The Christchurch massacre and the Australian state of mind. A cocktail that has been years in the making. The Christchurch terrorist carnage serves as a stark reminder that Australia is not only the home of funny beer commercials (“Fosters is Australian for beer”) and strange ways to play football, it is also home to an… Continue reading “What’s wrong with Australia?”
As I sat down this morning and switched on my computer. I couldn’t help but notice the headline in the Spectator, ‘The Islamophobia’ problem. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the author was Douglas Murray. In his latest tirade of anti-Muslim scaremongering, Murray was contemplating the roots of Islamophobia. For Murray, Islamophobia – in… Continue reading “Islamophobia is not Fiction or a Harry Potter Fantasy: It’s Racism and it’s time we accepted that”
Roger Eatwell coined the term ‘cumulative extremism’ in his influential article on community cohesion from 2006. He argued that ‘different forms of extremisms are constructed in discourse’ by extremist groups to legitimise their own activities, and also noted the ‘varieties of such interactions’. Sometimes, Eatwell argued, extremists could even identify positive features in their chosen… Continue reading “The British Extreme Right, Reciprocal Radicalisation and constructions of the Other”