NPR Ombudsman Cries Foul on ‘Ultra-Right’ Label in Norway Story
On Tuesday, NPR ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos reached back to a July 26 story on the horrific shootings in Norway. Correspondent Sylvia Poggioli suggested the shooter, Anders Breivik “once belonged to the ultra-right Progress Party.” Schumacher-Matos lamented the “ultra-right” label, and asked Poggioli to explain herself. He called it “ultra-wrong.” It quickly became clear that Poggioli saw “ultra” extremism in the party's opposition to Islam and immigration. The ombudsman posting including just a few paragraphs of what Poggioli wrote in her own defense. But at the bottom of the page, he posted the whole reply , and her affinity for left-wing rags like the Nation and “far right” labels became really obvious: Until recently, radical right-wing parties were marginalized and considered disreputable. For example, Norway's Progress Party—of which Breivik used to be a member—was isolated. Its anti-immigrant rhetoric made it a pariah party. The arrival over the last two decades of millions of immigrants—mostly Muslims—on a continent where the nation-state had been based on mono-ethnic societies, has given new impetus to the ultra-right parties . The turning points were the Islamist terrorist acts of 9/11, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (2004) and the Madrid and London bombings (2004, 2005). As Ian Buruma writes in The Nation, “this finally gave right-wing populists a cause withwhich to crash into the center of European politics.” This is what writer Kenan Malik said in a NYT forum on this topic: “ Far right parties throughout Europe draw upon two distinct constituencies. The first is a core of hardline racist bigots — many of these parties, like the British National Party andthe Sweden Democrats emerged out of the neo-fascist swamp and some still live there.The bigots, however, have been joined by a swathe of new supporters whose hostility toward immigrants, minorities and Muslims is shaped less by old-fashioned racism than by a newfangled sense of fear and insecurity.
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on August 27, 2011. Filed under