Bilal Cleland reminds us that the rise of fundamentalist populism in otherwise liberal societies, often promoted by a venomous tabloid media, needs to be recognised as a lethal trend.
“Jews will not replace us”
Haroon Moghul introduced his opinion piece in Haaretz on 30 June 2019, 'The White Genocide That the Far Right Won't Talk About', with descriptions of the replacement theory now dominating neo-Nazi thought.
The Charlottesville neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us”, meant, that "the Jews" were promoting mass immigration as a means of diluting the White population. They were not claiming the Jews would physically displace them.
The most extreme manifestation of this claim is that there is:
'The intentional elimination of white people, beginning with the subversive importation of (grossly exaggerated) numbers of brown and black immigrants.'
The Australian terrorist who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, was acting to avert a white genocide by immigrant "invaders".
The Norwegian Christian crusader Anders Breivik murdered young Norwegian Labour Party members, blaming them for the surrender of his country’s sovereignty to foreigners.
The Bosnian genocide in the 1990s, a genocide of White Europeans, showed that(30 June 2019, Haaretz):
'It was not the colour of their skin which saw them targeted, however. It was their religious affiliation and ancestry.'
This "great replacement" theory thus extends to religious and cultural differences not just skin colour. Muslims are part of the subversion of "White" civilisation.
The anti-Muslim Genocide in Bosnia
July 11, 1995, at Srebrenica: United Nations peacekeepers opened the way for Serbian Chetnik killers to carry out the murders of some 8,000 boys and men, whose only crime was their religious affiliation.
International Criminal Tribunal judge Fouad Riad described the barbarity in these words:
"Thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers’ eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson. These are truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history."
As academic Pinar Tankir reported the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo as stating (11 July 2019, Daily Sabah):
‘... over 100,000 Bosnians were killed between 1991 and 1995’ and of these ‘80 per cent were Muslims.’
…. It was indeed a planned and systematic genocide.
Preparing the way for genocide
Refugees, Muslims, Indigenous peoples, and all minority groups in otherwise liberal societies subject to the rise of fundamentalist populism and venomous tabloid media need to be able to recognise lethal trends.
Norman Cigar in his book: Genocide in Bosnia: The policy of ethnic cleansing, (Texas A&M University Press, 1995) reveals how the first phase involves shaping the intellectual atmosphere.
Well before the break-up of Yugoslavia, influential figures in Serbia had begun to shape a stereotypical image of Muslims as alien, inferior, and a threat to all that Serbs held dear.
Such messages about the Muslims eventually were to become commonplace in Serbia’s popular and scholarly literature, while the Serbian media denigrated Islam openly and gratuitously, often in terms approaching racism.
Islam was portrayed as a threat to Serbian political ambitions and Serbian culture.
One prominent author, Draskovic, lashed out at the
‘... fury of offensive and intolerant Islam in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Sandzak, and Herzegovina... [at] the vampire-like resurgence of the tradition of the Shariah [religious law], and... the strategy of jihad [holy war] with the goal of creating an Islamic state in the Balkans.'
Srebrenica was one of the fruits of such vilification.
The notion that “White” European culture is under threat from alien influences has filtered into the mainstream.
As was reported in the Guardian on 7 July 2019:
'Now the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, has found that the once-obscure ideology has moved into mainstream politics and is now referenced by figures including U.S. President Donald Trump, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and Björn Höcke of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).'
As Haroon Moghul commented(30 June 2019, Haaretz):
“If there is no future for Muslims in the West, then the future of the West itself looks bleak indeed.”
Bilal Cleland is a retired secondary teacher and was Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Chairman of the Muslim Welfare Board Victoria and Secretary of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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