian politics, Berg has combined writing for
folkloristic publications with chairmanship of a local branch of the strongly pro-Israeli and
evangelical Christian organization With Israel For Peace (Med Israel for Fred – MIFF).
14. It would, of course, be an understatement to say that Berg’s caricatures have little to do with any
discernible reality in Norway or elsewhere: multiculturalism can hardly be said to be about
recognizing all particularities as equally valid for the embrace of a normative cultural relativism; the
majority of Norwegians who on two occasions (1974 and 1994) voted down membership of the EEC
or EU have hardly been described as xenophobes, and the majority of Norwegians surveyed who
favour curbs on immigration have only rarely been described as racist.
15. Berg (2007, 102) even alleges that the state of Bangladesh practises [Islamic h.udūd punishments such
as] stoning and amputating limbs. It appears that Berg may here be confusing Bangladesh with Pakistan
under the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq from 1980 to 1988.
16. See http://internationalfreepresssociety.wordpress.com/board-of-advisors/.
17. Bawer does not provide any references whatsoever to support this point, making the sources of these
“estimates” unclear.
18. Allegations of assaults by homophobic Muslim male youths, whether in Oslo or Amsterdam, form part
of the standard repertoire in Bawer’s books. In While Europe Slept, there are two such allegations
recorded from Oslo alone. However, as far as can be ascertained, no one has ever been charged with
or convicted of hate crimes against Bawer or his Norwegian partner.
19. The term “quisling” has by chance also been a standard and favourite term of Bawer’s friend and
associate Hege Storhaug of the HRS. See Aftenposten (January 6, 2011) for an example.
20. The subtext here is of course that Christian concern with the welfare of children distinguishes “us” (as
Christians) from “them” (as Muslims).
21. Among Gabriel’s contentious and contestable claims in this book is that the indiscriminate killing of
civilians in al-Qaeda-style terrorism since the late 1990s is really in line with Islamic teachings.
Similar claims are made by the Somali-born polemicist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book Nomad (2010):
“After 9/11 I found it impossible to ignore his [Osama bin Laden’s] claims that the murderous
388 S. Bangstad
destruction of innocent (if infidel) lives is consistent with the Quran. I looked in the Quran, and I found it
to be so” (xiv).
22. I thank Prof. Oddbjørn Leirvik for information about Prokla-Media.
23. Per Christian Magnus (1959–) is a Norwegian reporter and documentary filmmaker who currently works
for the public broadcaster NRK’s regional office in the province of Hordaland, headquartered in the city
of Bergen.
24. The letter of support, dated March 26, 2006, has been obtained by the author from the ministry through a
Freedom of Information Act request.
25. Al-Kubaisi was raised in Baghdad, Iraq, then under secular Baathist rule. It is doubtful that al-Kubaisi
had any personal insight into Islamism by virtue of his upbringing.
26. The idea of Islamism as the equivalent of fascism features prominently in US neo-conservative
discourses, represented by Norman Podhoretz’s call to arms for a “World War IV” against an alleged
“Islamo-fascism” (Podhoretz 2007), which were picked up by Republican President George W. Bush.
The analogy between Islamism and fascism has also been appropriated by neo-liberal Paul Berman
(2010). Al-Kubaisi’s denunciations of a supposed appeasement of Islamism on the part of the Left
has been a staple of US neo-conservative discourse for years (Vaïsse 2010) and is echoed by Bawer
(2009) as well as Berman (2010).
27. Including the secular feminist reporter Karima Kamal at the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Mas.rī al-
Yawm, the Egyptian socialist Tagammuʿ Party’s current leader Mohammed Refaat al-Saeed, the
Egyptian business tycoon and self-styled public intellectual Tarek Heggy, the ageing surviving
brother of Hasan al-Banna in Egypt, Gamal al-Banna, the Egyptian secularist intellectual Sayyid al-
Qimani, the Palestinian intellectual Fekry Abdel Muttaleb, the French-Tunisian leftist-turned-liberal
Lafif Lakhdar, and the former member of the Muslim Brotherhood Kamel al-Najjar. The Egyptian-
born al-Najjar, who abandoned the Brotherhood after high school, is a self-declared atheist and
medical doctor based in the UK, who writes for the pro-Israeli MEMRI and is active on Arab
secularist websites. Al-Najjar is a pseudonym, and in the footage in the documentary he is filmed
from behind to avoid identification. Al-Kubaisi’s voice-over suggests that this is due to his fear of
retribution from the Muslim Brotherhood or Brotherhood-affiliated circles for having abandoned the
movement. However, given that there is no record of such retribution against former members in
Europe and that he left the Brotherhood decades ago, one might also see this as one of the
documentary’s manipulations of facts. None of the Egyptian intellectuals in question, many of whom
had close ideological and political linkages to the ousted authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak
(1981–2011), made any criticism of that regime in the documentary. It also appears that none of
them were informed of or asked to comment on al-Kubaisi’s conspiratorial ideas about alleged
Muslim Brotherhood designs on Europe.
28. MEMRI was founded in Washington, DC, in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, formerly a high-ranking officer in
the Israeli Army’s Intelligence Services. It was launched with the aim of “informing the debate over US
policy in the Middle East” and selects and translates news items from Arab and Iranian media into
various languages. As several commentators have noted, it is not unreasonable to see MEMRI as a
propaganda arm of the Israeli state, notwithstanding the fact that MEMRI has established an
important inventory of modern and contemporary Arab anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism. See
Achcar (2010, 181–182).
29. The public intellectuals in question were Abid Raja (1975–), a prominent lawyer and politician for the
social-liberal left (Venstre) party, and Mohammed Usman Rana (1985–), a medical doctor of a liberal-
conservative persuasion, who have both been prominent in public debates on Muslims and integration in
Norway in recent years. They are, for the record, both supporters of a secular and democratic state in
Norway
30. Taken from notes made by the author at the launch of Gender Me, a documentary on gay Muslims by
Norwegian-Turkish filmmaker Nefise Özkal Lorentzen (1964–), at Vika Cinema in Oslo in 2008. Al-
Kubaisi introduced the film at this launch, which was funded by Fritt Ord.
31. Statistical data suggest that women originating in countries where Islam is the main religion who settle in
Norway have a slower process of approximation to average Norwegian fertility patterns (Østby 2004,
127). Women from Somalia (3.7 children per woman in 2002), Pakistan (3.5 children per woman in
2002) and Iraq (3.1 children per woman in 2002) have significantly higher fertility patterns than
average Norwegians (2.1 children per woman in 2002) (127–129). However, there is a clear
tendency towards convergence with average Norwegian fertility patterns among Muslim women in
Norway with increased time of residence, from first to second generation, and with higher levels of
female education and labour market participation. Østby’s nuanced accounts of Muslim fertility patterns
and demographics in Norway have led to him receiving death threats.
32. Shakil Rehman, LIM, interview with the author on September 3, 2009
33. For a serious history of the various forms of the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in Muslim societies, see
El-Guindi (1999).
34. See Hegghammer (New York Times, July 31, 2011) for a particularly illustrative example in this regard.
Hegghammer, an internationally acknowledged Norwegian expert on al-Qaida related terrorism, herein
alleged that “the leading counterjihad writers have virtually never advocated violence,” an assertion that,
more than anything, demonstrates that at the time of writing Hegghammer had no knowledge
whatsoever of “Fjordman”’s actual writings, let alone Bat Ye’or/Gisèle Littman’s endorsement of,
and extensive contacts with, Serbian ultra-nationalists during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. See
Enebakk (2012) for a point-by-point analysis of “Fjordman”’s incitement to violence, and Sells
(2003) for Bat Ye’or/Gisèle Littman’s links with Serbian ultra-nationalists.
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Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations

ISSN: 0959-6410 (Print) 1469-9311 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cicm20

Eurabia Comes to Norway

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