"A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Nation-State" - by Sharif Islam
Matti Bunzl's work entitled "Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe," published in American Ethnologist (Vol. 32, No. 4, November 2005), is groundbreaking. It is evident from the article, as well as the commentaries on it that appeared in the same issue, that, to understand contemporary Europe, we need to rethink some of our assumptions about it and grasp the changing landscape of the rest of the world.
Bunzl asserts that both alarmists and leftists are wrong. Europe is not a hotbed of unbridled anti-Semitism. Nor can all anti-Semitic incidents be categorized under right-wing violence. He claims that both sides rely on static views of history: the former sees anti-Semitism as a constant and the latter, the right-wing ideology. Bunzl cites examples from Austria, among others, to illustrate historical change.
Even though Bunzl's concern about growing anti-Islamic attitudes throughout Europe provides substantial insights, critics of his article raise some important issues. One commentator on the article, John Bowen, takes issue with the neutrality of the term "Islamophobia": the term is more polemical than analytical. Bowen claims that anti-Arab racism is hard to distinguish from fear of Islam and both are mixed up with racism against Black Africans in the minds of many. He also thinks that Bunzl's portrayal of Islamophobia as a recent phenomenon is not well grounded, reminding the reader, for instance, of French attitudes toward Muslims that stemmed from the colonization of Algeria and the Algerian War. At the end of the commentary, Bowen asks whether or not limiting Europe to a set of nations with a shared heritage, e.g., excluding Turkey from the EU, is necessarily anti-Islamic. He doesn't answer the question, nor does he argue for the exclusion of Turkey himself, but he asserts that a person who makes such a statement is not "ipso facto" an Islamophobe.
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