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Gas, Shoot, Kill: The End of Humanity and the Universalism of the Double Language of Hatred Against Muslims and Jews

The article deals with hateful antirefugee comments made by Slovenian users on social media platforms and compares them to the antiSemitic discourse in contemporary Germany and the United Kingdom. It should be noted that the article does not treat these comments as being specific to the Slovenian environment in any way. The hatred, which can be universalized as the relationship between antisemitism and antirefugee xenophobia (or Islamophobia), contains a number of homogenous elements. The cultural, religious, economic and conspiratorial motives behind the hatred and fear of the Other were formed in a similar fashion when it comes to both the hatred of Jews, and especially after 2015, the hatred of refugees. If the former is distinguished by the characteristic contempt for Jews, the latter is dominated by antiMuslim and Islamophobic sentiments. However, the discursive features and metaphors are remarkably similar in both cases, and the expressions of hatred, racism, xenophobia and intolerance against refugees have transformed into open approvals of Hitler, fascism, Nazism, and the Third Reich, as well as a fascination with the horrific acts of the Holocaust, genocide, extermination, suffering, torture and killing. The paper attempts to show, at the level of concrete analysis, the similarities of the two public discourses and how Islamophobic discourse has adopted the linguistic apparatus developed by antisemitism, while also refreshing it and radicalizing it further. The analysis of the refugee (or the migrant) and the Jew in the language of hatred points to many analogies: just as we presumably needed an awakened leader (Führer) to deal with the Jews, we now need a new Hitler to deal with the refugees; the figure of the former was replaced by the figure of the latter. From this, we can conclude that Islamophobic discourse fundamentally overlaps the antisemitic discourse: the refugee today is occupying the position of a threatening Jew. The relatedness of both discourses contributes to the consolidation and normalization of Islamophobia in the public space as a form of new racism and thus provides rationalization for a belief system that unambiguously triggers sympathy for the Holocaust, genocide and killing, only this time based on Islamophobic prejudices against refugees.

 


Article inside journal

Issue No. 280 - Weaponizing Fear / New Feminisms and Fighting Stupidity
Source
Časopis za kritiko znanosti
Numbering
2020 , volume volume 48 , issue issue 280
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