(This is Part Two of a Four Part Essay exploring the Norway Terror Attacks and our response to Islamophobia: Part One here: What Norway's Terror Teaches us about Islamophobia and Online Hate: as I said at the end of Part One)
The internet didn’t create extremism. It might have amplified it on some occasions. But there are other examples of new media - from the Murdoch scandal to the Arab Spring - where online activism has served more liberal ends. The net is basically a neutral space to share opinions. And when it comes to the recent phenomenon of Islamophobia, those opinions predate Twitter or Comment is Free.I'm just back from Sarajevo where the scars of the siege are still visible fifteen years later: the sniper bullet-holes in the buildings, the horrible dragon's claw mark of a mortar shell, not to mention the look in the eyes of men my age. The cataclysmic Twentieth Century was effectively launched by a bullet fired in Sarajevo in 1914 - the assassination by a Serb Nationalist of Archduke Ferdinand - and it's hard not to hear the echo of that shot in the way the century ended: the crump of a shell in the Old Town marketplace, followed finally by the first ever NATO bombs dropped in anger, as planes took out the Bosnian Serb positions around the besieged city.
Just as modern Jihadism in the form of Al Qaeda came out of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, so too I believe Modern Islamophobia was born from the end of the Cold War (for its older incarnation check out Edward Said's Orientalism).
