Supervisor: Sudha Rajagopalan Second reader: Menno Spiering Date of submission: 1th of July 2018 Course: MA European Studies, Identity & Integration Department: Faculty of Humanities Institution: VU University Amsterdam
An analysis of stereotypes about
Muslims on the issue of Dutch
asylum seekers’ centres in
far-right communities on Facebook
Anti-social
social media
Table of Contents
Table of Contents...1
Introduction...2
1 Theoretical framework and methodology...6
1.1 Research and cyberspace...8
1.1.1 The real-world vs. the digital...8
1.1.2 Echo chambers, online news consumption, and clickbait culture...10
1.2 Muslim identity and the west...13
1.2.1 Imagining the Muslim other...14
1.3 Methodology...18
1.3.1 Anti-Asylum communities...19
2 Muslims depicted as dangerous...21
2.1 Security threats...22
3 Muslims seen as abusive to women...30
3.1 Threats to women...30
4 Muslims as economic competition...38
4.1 Economic threats...38
Conclusion...46
Bibliography...51
Introduction
Most academic studies of White Nationalism and the New Right do not rise above politically correct sneers and smears. They read like fed through a postmodern buzzword generator. Thus the growing number of serious and balanced academic studies about White Nationalism and the New Right are signs of our rising cultural profile. It is increasingly difficult to dismiss us.1
Greg Johnson, the chief editor of one of the most important alt-right publishers in the United States, made this statement. Johnson counts himself as being part of what is being described under many different denominators: ‘The Far-Right’, ‘Alt-Right’, ‘New-Right’ - all labels describing a worldwide movement that has shaken up politics as we know it. In the past couple of years, it’s momentum has grown even further, in the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. Today, the far-right is a frequently studied object by a wide range of academics. A fire seems to have been lit. The different angles from which this fire is approached, are all trying to add to its understanding, countering or advancing its flames. One thing is for sure, the far-right can no longer be dismissed.
A relatively recent approach to studying this global phenomenon is the use of the World Wide Web by the far-right. This type of research is gaining attention from all kinds of disciplines. The reason for this rise in popularity is the extensive use of the internet by movements regarded as far-right. For example, both Donald Trump in the USA and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands booked great success, for a considerable amount with the help social media.2 However, not only celebrities and
politicians, but also grass-roots right-wing movements have shown a particular interest in the potential of social media. This can be seen in the rise of organizations as The Identitarian Movement, a White Nationalist group that originated in Frace, and PEGIDA, a German movement that protests against a perceived ‘Islamisation’ of Europe.
One of the spearheads of all the above-mentioned elements of today’s far-right, is a hard-line stance against immigration, with a focus on Islam. In many countries in Europe and the US, the Muslim minority is placed high on the political programs of far-right groups. In the case of Geert 1 https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/05/right-wing-critics-of-american-conservatism/
2 Dominic L. Lasorsa, Seth C. Lewis, and Avery E. Holton, ‘NORMALIZING TWITTER: Journalism Practice in an Emerging Communication Space’, Journalism Studies, 13.1 (2012), 19–36.
Wilders, this was shown in his harsh statement on wanting less Moroccans in the Netherlands, resulting in him having to appear in front of the Dutch court. A country previously renounced for its tolerant policymaking is now making worldwide headlines about a parliamentarian’s racial slurs.
And so, The Netherlands has not stayed out of current debates about the far-right and Islam. Being a country where social media use is one of the highest in the world, a reflection of these discussions on the internet is imminent.3 This means ordinary people also get to join in the debate
from the comfort of their own homes. What Dutch people have seen in close vicinity to their computational devices, is concrete examples of refugees entering their country. Asylum seekers’ centers, give shelter to Muslims from countries like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These buildings are a physical representation of the refugee crisis in people’s own city or village. This can either cause people to hold out a welcoming hand, or to feel threatened.
One of the places where this situation came to a boiling point, is the Dutch village of Geldermalsen. In December 2015, Dutch news channels were broadcasting scenes of angry mobs clashing with the police.4 The cause of this unrest was the plan to build a new asylum seekers’ center
in the village. After the immediate riots died down, the protest continued in cyberspace. Several residents started a Facebook community where members could share their discontent about Geldermalsen’s soon to be asylum seekers’ center. This type of online activism can be witnessed all over the Netherlands, where anti-asylum pages sprung up across the country. Even today, two and a half years after the riots happened in Geldermalsen, some of these communities are still active. This begs questions like, what motivates people to gather in cyberspace against asylum seekers’ centers? And how are Muslims brought into this equation? And most of all, what are the particular ways in which stereotypes about Muslims are articulated around the issue of Dutch asylum seekers’ centers on Facebook communities between 2015 and 2018?
3 K T E Jacobs and N Spierings, ‘De Impact van Digitale Campagnemiddelen Op de Personalisering van Politieke Partijen in Nederland (2010-2014)’, 2015, 28-29.
4 ‘Gemeentehuis Geldermalsen ontruimd vanwege rellen AZC’, Trouw (16 december 2015).
Clearly, a new social media rich era has taken shape, as in 2018 2.2 billion people are making use of Facebook, the biggest online social network. Being social networks, they represent real-world society in a digital form. And this means that they also include the less pleasant parts of society. Hate, stereotypes, and insult cannot seem to be taken out of this equation. Some would even argue they are amplified on the web.56
The Netherlands makes an interesting case study for this specific topic. This country has been at the forefront of new media technologies since their invention, having one of the highest percentages of users in the world.7 In addition, The Netherlands has been regarded as one of the
most progressive countries when it comes to tolerance towards migrants since the seventeenth century. Whether this was ever the case, this image of tolerance makes it an interesting case study. More specifically,
immigration is now one of the central topics for debate in the EU; each country’s role has been taken under the loop, as the continent is facing a large influx of migrants since the past three years.
The choice of Facebook as a primary source for this research is partially based on the fact that Facebook is by far the most used social medium. 10,8 million people in the Netherlands make use of the website. This means that subcultures and minorities are relatively large groups of people and thus, well-represented for real-world society. Many researchers have focused on Twitter in previous work. However, Facebook offers different insights as an academic source for qualitative research. One of the reasons, is the possibility Facebook users have to form online communities based on a certain topic.
In this paper a qualitative analysis of Facebook post has been made. This method was chosen because qualitative data analysis is a solid approach to studying a online community’s expressed discourse. This is supported by Jane Forman and Laura Damschroder, who argue that qualitative content analysis, means deconstructing a text in style, emotion, and tone, and thus reveals what is 5 Imran Awan and Irene Zempi, ‘The Affinity between Online and Offline Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: Dynamics and Impacts’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 27.September 2014 (2016), 1–8.
6 Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, Diana R. Grant, and Chau-Pu Chiang, ‘Hate Online: A Content Analysis of Extremist Internet Sites’, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 3.1 (2003), 29–44.
‘behind’ a text.8 Nonetheless, some quantitative notes shed light on aspects of the analysis as well.
For example, to access the magnitude of a message. ‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ have been important in quantitative online analysis, and are briefly named in the analysis of a post. A new ‘fake’ Facebook profile was created to conduct this research with a clean slate. This is because Facebook tracks a users’ history, and alters any search query based on this previous history. The search terms: ‘AZC’, ‘AZC Alert’, ‘Nee AZC’ and ‘Geen AZC’ were used to find relevant communities. One of the criteria for including anti-asylum communities in this research was, the existence of a substantial number of members and a lively discussion about posts. The members of these communities have been left anonymous. In this thesis, they are referred to by their gender, general age and possibly the city or village where they live.
The discourse analysis of anti-asylum communities is made, by analyzing Facebook posts as short stories, forming a greater common narrative. All the posts used In this thesis have been translated from Dutch to English, with the aim to stay as true as possible to the original ‘load’ of the post. In chapters two, three and four, the posts are not only described, but also the layers ‘behind’ the post are discussed. This begs questions like, what is the emotion that shines through in the post, what are the motivations to upload such a post and how does this fit in the within the larger narrative of the group and the far-right in general?
The communities that have been analyzed in this thesis are a reaction to Islam and immigration and have been made possible by the internet. In the methodology of chapter 1.3, these communities will be further explored. A lot of the interaction between people in these communities is based on articles that are shared from various news sites. Many of these are Dutch right-wing media sources like Elsevier and de Telegraaf.
In the first chapter of this thesis, the theoretical framework is established, based on academic research on cyberspace, social media, the far-right and Islam in the Netherlands. In this part of the paper, concepts such as echo chambers, framing, polarisation, ‘othering’ and clickbait culture are
explored in detail. These concepts are all necessary for an analysis of the primary sources on Facebook. This has been done in chapters two, three and four. Every chapter deals with a certain recurring image that has been portrayed about Muslims on the Dutch anti-Asylum communities of Facebook. In chapter two a breakdown of how the image of Muslims as dangerous is created within the discourse of these communities. Chapter three examines the image of Muslims as rapists and chapter four the image of Muslims as economic exploiters. The choice of relevant literature throughout this thesis is made from a mix of both useful ‘older’ literature, and new insights formulated more contemporarily.
1 Theoretical framework and methodology
The technology that makes virtual communities possible has the potential to bring enormous leverage to ordinary citizens at a relatively little cost--intellectual leverage, social leverage, commercial leverage, and most important, political leverage. 9
This was writer Howard Rheingold’s enthusiastic plea in 1993. The internet was just a new-born, and Rheingold was vigorously exploring its possibilities. Rheingold was among the many intellectuals who could not stop writing about the greatness of this new technology. During the 1990s a general expectation was that “Collective, collaborative, and bottom-up creation and exchange are considered to have great potential to challenge conventional authorities of knowledge and expertise”.10 This was
not blind utopianism, as Rheingold immediately placed a side note next to his ecstatic writing, saying, “The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities”.11
In many other domains besides tech, the 1990s were a time of relative optimism. After the Berlin Wall fell and with-it communism, many people foresaw a time of relative peace and prosperity. Liberal-democracy had proven the victor over other ideologies and, apart from a handful of dictatorships, like Cuba and North-Korea, there were no feasible ideologies left to challenge this consensus. The epiphany of this thought was expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Herein, Fukuyama predicted to large-scale wars would take place on the basis of ideological differences. Or, in Fukuyama’s words, this was “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.12
According to commentators, the recent rise of the far-right has proven this expectation to be wrong.13
9 Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the electronical frontier (1993) 3,4.
10 Özlem Savaş, ‘Facebook Communities about Nostalgic Photos of Turkey: Creative Practices of Remembering and Representing the Past’, Digital Creativity, 28.1 (2017), 49.
11 Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 6.
12 Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (New York 1992). 13 Jan Zielonka, Counter-Revolution. Liberal Europe in Retreat (Oxford 2018).
14 Exemplary of this, is the fact that the AfD( Alternative für Deutschland) is currently the third biggest
party in the German parliament, which has not happened since the Second World War.15
Euphoria has made way for a more pessimistic view in the contemporary academic world. The utopian dream that was promised by the prophets of the 1990’s has revealed some of its pitfalls. Both anti-liberalism and the negative effects of internet technologies are becoming increasingly apparent in contemporary society. From a historical point of view this utopian believe, followed by less positive thinking, is logically a part of “moments of cultural and technological transition”.16
In the following chapter different perspectives from the academic world are discussed. Firstly, research on academic debates about social media is linked in light of the primary analysis of anti-asylum communities. Secondly, the image of Muslims in the western world from the middle ages up until the current events of the refugee crisis are dealt with in chronological order. And the final part of this first chapter explains the methodology that was used to make the analysis of Facebook’s anti-asylum communities.
1.1 Research and cyberspace
Not all academics are convinced that the internet simply has the potential for regression. More accurate would be to argue that many academics are critical of the internet’s expanse, and more aware of the possible pitfalls. A departure from the digital utopian thinking, which was prevalent in the 1990s, is found in many different academic circles. Exemplary of this school of thought is Evgeny Morozov. Politico magazine named this Belarussian author in their 2018 class of 28, which is the magazine’s yearly list of most important political thinkers.17 Having received the title ‘tech’s dark
prophet’, he is, in a sense as forecasting as Fukuyama was in the 1990s. In his books, The Net
14 Jan Werner-Müller, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (Connecticut 2011). 15 Seán Clarke, ‘German elections 2017: full results’, The Guardian (25 September 2017).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/sep/24/german-elections-2017-latest-results-live-merkel-bundestag-afd
16 David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, (Cambridge 2004).
Delusion and Too Save Everything Click Here, he argues it is incorrect to think digital technologies will lead to a better world. And foremost, we will not end up in a “digital paradise”.18 Morozov’s highly
critical approach is an interesting start to analyze what the internet’s complicity is in cyber hate.19
The range of different academic disciplines interested in research on the cyberactivity of the far-right is very broad. Depending on the specific debate, different disciplines are involved. In this chapter a range of studies like political sciences, history, communication studies, psychology, criminology, sociology are analyzed. First of all the relationships between the physical and digital world is discussed. And secondly, issues surrounding the way in which online information is consumed will be brought to light.
1.1.1 The real-world vs. the digital
An important debate that needs to be discussed when analyzing the far-right in cyberspace, is about people’s real-life identity versus their digital identity. Which of these is applicable, is completely dependent on the platform that is being studied. In the case of Facebook, the extended real-life hypothesis assumes that people have no motivation to assume an alternate digital identity. This is because, this online social network(OSN) is closely linked to a person’s real-life network of friends, family, co-workers, etc. Psychologist Mitja D. Back and others conclude, “people are not using their OSN profiles to promote an idealized virtual identity. Instead, OSNs might be an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality”.20 On the other hand, when it comes to immersive
social networks, users tend to present a more idealized version of themselves.21 For that reason, this
thesis will argue from the basis of the extended real-life hypothesis.
18 Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (London 2012).
Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York 2013). 19 Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens, ‘Echo Chambers and Online Radicalism: Assessing the Internet’s Complicity in Violent Extremism’, Policy and Internet, 7.4 (2015), 401–22.
20 Mitja D. Back and others, ‘Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization’, Psychological
Science, 21.3 (2010), 372–74.
In addition, the effects of anonymity on people’s online behavior is mainly the focus of psychology and communicative studies. 2223 Privacy options allow people to ‘hide’ their likes, posts or
comments, giving users a relative feeling of anonymity. This feeling of being anonymous has the effect that more emotional and extreme reactions are expressed in an online setting. Professor of psychology Kimberly Christopherson supports this argument by saying:
Individuals can use their anonymity (…) without fear of being identified and negatively evaluated by those they know. This factor may lead to an extreme sense of freedom for the individual and allow him or her to engage in behaviors typically disapproved of by others without fear of the consequences that may ensue as a result.24
Thirdly, another important subject for discussion is the real-world consequences of digital activities. This debate stands at the basis for anyone, interested in the digital world and its reflection on societal issues like crime. One of the academic dealings with this subject is Imran Awan, a criminologist specialized in anti-Muslim hate crime. Awan has written multiple papers on the correlation between cyber-hate and real-life hate crimes.2526 For instance in his book Islamophobia in Cyberspace, he sums
it as, “Online Islamophobia is likely to incite hatred and xenophobia leading to real-world crimes and a rise in political extremism both on the far-right and from the radicalization of Muslim youth in response to messages of exclusion”.27
There is no evidence that shows users have a different identity on Facebook as opposed to their real-life identity. However, users do have a relative anonymity when it comes to actions in their OSN. Consequential, people tend to express behavior that is usually disapproved of. This more 22 Michael J. Moore and others, ‘Anonymity and Roles Associated with Aggressive Posts in an Online Forum’,
Computers in Human Behavior, 28.3 (2012), 861–67.
23 Charlene Christie and Emily Dill, ‘Evaluating Peers in Cyberspace: The Impact of Anonymity’, Computers in
Human Behavior, 55 (2016), 292–99.
24 Kimberly M. Christopherson, ‘The Positive and Negative Implications of Anonymity in Internet Social interactions: “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”’, Computers in Human Behavior, 23.6 (2007), 3041. 25 Imran Awan and Irene Zempi, ‘The Affinity between Online and Offline Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: Dynamics and Impacts’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 27.September 2014 (2016), 1–8.
26 Imran Awan and Irene Zempi, ‘“I Will Blow Your Face off” - Virtual and Physical World Anti-Muslim Hate Crime’, British Journal of Criminology, 57.2 (2017), 362–80.
extreme behavior can lead to real-world crimes, such as violence. However, Awan states that “crime can incur a number of different ‘costs’ following a victimization experience that involve emotional, psychological, physical and financial liabilities. However, evidence shows that hate crimes hurt more.”28 A reason why some ‘extreme’ ideologies can be found making use of the internet is that
governments have difficulties with regulating and fully understanding the implications of the web. This means any political expressions that would normally be dismissed or even convicted can slip through the cracks of the established consensus. Online, people can “express racist attitudes and hatred without fear of reprisal”.29
1.1.2 Echo chambers, online news consumption, and clickbait culture
A concept that comes up in many studies about social media, is the concept of echo chambers. Echo chambers are closed formats wherein only like-minded opinions or worldviews are expressed. As a platform, Facebook plays into the existence of echo chambers because “The user experience on Facebook is highly personalized. This personalization includes the selection of news feed stories, advertisements, and even friend suggestions”.30 As previously explained, these suggestions are based
on previous interactions and expected preferences. In this case, a consequence would be that ideologies segregate and people are shown less of what they disagree with.
However, there are alternative views in the academic world. Multiple scholars argue an “Increased choice and social networks lead to greater exposure to diverse ideas, breaking individuals free from insular consumption patterns”.31 This more optimistic perspective on the effects of new
media technologies, instead proposes that social networks have reduced ideological segregation. Nonetheless, the academic opinion regarding Facebook tends to lean more towards the existence of echo chambers.
28 Awan and Zempi, ‘“I Will Blow Your Face off”, 373. 29 Christopherson, 3049.
30 Michal Kosinski and others, ‘Facebook as a Research Tool for the Social Sciences: Opportunities, Challenges, Ethical Considerations, and Practical Guidelines’, American Psychologist, 70.6 (2015), 543–56.
31 Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao, ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 80.Specialissue1 (2016), 298–320.
Echo chambers are promoted by the algorithms that are in place on Facebook. The internet, social media and algorithms are often regarded as neutral and not having a personal agenda. However, culture is directly transmitted to those technologies. In the case of Facebook, the social network, and its algorithms have been created to a certain goal. This goal is set by Facebook, a profit based company. For that reason, the coded system that Facebook has in place is not a neutral one. Both the platform itself and the algorithms running on it, convey the company’s goals. This is important to note when doing research on Facebook, because, as psychologist and data analyst Michael Konsinski and others argue:
Algorithms regulating individual experience are constantly evolving and, most likely, function differently for different users. As users are more likely to interact with content and people suggested to them by Facebook, their behavior is driven not only by their intrinsic goals and motivations but also (to some unknown extent) by the Facebook algorithms constantly adjusting their exposure to content and friends.32
And so, these algorithms do not only play into the existence of echo chambers but are also subjecting the possibility of exposure to certain news items to Facebook’s own coloring.
Facebook itself claims the platform does not promote echo chambers. In a study published by the research department of the company they write, “Some claim that social networks act like echo chambers in which people only consume and share information from like-minded close friends, stifling the spread of diverse information. Our study paints a different picture of the world”.33
However, most of the non-partisan academic studies would disagree. For instance, computational scientists Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens write, “filtering and recommendation have been fingered as the responsible technologies: people restrict the feedback they receive, distorting their psychosocial lives”.34 This is also supported by Seth Flaxman and others who write, “in controlled
32 Michal Kosinski and others, ‘Facebook as a Research Tool for the Social Sciences: Opportunities, Challenges, Ethical Considerations, and Practical Guidelines’, American Psychologist, 70.6 (2015), 543–56.
33 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/rethinking-information-diversity-in-networks/10150503499618859
34 Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens, ‘Echo Chambers and Online Radicalism: Assessing the Internet’s Complicity in Violent Extremism’, Policy and Internet, 7.4 (2015), 401.
experiments, subjects tend to choose news articles from outlets aligned with their political opinions”.
35 Facebook also claims to want to eradicate clickbait culture.36
These concepts exist next to a clickbait culture that is prevalent on social media. For a large part, clickbait culture entails uploaders’ tendency to post online articles with misleading headlines to lure in readers. This happens more frequently online, compared to traditional news sources, like newspapers. A newspaper headline has the purpose of informing the reader who is scanning through the paper. This is not the case with digital news, where headlines mainly serve the purpose of
drawing-in readers.37 3839 And so, this goal is reached most effectively when headlines are
exaggerated, emotionalized, and subjected to other forms of misinformation.40 The consequence of
clickbait culture existing is that “intentionally false claims are accepted and shared while debunking information is mainly ignored”.41 It seems it’s becoming harder and harder to separate the ‘fake’ from
the ‘real’. Clearly, new issues surrounding information consumption have risen since the invention of new media technologies.
1.2 Muslim identity and the west
In 2016 two men in the city of Enschede were given the first conviction for a far-right terrorist crime in the Netherlands, by setting fire to a local mosque. The men’s motive was to scare the local authorities to refrain from building an asylum seekers’ center in Enschede. The arsonists posted pictures of their activities on social media, in addition to anti-Muslim racial slurs. The Dutch court gave them a four-year jail sentence because of the social damage that the action had caused. This
35 Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, and Justin M. Rao, ‘Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 80.Specialissue1 (2016), 298–320.
36 Nick Strat, ‘Facebook is determined to completely kill clickbait’, The Verge (May 17 2017). https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654730/facebook-news-feed-update-kill-off-clickbait
37 Jeffrey Kuiken and others, ‘Effective Headlines of Newspaper Articles in a Digital Environment’, Digital
Journalism, 5.10 (2017), 1301.
38 Jim Thomas, ‘Beware Bubbles and Echo Chambers’, Hastings Center Report, 44.S5 (2014), S43–45. 39 Antonio Scala and Cass R. Sunstein Walter Quattriciocchi, ‘Echo Chambers on Facebook’, 51.2015 (2014),. 40 Yimin Chen, Niall J. Conroy, and Victoria L. Rubin, ‘Misleading Online Content: Recognizing Clickbait as ``False News’’’, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection, 2015, 19.
‘damage’, was an increased feeling of fear and isolation by the Muslim community of the Netherlands.42 This deed reveals a willingness to act against the coming of an asylum seekers’ center
and using social media as a means of getting an audience. Also a direct link between Islamophobia and asylum seekers’ centers is starting to become visible.
The attack on asylum seekers’ centers is by no means a Dutch phenomenon. Swedish right-wing activists on YouTube can also be seen attacking asylum seekers’ centers.43 In chapters two, three
and four, this paper analyzes Facebook communities where people protest against asylum seekers’ centers by posing an Islamophobic image of Muslims. In this chapter, the historical background of the west’s image about Islam is discussed in detail, up to the present day situation in the Netherlands.
1.2.1 Imagining the Muslim other
Within identity studies, ‘othering’ is an identity-shaping process by which someone or some group that does not belong to the self, is characterized by features that the self does not possess. Simultaneously, ‘othering’ defines the self on the basis of being different from ‘the other’. Chronologically, fascism, communism and radical Islam have been ‘the other’ opposed to the West. This reflective identity-building process does not always have to be about enmity. ‘Othering’ has also happened through acts of fascination or even admiration, regarding the western world’s perception of the Islamic world. For instance, Arabic was taught at the College de France as early as 1587, and Oriental Studies has been a subject at Universities around Europe ever since this time.44
One of the most famous works on the subject of ‘othering’ and Middle-Eastern studies is literary scientist Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978. Said studied the way in which Europe has ‘othered’ the Orient, claiming much of Europe’s identity was built on the differences it perceived to have with Islamic civilisations. Said argues:
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and
42 https://nos.nl/artikel/2139914-vier-jaar-voor-brandstichting-met-terreuroogmerk-moskee-enschede.html 43 Mattias Ekman, ‘The Dark Side of Online Activism: Swedish Right-Wing Extremist Video Activism on YouTube’, MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 30.56 (2014), 93.
44 M.J. Wintle, ‘Islam as Europe’s Other throughout History: some discontinuities’, History, 101, issue 344 (Feb. 2016), 44.
languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West).45
Said’s theory about ‘othering’ is based on imagery, thought and vocabulary. Othering is a process that works both ways, “The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.” The origin of this bipolar relationship between the Islamic world and the West does not lie in the nineteenth century. It stem back to the middle ages.46 After Charlemagne, Islam kept a foothold in the
Iberian Peninsula until 1492. Moreover, until deep into the Middle Ages, crusades formed the basis for temporal unity to face Islam. Another Islamic threat soon spilled in from the East when Constantinople fell into Ottoman hands in 1453. Turks continued to form a threat to Europe until 1683 at the battle of Vienna, and until that time the European identity was among other things, anti-Islamic.
A colonial patronizing image followed after Islam was pushed out of Europe in 1914. In modern history, historian often write about a post 9/11 image of Islam. This is because 9/11 is named as the major turning point in Western thought about Islam.47 And, although the importance of the
events of the 11 September 2001 for modern history cannot be stated enough, a change in the West's image of Islam already had taken place before the Twin Towers fell. An example of this dates from the end of the 1980’s, when Salman Rushdie wrote his novel, The Satanic Verses. This was the first time when in western modern multicultural societies, a part of the Muslim world clashed with western liberal traditions. A worldwide affaire ensued. According to Dutch Islamologist Ron Haleber, the position of Muslims in the entire western world had changed after the Rushdie Affair. He states in his article The Rushdie Effects, "The affair has shifted the image of Islamic inhabitants from 'victim' of imperialism and natural circumstances to the 'accused'".48 According to him, the innocence of a part
of the population of many European nations would have disappeared in one fell swoop. 45 E.W Said, Orientalism, revised edition (London, 1978).
46 Idem.
47 Christopher A. Bail, ‘The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks’, American Sociological Review, 77.6 (2012), 855–79.
48 Ron Haleber, ‘De Rushdie-effecten. De migrant tussen twee vuren’ in: Ron Haleber e.a. ed., Rushdie Effecten.
On the other hand, a more conservative approach can be seen in the work of historian, and journalist for the Dutch newspaper Elsevier, Bart Spruyt.49 Spruyt does not deny that the position of
Muslims in the Netherlands, has become less favorable. However, he regards the liberal attitude of the 1970’s among one of the most important causes of this issue, saying: “The ensuing combination of the relativism of the ’68ers and the welfare state, together with the influx of immigrants as a result of economic growth, has created parallel societies in which Muslims could build up their own sovereign world of institutions and values”.50 This segregation has caused native segments of western
society to ‘clash’ with their Muslim countrymen.
2015 is generally regarded as the year in which the so-called ‘migration crisis’ started in Western Europe. The Netherlands and other EU member states had to cater for double the number of asylum seekers compared to 2014. The three largest groups of Muslim migrants came from Syria (362,800), Afghanistan (178,200) and Iraq (121,500).51 These predominantly Islamic countries faced
major long-lasting conflicts, not without interference from the same countries in the EU. During the peak of the Syrian refugee flow in 2015, about 43,035 refugees, of which 20,500 Syrians, migrated to the Netherlands. By 2015 this number had dropped severely.52 The reason for tis frop was that
neighboring countries of Syria are taking more refugees and Eastern-European countries took up a more strict border policy.53
The amount of attention Dutch social and traditional media give to Muslims and Islam are disproportionate compared to the percentage of Muslims in the population of the Netherlands. According to the CBS(Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek), which is the official Dutch institution responsible for gathering statistics about the Netherlands, only 5% of the Dutch population is Muslim.54 The disproportionate media attention is also visible in the research by Leen d’Haenens and
49 Bart Jan Spruyt, ‘“Can’t We Discuss This?” Liberalism and the Challenge of Islam in the Netherlands’, Orbis, 51.2 (2007), 313–29.
50 Bart Spruyt, 'Can't we dissucss this?' Liberalism and the challege of Islam in the Netherlands ,.
51 ‘Record number of over 1.2 million first time asylum seekers registered in 2015’, Eurostat News Release (4 March 2016) 1.
52 https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/achtergrond/2016/47/bevolking-naar-migratieachtergrond 53 https://www.trouw.nl/samenleving/en-ineens-is-het-azc-leeg~ae739a6b/
http://www.at5.nl/artikelen/165577/asielzoekerscentrum_nieuw-west_gaat_eerder_dicht 54 https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2016/51/helft-nederlanders-is-kerkelijk-of-religieus
Susan Brink, about het Algemeen Dagblad’s mentioning Islam their newspaper articles. An increase of 9% in 1998 to 23% in 2004, paints a very clear picture.55
Liz Fekete, the director of the Institute for Race Relation in the United Kingdom, argues, there has been a systemic framing of Muslims as dangerous by both the media, the state, the EU and political movements since the war on terror, which followed the 9/11 attacks. She claims, “Since Islam now represents a ‘threat’ to Europe, its Muslim residents, even though they are citizens, even though they may be European born, are caught up in the ever-expanding loop of xeno-racism.”56 The fact that
Western societies were at war with Islamic countries in the middle east, like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, played into the believed that the West is at war with Islam. According to Feteke, this has led to the demonization of Islam by security services, the police and the media “to weave general public opinion into a global warfare against Muslims”.57
This perspective is also expressed by Imran Awan in his essay about “Facebook’s walls of hate”. In this study, Awan analyzed the messages of hate carried out on Facebook by British far-right organizations and their supporters. The four most common ways in which Muslims are depicted online are “1) terrorists; 2) rapists; 3) Muslim women wearing the Niqab/Hijab are a security threat; 4) Muslims are at war with ‘us’”. 58 All of these categorizations involve a depiction of Muslims as
‘dangerous’. In their own research related to immigrants, Christine Ogan and others already showed that “We already know that media play a big role in framing the public discourse about Muslims and Islam in Europe and the United States. (…) Muslims were generally portrayed in stereotypical terms, and Islam was seen as a threat to security”.59
55 Leen d’Haenens and Susan Brink, ‘Islam in the Dutch press: with special attention to the Algemeen Dagblad’,
Media, Culture & Society 29.1, 135-149.
56 L. Fekete, ‘Anti-Muslim Racism and the European Security State, Race and Class’, 46.1 (2004), 3. 57 L. Fekete, ‘Anti-Muslim Racism and the European Security State, Race and Class’, 46.1 (2004), 8. 58 Imran Awan, ‘Islamophobia on Social Media: A Qualitative Analysis of the Facebook’s Walls of Hate’,
International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 10.1 (2016), 5.
59 Christine Ogan and others, ‘The Rise of Anti-Muslim Prejudice: Media and Islamophobia in Europe and the United States’, International Communication Gazete, 76.1 (2014), 9.
Research on the topic of the far-right in cyberspace started in the USA, where the use of the internet by white-supremacists has been explored since the mid-1990s.60 Exploring Stormfront by
Lorraine Bowman-Grieves is one of the first academic works that analyzed the far-right, as a global online movement.61 Similar researches have been conducted all over the Western World, in countries
like Spain, Italy, Germany, and Australia.626364 This does not mean, that the choice of using internet
mobilization is a method that is merely used by the far-right. It is more so, a method used by political movements that are regarded as relatively ‘young’. In this sense, both “Green parties and Far-Right parties use social media extensively”.65
1.3 Methodology
The fellow members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion...Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.66
These are the words of the late anthropologist Benedict Anderson and are still relevant today. This is also valid, for people who group together in cyberspace. In 1983 Benedict Anderson wrote an extensive book on The Origin and Spread of Nationalism.67 Anderson argued nationalism was made
60 Josh Adams and Vincent J. Roscigno, 'White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web',
Social Forces 84.2 (2005) 759-778.
61 Lorraine Bowman-Grieve, ‘Exploring Stormfront: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right’, Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism, 32.11 (2009), 989–1007.
62 Anat Ben-David and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez, ‘Hate Speech and Covert Discrimination on Social Media : Monitoring the Facebook Pages of Extreme-Right Political Parties in Spain’, International Journal of
Communication, 10 (2016), 1167–93.
63 Manuela Caiani and Claudius Wagemann, ‘Online Networks of the Italian and German Extreme Right’,
Information Communication and Society, 12.1 (2009), 66–109.
64 Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, ‘Platformed Racism: The Mediation and Circulation of an Australian Race-Based Controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube’, Information Communication and Society, 20.6 (2017), 930–46.
65 Vergeer and Hermans, 'Campaigning on Twitter: Microblogging and Online Social Networking as Campaign Tools in the 2010 General Elections in the Netherlands', Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18.4, 403.
66 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London 1983).
possible by the new technology of the printing press. The media played a big part in the creation of ‘imagined groups’, such as nations, which people felt they were a part of. On the internet the distance between people feeling part of a group is shorted. For example, a mother living in Alaska with a terminally ill child can imagine being part of the same community as a parent facing the same hardships in India through communication via the internet.
Communities as a study object date back to the very early stages of sociology and anthropology. This field of research has been taken on by academics studying online communities. This begs the question, how are these classical communities approached in the academic world, compared to digital communities? 68 This can be seen in facebook communities. These are formed
around diverse topics like support groups for people with health issues, nostalgia, and political beliefs.697071 Within a community, there is often a discourse that is inclusive for in-group members
and exclusive to people not belonging to the group. The same goes for online communities. This discourse also reaffirms and strengthens the shared beliefs held by members of the group. Each individual post can be regarded as a piece in the large discourse or narrative of the group. In other words - “the cues which enable the reader to interpret these disparate sequences as stories are found in their discourse context”.72
1.3.1 Anti-Asylum communities
It is important to have a general understanding of some of the demographics of the people involved in anti-asylum communities. There are studies that argue the majority of the supporters of far-right movements are Caucasian middle-aged men.73 In addition, there are also researchers who argue that
68 Shaoke Zhang, Hao Jiang, and John M. Carroll, ‘Social Identity in Facebook Community Life’, International
Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, 2.4 (2010), 64–76.
69 Michaël Boireau, ‘Uncovering Online Political Communities of Belgian MPs through Social Network
Clustering Analysis’, Proceedings of the 2015 2nd International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open
Society: Challenges in Eurasia - EGOSE ’15, 2015, 150–63.
70 Özlem Savaş, ‘Facebook Communities about Nostalgic Photos of Turkey: Creative Practices of Remembering and Representing the Past’, Digital Creativity, 28.1 (2017), 48–57.
71 Emelie Maria Thoren and others, ‘Online Support for Parents of Preterm Infants: A Qualitative and Content Analysis of Facebook “Preemie” Groups’, Archives of Disease in Childhood: Fetal and Neonatal Edition, 98.6 (2013), 535.
72 Ruth Page, ‘Re-Examining Narrativity: Small Stories in Status Updates’, Text and Talk, 30.4 (2010), 439. 73 De Lange, UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Populism in Europe : Netherlands, (Amsterdam 2018) 18.
right-wing online activity is dominated by men in their twenties and thirties.74 When it comes to the
Dutch anti-asylum communities, that were examined in this research, these classifications were not as correct. The members of these online communities do not show a large majority in either gender. Also, the average age is at least fifty years or older, as some studies predicted. This plays into the idea that Facebook has lost its sway with a younger generation and currently now also caters to an older crowd of people.75
In this paper two kinds of communities with different properties have been researched, ‘Facebook groups’ and ‘Facebook pages’. The first important distinction between these two is that a Facebook group is open to input from everyone, as opposed to a page where the page itself does most of the posting. When it comes to a Facebook page there is leadership in the shape of the moderator of the page. In this case, the moderator is the only one who can post new items. On the other hand, in a group, the posting can be done by any member. Moreover, there are more and less active participators. Facebook groups are loose communities where very little participation is needed, only a select few of active people are needed to keep the community going.76 There is no clear leadership
within these groups. Both types of online communities are self-organized and do not claim to be connected to any political organization. In terms of location, some of these communities are connected to specific localities like cities or towns, and thus, contain people from a real-world community that share a like-minded goal. On the other hand, there are more national communities that merely share the same goal, as a more general idea of not wanting more mosque’s or asylum seekers’ centers, for example.
On many of the profiles of these community members, their affiliation with a right-wing party like the PVV or right-wing protest group is clearly visible. This also becomes apparent from the many comments in which people tell their peers to vote for the PVV. Even though this type of community is, 74 Idem.
75 Aatif Sulleyman, ‘Facebook Losing Its Grip on Young People, Who Are Quitting The Site in Their Millions’, The
Independent (12 February 2018).
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-quit-young-people-social-media-snapchat-instagram-emarketer-a8206486.html
76 Lorraine Bowman-Grieve, ‘Exploring Stormfront: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right’, Studies in
in essence, self-organized, a connection to political parties is visible in their voting preference. An example of this connection is Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders’ “Mosknee” initiative, which proclaimed to be a self-help programme for Dutch citizens that do not want to see more mosques near their homes.77 This reveals the influence of political leaders in framing items in a certain way,
setting an example for their supporters. For example, such communities also exist with the aim of objecting against the presence of mosques in the public domain. Pegida Nederland came into action in November 2017 to stop the construction of a new mosque in the Dutch city Enschede. The far-right activist group had painted a cross and a church, on the mosque and sprinkled the construction site with pig’s blood.78
Far-right movements definitely proliferate themselves in this manner, not just to protest against asylum seekers’ centers. Therefore, participation in politically themed Facebook pages or group should be considered as an active form of civic engagement. They are everyday practices of do-it-yourself nationalism.
77 ‘Wilders begint 'offensief' tegen bouw moskeeën’, het Algemeen Dagblad (18 Februari 2016). https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/wilders-begint-offensief-tegen-bouw-moskeeen~ad965dae/
78 ‘Burgemeester Enschede noemt moskee-actie Pegida 'Ku Klux Klan-achtig'’, De Nederlands Omroep
Stichting(12 November 2017)
2 Muslims depicted as dangerous
Incidents involving far-right crimes, are very rarely showcased in anti-asylum communities. Common topics of debate in these communities are news items about incidents that happen in asylum seekers’ centers or incidents that involve a refugee. Undoubtedly, the dysfunction of the Dutch asylum system is at the core of the discourse that is being portrayed within these communities. In addition, a deeper analysis reveals this is done by painting the minority group of Muslims in a bad light. This chapter will deal with how the post 9/11 generalization of Muslims as terrorists, is being reaffirmed and expanded on a daily basis, for and by people involved in far-right communities on Facebook.
Often, the members of anti-asylum communities show that they feel they have been given false information about the nature of the refugees in the Netherlands. According to some reactions in anti-asylum communities, these refugees were supposed to be highly educated. The incidents that are being reported, are used to argue against this positive image. This leads to anti-asylum communities on Facebook using generalizations about Muslims to argue against the coming of asylum seekers’ centers all over the Netherlands. Sociologist En Chieh Chao writes in his article ‘The-Truth-About-Islam.com’:
Popular anti-Islamic websites marked a new era of the industry of Islamophobia that entertains a positivist collection and populist exhibition of the criminality of Islam. Terrorist attacks and suicide bombers are counted, stonings and honor killings pictured, images of oppressed Muslim women pitied.79
2.1 Security threats
One of the biggest issues, which the members of anti-asylum communities see, is extreme unsafety following the coming of refugees. This can be seen when, on the sixth of May the Zeg NEE tegen het AZC page posted, “Today it went wrong AGAIN in Weert”, referencing an article by the NOS about an incident which happened in an asylum seekers’ center in Weert. An employee of the center had been
79 En Chieh Chao, ‘The-Truth-About-Islam.Com: Ordinary Theories of Racism and Cyber Islamophobia’, Critical
physically abused by an asylum seeker when this person was being evicted from the center. This post was a substantial one, as it received 129 likes and 20 shares. Some of the comments responding to this post are clearly ominous, expecting large-scale violence: (Man, 60+, Etten-Leur)“We have to bring in more multicultural ... then it is not so obvious .... we are going towards civil war and certainly if this continues” (Man, 60+). In this reaction, the scale of immigration in the Netherlands seems out of proportion, as the possibility of a civil war suggests.
In some of the comments, the general level of education is immediately placed in doubt, while nothing is known about the culprits. (woman, 30+)“But, I thought we wouldn’t get any trouble from those poor people in need of help, who were pharmacists and doctors. But maybe that was out of fear that residents in the neighborhood did not feel like an azc in their neighborhood”. Herein lies the assumption that some of the media and politicians identified the refugees coming from Syria as being educated people. In sum, these posts establish the communities’ xenophobia about foreigners, in general, being dangerous. With words like, “multiculturals” , the people which should be feared is quite broad.
It is important to recognize where these ideas about Muslim identity are promoted. As discussed in research done by Feteke, influential people in politics and the media have shaped the western public’s ideas about Muslim's identity. For instance, PPV supporters give more significance to dealing with Islamic extremism compared to their counterparts in other European far-right movements. Bartlet and de Lange argue this is because of the priority that is given to the danger of Islamic extremism by the PVV’s leader Geert Wilders.80 Wilders is often named as the most prominent
figure on the ‘far-right’ in the Netherlands. Wilders, following in the footsteps of previous politicians like Pim Fortuyn, and has devoted much of his career on creating a negative image of Islam.
In understanding this kind of xenophobia, the influence of the person who is posting is very important for what information people take from a certain post. The user doing the posting writes a headline above a post and gives it a subjective emotion or tone. Exemplary for this is the article by
NRC Handelsblad, which was posted on the Geen AZC in Nederland page, on 19 February 2018. The post was liked by 64 people and shared by 17. This news item reports on thirty Syrian refugees that arrived in the Netherlands with a ‘blanc passport’. In the article, it is written that the Islamic State has also been using this type of passport for terrorists. Also, it is mentioned that Dutch security services are worried about an increased terrorist threat. 81 The article is part of a post saying, “Meanwhile Rutte leaves the borders wide open. Dangerous man that Rutte”.
In the comments to this post, it becomes clear how important the ‘message’ is, that is given by the person doing the posting. The interpretation of this news item, by most members of the community, seems completely in line with this headline, which targets Mark Rutte. For example, (woman, 25+) “Unbelievable that 1 person, 1 simple party or 1 government can bring down a whole country of millions and be unaware of the harm caused”, (woman, 60+) “We’ll send those 30 to Rutte’s tower so he can see what he is doing” and (man, 60+) “It is time that they shoot him”. And so, this post is an example of how the news is easily framed into a different context, outside the original one. President Mark Rutte, and the biggest two parties on the left in the shape of Jesse Klaver (Groen Links) and Alexander Pechtold (D66) are very often blamed for incidents regarding refugees.
This rhetoric is in line with Dutch new-right arguments, that are almost always anti-elitist, anti-establishment or anti-liberal. Multiculturalism is regarded as idem with the liberal establishment of the elite.82 And, by that reasoning, this part of the political establishment is responsible for the
coming of asylum seekers’ centers in the Netherlands. These “Anti-elitist discourses often tend to “subordinate socioeconomic cleavages to intrapolitical ones,’’ (…) to subsume all issues to the schema of people versus the elite as a substitute of class conflicts”.83 The ruling class is regarded as to tolerate
“parallel societies” of “small, self-isolated social groups, each of which adheres to a different norm”.84
Political scientist Jan Zielonka makes a statement on this matter with his book Counter-Revolution,
81 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/02/18/30-asielzoekers-in-nederland-met-een-is-paspoort-a1592712 82 Peter O’Brien, 'The Muslim Question in Europe', Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline, 2015, I, 172. 83 Benjamin Krämer, ‘Media Populism: A Conceptual Clarification and Some Theses on Its Effects’,
Communication Theory, 24.1 (2014), 44.
wherein he argues liberals have failed to reflect on their own shortcoming, and have allows anti-liberal sentiments to spawn all over the world.85
The editorial power of an influential person or organization on social media can be problematic because of the lack of a mediator between author and readership. This issue in new media is underscored by a professor of computational social science, Eugene Agichtein. He argues, the quality of user-generated content “varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam”. 86 This is
because there is no publisher to test the information that is given in a Facebook post sharing a news item. This is a huge step away from objective journalism. This seems obvious, as it is likely that the user who posts a news article never had the aim to be neutral. In sum, a s the last mediator between story and public, the person posting sets the tone for a news report to his own will. When it comes to social media, the second layer of framing comes on top of this. There is no mediator or publisher to select the quality of information. This is one of the reasons for social media like Facebook and Twitter to become platforms of hate.
When it comes to user-generated content, like a Facebook post, it is interesting to analyze what was the users’ intention was in creating a post. If not wanting to merely report the news, what then motivates him or her? When it comes to anti-asylum communities, the main objective of being an active member of the community is to show one’s discontent. This is often done by framing figures-to-blame in a negative picture. In the previous post, the scapegoat was the Dutch prime minister. This is by no means a new trend, as anti-liberal counter-movements have existed since the French Revolution.87 However, anti-asylum communities can go beyond targeting the political elite.
This framing of the news in a subjective light also happens when members of anti-asylum communities discuss their image of Muslims. For instance, on the 30th of April 2018, the NOS
published an article titled, “The Netherlands is taking in more migrants from Turkey and Southern Europe”, with the subtitle “the total inflow of asylum seekers was slightly higher than in 2016”.88 This
85 Jan Zielonka, Counter-Revolution. Liberal Europe in Retreat (Oxford 2018) .
86 Eugene Agichtein and others, ‘Finding High-Quality Content in Social Media’, Proceedings of the
International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining - WSDM ’08, 2008, 183-191.
87 Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, (Cambrigde 1993).
is a relatively neutral article, without any assessment of the news being bad or good. This is a relevant post because it received 300 likes and was shared 61 times. The article explains how the Netherlands has taken in more refugees last year because countries like Turkey, Italy, and Greece are overburdened. There is a picture of the Centraal Orgaan opvang Asielzoekers (COA) on the forefront of the article. In the comments the image of Muslims as dangerous becomes apparent. (man, Rotterdam)“Oh yes. Even more of those criminal Muslim scum in our country” and (man, 50+ Breda)“Are there not enough of those wretches here, they are not refugees but deserters”. The term “deserters” in this example refers to radicalized Muslims that are returning to the Netherlands, after having fought in Syria. Both Muslims as a generalization and Muslims as refugees are regarded as being dangerous.
On the 23rd of March 2018, Geen AZC in Nederland posted an article by the Telegraaf showing
concern about the security threat that refugees pose to Dutch society. The newspaper claims a transgender refugee was raped by two men in an asylum seekers’ center in the Netherlands. No information is given about the perpetrators nor the victim in either the post or the article itself. 89 The
article was accompanied by a text from the moderator saying, “Thank you Alexander Pechtold! Great those open borders”. As we see in this post, this stand-alone incident is seen as exemplary for the situation of “open borders” the Netherlands is thought to be in. In effect, violence is imported with the coming of foreigners. According to this post, the one to blame is the leader of the progressive party in the current Dutch government, Alexander Pechtold. Pechtold is regularly described as the leader of those opposing the members of these communities. He is sometimes regarded as the very cause of many immigration problems.
The article of the 23rd of March received a substantial amount of attention with a total of 17
shares and 67 likes. In the comment section, a large number of reactions can be seen supporting the idea that Muslims are on the basis of a security threat. Some of the most popular reactions were (Man, 60+, Haarlem):
How beautiful it is here with all those RASCIST Muslims. Obviously, we should not say anything about it because then suddenly it is considered discrimination. Above all, keep on bringing in this scum if you do not want a future for you and your (grand) children. So, if you keep bringing the enemy in you should not be surprised if it will be war ... strangeeee right. 'Good' strategy by our treacherous government and the crazy leftist, cowardly traitorous fascist sheep heads.
Also, straight-out Islamophobic responses were visible such as, (Dutch man 60+)”Clean them up those dirty Muslims”. This is reinforced in the research done by Rettberg and Gajjala about “Negative portrayals of male Syrian refugees in social media”. They argue “The stereotypical image of Middle-Eastern men in contemporary times often suggests that they are dangerous”.90 Turkish sociologist
Nilüfer Goële emphasizes this idea by saying Muslims “have been compared to dangerous ‘black sheep”.91 In sum, the article from the Facebook post originally never had any mention of Islam or
Muslims at all. Simply said, the refugee is synonymous for Muslim, and the Muslim is dangerous. On the 7th of April 2018, the Zeg NEE tegen AZC page shared an article by the NOS about an
attack which took place in Munster, Germany. A German citizen killed two people whilst driving his car into a crowd.92 The post received 146 likes and 44 shares. What is stated in the article itself is:
According to Minister Reul, the perpetrator is a German without a migrant background, who has no ties with jihadists. German media report that it concerns the 1968-born Jens R., who was struggling with psychological problems. The ZDF reports that he has recently attempted suicide.
Thus, the perpetrator of this incident was a person without a migrant background and no connection to Islam whatsoever. Nonetheless, this incident was shared on a page that serves the purpose of protesting against asylum seekers’ centers. This is an interesting post because it received a large amount of attention. Most of the comments about this article reveal how this new item is completely taken out of context: (man, 60+ Diepenveen) “Another attack! And l the EU just let the Muslims in.
90 Rettberg and Gajjala, 'Terrorist or Cowards', 179.
91 Nilüfer Göle, 'The public visibility of Islam and European politics of resentment: The minarets-mosques debate', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 37.4, 388.
Thank you, politicians” and (woman, 60+ Breda) “How many innocent people still have to die because of this situation. EU you wake up for once and close all borders because this is getting worse”. Any kind of nuance from the original news source is completely lost when it is framed within the broader discourse of this Facebook community.
The notion of echo chambers is clearly visible in the last example because a news article about something completely unrelated is still used for the same discourse that can be seen throughout the rest of the anti-asylum community. There is little to no actual debate within any of these communities, between people disagreeing with each other. Anti-asylum communities are for that reason a prime example of echo chambers. The like-mindedness of the members of these communities is something that could be expected, as they are set-up as protest groups against the establishment of new asylum seekers’ centers. However, there is also no debate about the idea of Muslims being dangerous or even terrorists. As shown in chapter 1.1.2 multiple researchers argue that the same type of echo chambers exist elsewhere in cyberspace. This can be problematic because people that mainly consume news within these “bubbles” are rarely exposed to alternative opinions. The effects of this could mean a further polarisation of ideas. However, the effects of this type of news consumption must not be exacerbated as in our contemporary time only a small amount of the population reads the news on social media.93
One of the leading academics focusing on the far-right or ‘populists’ is the political scientist Jan Werner-Müller. In his book What is Populism, Müller explores what this term actually means, and more interestingly, how to deal with populist arguments. Müller explains that supporters of the far-right are often classified as uneducated, unintelligible and emotional by their opponents. Avoiding all debate, on the basis that it is better to disregard their ungrounded ideas because they are based on emotion, instead of logic.94 Political theorist Corey Robin writes that the left has mostly tried to
play-off the right as “an emotional swamp”95. This approach only adds more fuel to the fire. According to
93 Seth Flaxman, S. Goel, and R.M. Rao, ‘Filter bubbles, echo chambers and online news consumption’, Public
Opinion Quarterly, 80, 306.
94 Jan Werner-Müller, What is Populism?, (2010 Pennsylvania).
Müller, the only way to counter racist and derogatory ideas is to keep the debate going. Eventually, the more logical arguments will prevail.
However, engaging supporters of an extreme ideology becomes problematic when the existence of echo chambers is confirmed. As is visible in the like-minded reactions to posts in anti-asylum communities, there is no exchange of opposing views on the topic of immigration. This entails, the xenophobic, anti-Muslim perspective is questioned very rarely on these platforms. When people link-up through shared opinions, mainly their own ideas will get confirmed. In addition, according to researchers Antonio Scala, Cass Sunstein, and Walter Quattriciocchi:
It is well-established that many people seek information that supports their current convictions, the phenomenon of confirmation bias. That phenomenon significantly affects decisions about whether to spread content, potentially creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. In these circumstances, online behavior can promote group polarization.96
In sum, the demonization of Muslims as violent, a threat too security and sometimes as terrorists is clearly visible by some supporters of the far-right. This image is echoed on Facebooks anti-asylum communities where disagreement is rarely seen in these corners of cyberspace. What also becomes apparent form analyzing the image of Islam as a threat to security ion anti-asylum communities, is the importance of headlines in online news consumption. As seen in some of the comments, that members post about news items, the information or misinformation that is shared in a headline, leaves the risk of the news items being taken out of its original context. The new context it is framed in, often serves the communities’ anti-immigration stance.
3 Muslims seen as abusive to women
Multiple studies have shown that Muslim men are being described as abusive to women on different media platforms. In a research conducted about the portrayal of Syrian men on Twitter, media professors Jill Walker and Radhika Gajjala found, this imagery dates back to colonial times. Syrian men are described as posing a threat to white women, because of the idea that they are aggressive and have an overly sexual nature.97 In the context of the Rotherham scandal, where Muslim men
were involved in sexual activities with underage girls, ‘”Muslim’ was deployed in order to cast all Muslims as synonymous with child abusers and indeed participants reported incidents where they were called ‘rapists’ and ‘paedos’—(pedophiles)”.98 These peaks in anti-Muslim sentiment seem to be
short-lasting moments of hate. However in the current situation, as it is argued in this thesis, this has been happening on a regular basis since 2015.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, after 9/11 the depiction of Muslims as dangerous is clearly visible in anti-asylum pages. However, according to Walker and Radhika, during the Syrian refugee crisis, this image somewhat lessened. A new way of framing this group was sought by right-wing supporters. Consequentially, the image of Muslims as abusive to women became more prevalent. Moreover, “predatory sexuality and undisciplined male aggression were among several causes suggested supporting claims that people in the Middle East were not ready for democratic self-governance”. This idea has been revived, adding to the idea of Muslims as terrorists since 9/11. In this chapter, the depiction of Muslim men as rapists and unfriendly towards women is explored in the context of the discourses which can be seen on anti-asylum pages.
3.1 Threats to women
Both in the previous chapter and this one, the online activism that is visible here takes shape in the form of reporting incidents that confirm a pessimistic view on immigration. According to Awan the
97 Rettberg and Gajjala, 'Terrorists or Cowards'.
