The Radical Right and Islamophobia Page 1 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). date: 03 August 2018 Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses the radical right’s embrace of Islamophobia. Initially propagated by certain parties of the radical right in the 1980s as part of a nativist backlash on immigrants and camouflaged under the seemingly less extreme garb of ethnopluralism, Islamophobia has mutated into the primary populist anti-paradigm for the overwhelming majority of the radical right. In different yet complementary ways, international terrorism and the global financial crisis have played straight into the radical right’s (in)security agenda. Since the turn of the new millennium, the Islamophobic rhetoric of the radical right has become more and more pervasive, more radical in content, more extreme in scope, and more potent in reach. Keywords: radical right, Islam, Islamophobia, Muslims, immigrants THE contemporary radical right is overwhelmingly hostile to Islam. This trend has acquired disturbing momentum since 9/11 and the subsequent terrorist attacks in different parts of the globe. However, at the heart of this existential hostility lies the “othering” of Islam and Muslim communities, which has much deeper roots and a longer presence in the history of the European radical right (Qureshi and Sells 2003). Since the 1980s, the pioneering radical discourse of the Front National (FN) in France and the Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest; formerly Vlaams Blok) in Belgium have had a particularly negative image of Islam as the basis of what both parties perceive as an immigration “problem” in their respective societies. At the time, such views were considered to be on the fringes of the political spectrum. While intensifying nativist anxieties about non-European immigrant communities had already registered on the radar of populist views—and would continue to grow in significance throughout the 1990s —hostility to Islam was only part of the radical right’s much wider repertoire of “othering.” In other words, hostility to Islam, still far from a declared mainstream The Radical Right and Islamophobia Aristotle Kallis The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right Edited by Jens Rydgren Print Publication Date: Apr 2018 Subject: Sociology, Political Sociology Online Publication Date: Feb 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274559.013.3 Oxford Handbooks Online