Weiye Loh's Library tagged Extremism →  View Popular, Search in Google

. We shouldn’t be running around trying to find lowest common denominators and coming up with solutions like: If four in five religions (as determined by the state) find homosexuality wrong, therefore the state should find homosexuality wrong. If three in five religions say wives must obey their husbands, therefore the law should provide fewer rights for married women versus married men.

Of course the government is careful never to frame it quite like that; however, each time they say “Singapore is conservative”, or make some reference to “widespread” opinion, they are in effect making reference to religious beliefs — because these views stem from there.

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private "facts," too.

They claimed that global warming wasn't real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

"Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!"

It's a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy.

What the Religious Right, including the Religious Right's Roman Catholic and Protestant enablers, did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government--is questioned as part of religious faith itself.

It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, "The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control."

Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father's 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, or for that matter a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party or those by Michele Bachmann, or Robert George or his follower Glenn Beck.

In my father's book he called for the overthrow of the US government unless non-violent ways were found to overturn Roe v Wade. He compared America to Nazi Germany.

In an op-ed at Jadaliyya, Shiva Balaghi calls the events a "Tragic Day for Norway; Shameful Day for Journalism." She summarizes her own view of the reports:

 

  I read a story in the New York Times that squarely pointed to jihadi groups angered at the war in Afghanistan...The Financial Times was no better. From the start, it reported allegations of Islamic terrorism, continuing with this view well into its evening reporting by which time an arrest had already been made in the case... Judy Woodruff’s interview with a Norwegian journalist that aired on PBS’s Newshour followed a similar scenario.

 

  In this 24/7 news cycle driven even more mad by terror experts who conduct research using google and tweet a mile a minute, journalists should exercise caution... Perhaps today the neo-Nazis in Europe count Muslims among the problems that drive their madness. But to a large degree, these right wing extremist views shaped twentieth century Europe.

Ibrahim Hewitt writes an editoral at Al-Jazeera, where he observes that once media outlets noted that the suspect was not Muslim, they disassociated connections between the suspect's beliefs and his alleged violent actions.

 

  ...the perpetrator was a "blond, blue-eyed Norwegian" with "political traits towards the right, and anti-Muslim views." Not surprisingly, the man's intentions were neither linked to these "traits," nor to his postings on "websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies." Any influence "remains to be seen"; echoes of Oklahoma 1995. Interestingly, this criminal is described by one unnamed Norwegian official as a "madman."

These motives provide followers of far right and fundamentalist groups with a compelling and convincing rationale for getting actively involved. Foremost, these citizens perceive that a wider community is under threat, whether from al-Quaida, supranational organisations such as the EU or UN, immigration or the growth of settled Muslim communities.

Furthermore, they also contend that this threat is cultural rather than economic. It is not simply about jobs or social housing. It is a profound sense of concern that a set of values, way of life and wider community are under threat, and that only the most radical forms of action can remove this threat.

even as we argue that people look to the Quran merely because it is the most-readily known alternative in the light of the perceived failures of the current constitutional order, identification with Islam has deep roots.

As the above graph shows, nearly 80 percent of survey respondents identify as Muslims rather than as Malaysians. Their religious identity trumps their national identity.

views of hudud laws. Muslim Malaysian youths favour them more than Muslim Indonesian youths.

The survey suggests that Muslim youths in Malaysia are more conservative than in Indonesia, and that in Malaysia they look more to Islamic law too. It also means that although sensational news reports emerge regularly from Indonesia of mobs going on rampage enforcing Islamic norms or attacking other religions, it is in Malaysia where there is a yearning for Islam to replace secular constitutional arrangements. If this is a recipe for political instability, then we should be watching northwards rather than southwards.