Europe and the Neo-Fascist Threat

Lisa Bjurwald is an investigative  journalist who has specialised in the politics of xenophobia for well over a decade. She is alert to the propagation of  racist conspiracies – such as “The muslims will take over because they have larger families!”, and the failure of the media in general, to expose such fear-mongering for what it is.

She notes the shift “from boots to suits” as the miliant and the political, and the pan-European and US networks, feed off each other.

She links islamophobia, anti-semitism and antizyganism (“Gypsies”, the Roma) as interlocking ideologies and exposes the reality of demographic warfare.

She notes that the Internet allows extreme ideas to be accessible and widespread –  a tool of propaganda, recruitment and cooperation.
Radicals can go undetected.
It underlines the need for media literacy – what is true or false on-line, how selective “truth” works in propaganda, for example.

Some of the urgent challenges she lists are:

• the focus on islamism has strengthened the extreme right
• the lack of knowledge about today’s movements (even and particularly in the security domain)
• radical ideas have entered the mainstream
• our tolerance for racism has grown
• the strong extremist presence on-line
• will the next Behring Breivik go undiscovered too?

An important and engaging lecture.