Posts Tagged ‘ far-right ’

Owning Up: Academic Responsibility in a Polarised Political Landscape

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1 December 2011
Myth

A Sigh of Relief There was a sigh of relief when, after a far­cical legal pro­cess, befit­ting an Ally McBeal-​type scen­ario of the bizarre and sur­real, Wilders (the anti-​Islam/​Muslim politi­cian) was acquit­ted from incite­ment to hatred and crim­inal insult. The acquit­tal had been pushed for right from the moment the Court of Appeal had ordered his pro­sec­u­tion, both by coun­sel for the defend­ant and the pro­sec­u­tion. Most politi­cians and many fel­low schol­ars (legal and oth­er­wise) held the belief that the court was not the forum in, and the law not the instru­ment with, which the under­ly­ing prob­lem­atic ought to be addressed or debated. The per­ceived prob­lems about integ­ra­tion and immig­ra­tion and the per­ceived threat of the other, the stranger, is polit­ical not ...
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Hard Lessons From The Hard Right

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16 July 2009
BNP Rally

When the Brit­ish National Party finally man­aged two suc­cesses in the June 2009 European Elec­tions, the main­stream media reac­tion was one of aston­ish­ment fol­lowed by intense curi­os­ity and soul search­ing. This was a UK ver­sion of the 2002 suc­cess of the Front National in France, when Jean-​Marie Le Pen man­aged to get through the first round of the pres­id­en­tial elec­tions. Most com­ment­at­ors at the time attrib­uted Le Pen’s suc­cess to the gen­eral dis­af­fec­tion with polit­ics, while those on the left lamen­ted the fact that the “false” issues stirred up by the hard right (the for­eign threat, Islamic con­tam­in­a­tion, etc.) appealed much more to voters than the “real” issues (neo-​liberal eco­nomic exploit­a­tion, uneven glob­al­iz­a­tion, etc). There was a col­lect­ive sigh of relief when Le ...
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