When Hate Becomes the Norm Internet Far Right 2013

SAGELos Angeles,London,New Delhi,Singapore,Washington DC

Race & Class Copyright © 2013 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 55(1): 78 –86 10.1177/0306396813486604 http://rac.sagepub.com

Sweden: when hate becomes the normKATRINA HIRVONEN

Abstract: The author, who worked at the Swedish Vallentuna centre for unaccompanied minors, was shocked by the anti-foreigner climate she encountered. In order to examine the parameters of this hostility, she researched representations of unaccompanied minors online. Working within the framework of netnography, she uncovered a potent mix of Islamophobia and anti-foreigner hate, with unaccompanied minors depicted within a Eurabian mindset. The article reflects on the relationship between offline and online worlds and suggests that extremist sites provide echo chambers for far-right opinion. By normalising extreme views, they serve to deliver more votes to the Sweden Democrats – an extreme-right parliamentary party which is setting the national terms of debate on restricting immigration.

Keywords: avpixlat.info, counter-jihadist, Eurabia, Islamophobia, Kent Ekeroth, nationell.nu, netnography, nordfront.se, Sweden Democrats, Swedish Migration Board, unaccompanied minors

In the Swedish general election of 2010, the Sweden Democrats (SD), a party with neo-Nazi roots, made a stunning electoral breakthrough, gaining 5.7 per cent of the vote and twenty seats in parliament. The SD appeared to have

Katrina Hirvonen lives in Stockholm and has carried out research into extremist online representations of unaccompanied minors, the full text of which will be published in Implications of the Eurozone crisis for perceptions, politics and policies of migration edited by Bo Peterson and Pieter Bevelander, forthcoming.

486604 RAC55110.1177/0306396813486604Race & ClassHirvonen: Sweden2013

Commentary

Hirvonen: Sweden: when hate becomes the norm 79

remodelled itself as a respectable anti-immigration party, similar to the Danish People’s Party. In the last three years, scandals have bedevilled the SD’s elected representatives, concerning, for example, its former justice spokesman, Kent Ekeroth, after footage emerged of him armed with an iron bar, attacking a man and a woman while engaging in racist abuse. But the party’s electoral support is still running high, with recent polls suggesting that it is now the third most popu-lar party in Sweden.1

The SD’s rise takes place as opposition grows to the arrival (and housing) of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, the number of whom has increased in recent years, from 269 new arrivals in 2005 to 3,400 in 2012.2 The Swedish Migration Board reaches agreements with municipalities which, under the Social Services Act (2006), are to provide suitable reception arrangements. But the increase in the number of children, many of whom come from Afghanistan and Somalia, has led to a stand-off between central and local government over accom-modating them, as many municipalities (particularly those governed by centre-right parties) refuse to provide accommodation, forcing the government to draft stronger legislation to enforce compliance. One third of all centres for unaccom-panied minors have been subject to vandalism, violence and threats in the last year.3 Migration Board representative Lars Borgebo says that it is no longer safe to hold local public consultations and attributes the deteriorating political climate to the presence of the SD in parliament, the subsequent acceptance of anti-immi-grant ideas and the way that the far Right use social media to mobilise forces for consultation meetings.4

Asylum-seeking children in a Stockholm commuter town

This article focuses on the 2012 protests against a centre at Vallentuna, a largely middle-class suburb, twenty-five kilometres north of Stockholm. Vårljus AB, a private company owned by twenty-five municipalities in the Stockholm area, was contracted by the Vallentuna municipal authority to staff a permanent accommodation centre that would house not just newly arrived unaccompanied minors, but also youngsters who had recently won permanent residence rights. From the beginning, there was opposition: letters were sent to the local paper, a petition was launched and meetings solicited with elected representatives. Before long, the proposal was being discussed on blogs and internet forums, particularly those associated with the anti-immigration movement. Anonymous threats were made should the centre be opened.

Vallentuna is one of Stockholm’s rapidly expanding commuter towns, which boasts lakes and streams, Stockholm’s foremost bird habitat, ample living space, and so on. Support for the Sweden Democrats, who won seats on the local coun-cil, is strong on the centre-right controlled municipality. The SD opposed the accommodation centre from the start. It was planned for a particularly genteel and expensive part of the town, in an area of detached family homes with gener-ous, landscaped gardens. When the public service channel PI set out to

80 Race & Class 55(1)

investigate the basis for local opposition to the new centre, residents, backed by estate agents, spoke of their fears that too many immigrants would depress house prices.5

However, Vårljus AB pressed ahead with its plan, appointing a staff of social workers (of whom I was one). But before its scheduled opening, in April 2012, the manager got abusive phone calls asking whether she was aware that the youths came from places ‘where they are used to raping females’ and whose very pres-ence in the town would make female teenagers unsafe walking the streets. Then came the vandalism. One evening, eggs were thrown at the building, walls were sprayed with graffiti, a hole made in the door, a hose inserted and water pumped through so as to cause extensive damage.

When the centre finally opened, some neighbours were supportive, and politi-cians, including Tobias Billström, the Swedish Minister of Migration, attempted to set a lead by visiting the centre. But the opposition persisted and the situation was far from easy. Vårljus AB hired extra security personnel to patrol the centre and, though the Swedish Security Police (SÄPO) decided the immediate threat to it had passed, the local police made regular visits, day and night. Not surpris-ingly, the young people, already traumatised by previous experiences, sensed that they were unwelcome: I myself, white and blond, had local people pointing their middle finger at me, as I made my way to work each day. Accompanying Afghan minors to shops in Vallentuna, I could not but sense the level of anti-foreigner hostility. I began to worry about sending the boys to the local school since I knew that in the school council elections the SD had received 70 per cent of the vote.

To understand this hostility, I found myself googling the words Vallentuna + ensamkommande (unaccompanied). Online I regularly found the view expressed that now ‘they’ (rich people) will finally come to see the ‘consequences of multi-culture’ already experienced by the working class. In fact, online commentators found it really funny that ‘rich people’ in ‘protected areas’ such as Vallentuna were finally waking up to the reality of immigration. But such comments were the tip of the iceberg. The worldview I found online in discussions about the asy-lum seekers in my care seemed to echo that of Anders Behring Breivik’s6 con-spiracy theory of Eurabia, which depicts Muslims as part of a conspiracy to Islamicise Europe through immigration.7 As one online commentator put it in the comment field on the website Avpixlat: ‘The prognosis for Vallentuna: strong increase of mobile phone robberies, shoplifting, threats against insurance person-nel, gang rapes … everything because of the unaccompanied rapist children.’

The internet as echo chamber

There is no doubt that in Sweden a counter-jihadist movement is closely allied, via Kent Ekeroth, to the SD and that the SD’s electoral breakthrough was in part fuelled by online activity.8 Internet forums that centre around discussions of Muslims and Islam act as ‘echo chambers’ for counter-jihadist thought,


reinforcing visitors’ ideas and creating an environment where opinions that are not socially acceptable in mainstream society become the norm.9 The internet provides a unique opportunity for people to express their racism, contact like-minded people – without ever being held to account.10

A country like Sweden, where human rights and non-racism are regarded as social and cultural norms and tolerance a national virtue, allows alternative social media to present themselves as anti-establishment and pro-freedom because they do not succumb to the ‘politically correct’. For example, during an online chat forum, in which the former Expo journalist Lisa Bjurwald was discussing her book on the online anti-immigration movement, Skrivbordskrigarna (Desk war-riors), she found herself fielding callers with questions like ‘Is this so-called online hate, a sign that the Swedish media is too undifferentiated with an inbuilt approach that censors discussion of the immigration problem?’11 Similarly, when prime minister Fredrik Reinfeld linked the SD success to the ‘easy answers, loudly delivered’ on internet forums ‘where the real work of the SD is carried out’,12 there were 1,577 comments on the Avpixlat website on the day the article was published, from people describing themselves as part of a Swedish majority whose views were not being taken seriously.

To assess the internet’s influence on offline activities, I studied internet sites by deploying a form of ethnographic research known as netnography.13 Islam-hostile webpages have grown over the last ten years, and the modern extreme Right is increasingly being developed on the internet, where representations are uncensored.14 I chose three of the biggest and most popular anti-immigrant websites in Sweden because they had the highest number of articles and com-ments on the accommodation centre at Vallentuna. While I examined data from just 288 comments and sixty articles, it was obvious that other comments and articles merely repeated the words, phrases and metaphors used in the com-ments fields and articles searched; in this sense the ‘echo’ in the ‘chamber’ was very clear.

The largest website was Avpixlat, which leans towards counter-jihadism and took over from a popular website called Politiskt inkorrekt (Politically Incorrect). According to the Expo Foundation it has unofficial links with the SD. Its bank account, for example, is in the name of Kent Ekeroth. Many of the comments on the website end with ‘SD 2014’ (2014 being the date of the next general election in Sweden). Avpixlat means non-pixellated and refers to the way the media protects the identity of crime suspects by digitally blurring an image. The site has the express purpose of fighting to ensure that the images of crime suspects are clear for all to see, thereby revealing, so it argues, the colour of criminality. This web-site, then, builds on the far Right’s attack on the mainstream media as the site of anti-racism and political correctness. Faced with a situation (post-Breivik) where mainstream newspapers and government websites remove comments that are racist or offensive, Avpixlat has introduced a technical function on its website whereby users are invited to download a programme called Avpixlade kommen-tarer (non-pixellated comments) which creates a parallel (but invisible) forum on


official and mainstream media websites for Avpixlat users only. Users can thus place critical (and racist) comments safe in the knowledge that only Avpixlat users will be able to access them; they cannot be opposed by anti-racists and evade the stricter standards and participation guidelines adopted by the main-stream press in response to growing racism.

The second website was the homepage of Nordfront (Nordic Front), formerly known as the Patriot.nu (Patriot Now). Describing itself as ‘the voice of the free Nordic’, it is the most openly neo-Nazi of the sites viewed, airing traditionally far-right anti-immigrant and white supremacist views. Its domain owner Emil Hagberg was prosecuted for hate speech in 2012,15 having previously been con-victed of other forms of hate speech, breaking laws relating to weapons restric-tion, and crimes of violence. It seems that in October 2012 the current domain owner was also charged with two counts of hate speech for an article and a com-ment on an article on the homepage. The Nordic Front has connections to the Svenska Motståndsrörelsen (Swedish Resistance Movement, SMR) which is led by Klas Lund, a former member of the White Aryan Resistance, who has a convic-tion for manslaughter. The mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik referred to the SMR as ‘his brothers’.16

The final site studied was Nationell.nu (National Now). Describing itself in the vaguest terms as ‘the online newspaper for the Swedish Resistance’, it has no overt political affiliation. While the domain owner is Richard Langéen, other con-tributors are unknown. Again, opposition to the political correctness of the Swedish media is the rationale for the website, which describes itself as the big-gest ‘regime critical online newspaper’ in Sweden. Its aim is to serve as an anti-dote to the political correctness of the Swedish media so as to set the Swedish people free.

Language and hate speech

One term skäggbarn (beard children) runs through the comments as the descriptor for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. In fact, discussion of age assess-ments of unaccompanied minors by the immigration authorities, often relying on unreliable methods such as dental formation, are commonplace in Sweden. In this sense, the fact that unaccompanied minors are routinely described on far-right sites as dishonest liars reflects the mainstream view that the children are sent by adult members of the family in the hope that, once granted residence rights, they can act as the ‘anchor’ for the rest to move to Sweden.

On the far-right sites this idea is explored in abusive language. At the very least, unaccompanied minors are depicted as scroungers – opportunist fortune hunters, social tourists, asylum-tourists in Sweden for an ‘all-inclusive trip’. But more often the lens used is that of criminality. These are bandits and above all ‘rapists’, more explicitly ‘hungry rapists’, ‘paedophile rapists’, ‘MENA rapists’–the ‘most rape-prone immigrant of them all’ whose presence will ensure a ‘rape’ epidemic. The focus on the sex-drive and rapist tendencies of the ‘beard children’


and ‘gang rapists’ out to target Swedish girls and children is overwhelming – as is the number of references to immorality, backwardness, dirt and disease. Terms such as ‘ungrateful Neanderthal men’ and phrases such as ‘imported dirt’, ‘dirty people from the shabbiest places in the world’, ‘medieval people’ are used. Comparisons are made with rodents (more explicitly ‘human rats’ and ‘anabolic lab rats’), and monkeys (‘half monkeys’, ‘inbred monkeys’, or ‘with less morals than a monkey’). Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are predators, pri-mates, parasites and ‘deadly monsters’ who ‘don’t belong in a civilisation’, ‘attack weaker ones’ and ‘hunt in groups like hyenas’. With the most heavy-handed irony they are also described as ‘culture enrichers’.

But, as befits these times, the depictions also go beyond anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner sentiment and are overtly anti-Muslim. Unaccompanied minors com-ing from Muslim regions of the world are described as Islamists, terrorists, jihadists (or ‘anchor jihadists’), the ‘chosen soldiers sent here to destroy the white race and the West’, ‘Islamic colonisers’, the ‘occupation soldiers for Islam’, the ‘foot soldiers of the first troops of Islam’, or the ‘Islamisation products shipped to Europe’ to ‘colonise Europe through Islam’. They comprise ‘Islam cells’ just ‘wait-ing for the order’.

There is an obvious connection here to the idea that Europe is under threat from mass Islamist invasion by stealth, i.e. through immigration. Immigration is also seen as part of an anti-white war, even a genocide, the purpose of which is to replace the white race by an Islamic one. It is not just Swedish girls under threat of rape, but the nation itself which is being abused, attacked, plundered and raped. Unless action is taken in defence of the Swedish people, the argument goes, they will become a minority in their own land and Sweden transformed into an undeveloped country under Sharia law – the same vision that Breivik presented in his manifesto.

Some posts are so offensive and brutal as to constitute ‘racist hate speech’. On the website Nationell.nu ‘Lars’ writes: ‘Beard children is the linguistically correct term for these “refugees”, and n****r is another linguistically correct word and also the only word that can denote a n****r.’ On the same website ‘Min Link’ writes: ‘First I was going to write that these small “refugee minors” behave like animals, but that would be degrading towards animals. Coldhearted and disre-spectful monsters is a better description.’ In a similar way, comments attacking whole groups of people on the basis of race and/or religion were found on Nordfront. A person calling himself ‘Tony’ states: ‘Children! These guys are at least 25-30. It is absurd and sick to see Arabs of this age pose with teddy bears on a couch … If I were to decide these liars and parasites would be shot directly at the state border.’

Even when offensive language does not directly incite violence, it is not necessar-ily harmless. Discussions which begin with offensive descriptions of unaccompa-nied minors seldom end there. On Nordfront, in a discussion about the vandalising of a centre for unaccompanied minors, one (unidentified) commentator writes: ‘Wonderful, but it would have been better to use hand grenades instead of


meaningless eggs.’ To which ‘Cornfed’ replies: ‘Don’t tell other people to use hand grenades if you are not willing to use hand grenades yourself’, and a third person calling himself ‘Per’ enters the discussion to volunteer, ‘I’m willing to do it! I hope this will inspire more people to take sides’.

One can see how the comment fields on sites serve as an echo chamber with extremists reaching out for others with the same ideas to reinforce extreme opin-ions already held, but then made to feel, through constant affirmation, that their views are not extreme but the norm. ‘Argbot’ writes: ‘Take out every centre for the “unaccompanied”. They are nothing more than shelters for chosen soldiers sent here to destroy the white race and West.’ ‘Anonym’ writes: ‘One person who is making resistance by putting a house on fire, they can put in jail; but what can they do when it will be hundreds of thousands.’

Online, such a forum for sharing ideas constantly encourages the development of ever more extreme thoughts and suggested action. The echoes in the chamber go round and round, gathering sound and fury. ‘Fire bomb the refugee centres’ ‘Let the riffraff burn’, writes ‘Kommando Skin’. ‘EVERYBODY GET OUT ON THE STREETS GOD DAMMITT!! RECLAIM SWEDEN!!’ writes ‘W’. ‘Give me a weapon! Give me a fucking weapon’, writes ‘Radikal’. ‘For Fuck sake, when will Sweden wake up!! I would like to burn down these “refugee minors” accommo-dation to the ground – with them all inside.’ For some commentators, the sabo-tage that delayed the opening of the Vallentuna accommodation centre receives strong support. ‘Jack the Snake’ wants to initiate a more nuanced discussion about the most effective way of stopping the accommodation centres.

Judicially it’s insane with fire bombs, fireworks, smoke bombs and stuff like that since it is classified as arson and therefore prioritised by the police. The protest with a garden hose was much cleverer: a lot of damage, lesser penalties and less effort made by the police.

To this ‘Kvantmekaniker’ replies: ‘If water is to be used it has to be a tsunami of great proportions in order to flush away the parasitic occupants of this country! Fire on the other side, makes shit go up in flames.’ Meanwhile on the Avpixlat website where the events at Vallentuna are also explicitly discussed, ‘Holerinnor’ writes: ‘I am looking forward to how the development of this house will con-tinue. It wouldn’t surprise me if it would set on fire! And no one calls the fire fighters!’

Conclusion

This small study can only begin to trace the connections between online and offline worlds. But it is clear that parties such as SD and online hate forums are part of the same political current, with the virtual environment encouraging and fuelling physical violence. If online environments continue to strengthen political


parties that support the Eurabia theory and the counter-jihadist mindset, there is the obvious risk that they will normalise extremist ideas and mainstream them.

It is horrifying to think that this hatred is being directed at the most vulnerable – young refugees coming from countries such as Afghanistan. In the course of my work, I began to grasp something of the uncertainty of the lives of asylum-seek-ing children – the anxiety caused by the long wait for an asylum decision, the hopelessness when a claim was rejected. One boy, who had attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself under an underground train, was in a wheelchair. Others are cutting themselves and exhibiting other self-harming behaviour. The stories they told of their journey to Sweden were of untold hardship and stress. Many had experienced violence and some had witnessed co-travellers die.17 I will never forget the look in the eyes of one child who asked me: ‘Why is everybody killing Afghans? Everywhere in the world Afghans are killed. In Afghanistan, in Iran, Afghans are killed. And in Sweden, too, Afghans are not welcome.’

‘There is no such thing as your children and my children,’ wrote A. Sivanandan. ‘Children are children are children. They are the measure of our possibilities; how we treat them is the measure of our humanity. The moment we categorise them as foreign is the moment we lose both.’18

References 1 See http://www.dn.se/nyheter/politik/sverigedemokraterna-far-rekordhogt-stod 2 Figures from the Swedish Migration Board. 3 See http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/valdsam-vardag-for-ensamkommande-

flyktingbarn_7949328.svd 4 See http://Expo.Se/2013/Asylboende-Attackerat-Efter-Hogerextrem-Mobilisering_5589.

html 5 Daniela Marquardt, ‘Resa genom unga flyktingars Sverige Konflikt i P1’, http://sverigesradio.

se/sida.artikel.aspx?programid=1300&artikel (aired 23 July 2012). 6 Anders Behring Breivik was the unrepentant far-right extremist murderer of sixty-nine people

in July 2011 in Norway. 7 See Matt Carr, ‘You are now entering Eurabia’, Race & Class (Vol. 48, no. 1, 2006) and Liz Fekete,

‘The Muslim conspiracy theory and the Oslo massacre’, Race & Class (Vol. 53, no. 3, 2012) and speech ‘Islamophobia and the politics of hate in Europe’, delivered to Edge Hill University, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQMaOp1RT54 (accessed 12 November 2012).

8 Ekman Mattias, ‘Online Islamophobia: the relation between elite news discourse and increasing xenophobia in Swedish blogs’, paper presented at IAMCR-conference, Istanbul (13–17 July 2011).

9 Øyvind Strømmen, Det mörka nätet: om högerextremism, kontrajihadism och terror i Europa (Molin and Sorgenfrei, 2012).

10 The point is made by Anders Dalsbro of the Expo Foundation in a postscript to Øyvind Strømmen’s Det mörka nätet: om högerextremism, kontrajihadism och terror i Europa (Molin and Sorgenfrei, 2012).

11 The link to the chat that was open for one hour on 11 January 2013. See http://www.dn.se/chattar/chattrum1

12 See http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/reinfeldt-angrep13 Guidelines for netnographic research have been suggested by Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography:


doing ethnographic research online (London, Sage, 2010). Netnographers aim to gain insights that would be hard to reach through traditional methods such as attitude surveys.

14 Pieter Bevelander and Jonas Otterbeck, ‘Islamophobia in Sweden: politics, representations, attitudes and experiences’, in Marc Helbling (ed.), Islamophobia in the West: measuring and explaining individual attitudes (London, Routledge, 2012); Strømmen, op. cit.

15 See http://expo.se/2012/nazist-fanglas-efter-dodshot-mot-judar_5292.html16 See http://www.svt.se/nyheter/varlden/breivik-mina-broder-sitter-darute17 UNHCR, Voices of Afghan children – a study on asylum-seeking children in Sweden, 2010.18 Foreword to Liz Fekete, They Are Children Too (London, Institute of Race Relations, 2007).

When Hate Becomes the Norm Internet Far Right 2013

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