‘Green Crescent, Crimson Cross’: The Transatlantic ‘Counterjihad’ and the New Political Theology Ed Pertwee A thesis submitted to the Department of Sociology of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, October 2017 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it ispermit- ted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 87,083 words. i Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes to my supervisor, Professor Chetan Bhatt, for his support and encouragement over the past four years. He has been a constant source of inspir- ation and I owe him an enormous intellectual debt. I am also grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council and to the London School of Economics for their generous financial support, without which this research would not have been possible. I spent several days exploring the Searchlight Archive at the University of Northampton, which was a treasure trove of information. My thanks go to Dan Jones, who was invaluable in helping me to navigate the collections. I am similarly grateful to those who took part in interviews for this project, many of whom also supplied me with resources and information. My thanks also go to all my friends and colleagues in the Department of Sociology and Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the LSE. ii Abstract This thesis explores the EuroAmerican ‘counterjihad’, a transnational field ofanti- Muslim political action that has grown significantly since it first became visible inthe mid-late 2000s. Its key symptoms have included ‘Defence Leagues’ and ‘Stop Islam- isation’ groups in various national contexts, grassroots mobilisations against mosques and minarets, campaigns to ‘ban the burqa’, as well as a very wide network of anti- Muslim online spaces. The thesis argues that the counterjihad can be seen as atransna- tional political movement, and its discursive, aesthetic, organisational and tactical repertoires are all critically explored. It will be shown that the heterogeneous polit- ical tendencies that constitute the counterjihad are united by a shared narrative of Western crisis, decline and impending catastrophe; several overlapping conspiratorial narratives that attempt to explain this predicament; and, finally, a spectrum of com- pensatory political projects that seek to reinvigorate a sense of Western civilizational and white ethnic identity in a post-Cold War context where those identities are in- creasingly contested. The thesis also argues that the counterjihad is one aspect ofa more general phenomenon: the striking reemergence in ‘late’ modernity of a number of ‘countermodern’ or ‘traditionalist’ political theologies. These new political theolo- gies overlap with, but are not identical to, the ones that flourished during the long crisis of ‘classical’ European modernity in the early twentieth century (notably, ‘clas- sical’ Italian Fascism and German National Socialism). Finally, the thesis considers the sociopolitical conditions that have fostered the reemergence of such phenomena today. iii Contents 1 Introduction: Fear and Loathing in Fortress Europe 1 I Contexts 19 2 Working in the ‘Grey Zone’: a note on methodology 20 Conclusion . 35 3 ‘The Appeals of Heredity’: on countermodernisms and political theologies 36 ‘A true present’ . 40 ‘Eternal land and eternal blood’ . 43 ‘Something existentially different and alien’ . 49 ‘Only a God can save us’ . 57 Conclusion . 65 4 ‘Peoples of the Forest, Tribes of the Desert’: countermodern ideologies and Islam prior to the counterjihad 67 At the ‘Eleventh Hour’ . 70 ‘A strategy of euphemism’ . 75 The ‘New Alliance’ . 81 ‘The threat that can bring us to power’ . 88 Conclusion . 96 II The Counterjihad 98 5 ‘Welcome to the Counterjihad’: anatomy of a political movement 99 iv The European Counterjihad . .101 The North American Counterjihad . 117 Networking the Counterjihad . 125 ‘Extreme but not fringe’ . 137 Conclusion . 141 6 ‘Almost Midnight in the West’: the Eurabian cultural apocalyptic 142 ‘The Second Fall of Rome’ . 147 ‘A stranger in my own country’ . 156 ‘The demographic timebomb’ . .166 ‘A recipe for cultural suicide’ . 172 Conclusion . 176 7 The ‘Red-Green Axis’: on counterjihadist demonology 177 ‘A global Dark Ages’ . 180 ‘A house burned down’ . 186 ‘The Eurabia Code’ . .190 ‘Civilization Jihad’ . 194 ‘They were to a man, Jewish’ . .196 Conclusion . 211 8 ‘Our Ancient Heritage’: the new political theology 214 ‘Taking care of your own’ . 217 ‘Holger Awakens’ . 223 On ‘Hallowed Ground’ . 231 ‘A declaration of pre-emptive war’ . 247 Conclusion . 251 III Conclusion 253 9 Conclusion: Fascism, Past and Pending 254 A Appendix: Websites Analysed 266 v B Appendix: Research Statement 271 Bibliography 273 vi List of Figures 1.1 Pegida UK demonstration, Birmingham, February 2016. 4 4.1 Hitler meets the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Berlin, 1941. 74 4.2 Cover of Derek Holland’s pamphlet The Political Soldier (1984). 85 4.3 Front cover of National Front News, March 1988. 87 4.4 British National Party anti-Islam campaign, autumn 2001. 89 4.5 Covers of British National Party magazine Identity after 9/11 and 7/7. 95 5.1 The online counterjihad network. .132 5.2 The online counterjihad network: key interfaces. .136 5.3 Donald Trump attends the launch of The United West, March 2011. 140 6.1 Graphic: ‘Stop Islamisation of Europe’. 153 6.2 Leaflet: The Islamic Timebomb. .154 6.3 Placard: ‘Cultural Enrichment?’. 162 6.4 Cartoon: ‘The Other Islamic Bomb’. 169 7.1 Graphic: ‘A House Burned Down’. 187 7.2 Stills from the film Political Correctness: the Frankfurt School. 204 7.3 William Lind and Donald Trump, April 2016. 212 8.1 English Defence League emblem and motto. 232 8.2 White nationalist images produced by the North West Infidels. 244 8.3 Front cover of Anders Breivik’s ‘manifesto’ 2083. 249 vii List of Tables 2.1 Details of research participants. 32 2.2 Details of observation sites. 33 viii Note on Referencing Academic secondary literature and long-form journalistic articles are cited using in- line references within the text. Fieldwork data, news agency reports, websites and the like are referenced using footnotes. ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Fear and Loathing in Fortress Europe It was a cold, grey and wet Saturday afternoon in February. I was standing huddled underneath a bridge outside Birmingham international rail station, a few miles east of central Birmingham in the town of Solihull, with perhaps two or three hundred other bedraggled and shivering people. The occasion was the inaugural demonstration of Pegida UK, the UK offshoot of the German anti-Muslim protest movement Patri- otische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Pegida; Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), which first came to international attention in late 2014 when its weekly rallies in central Dresden began to attract crowds of thou- sands, peaking at around 25,000 in early 2015, shortly after the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo were attacked by gunmen pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda (Dostal, 2015; Virchow, 2016). The UK group was one of a number of affiliates that had been set up, hoping to emulate the success of the Dresden movement. Fronting the Pegida UK march were its leader, Paul Weston, head of the tiny far- right party Liberty GB and frequent contributor to the US-based blog Gates of Vienna, and Anne Marie Waters, director of Sharia Watch UK and former parliamentary candidate for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), who in September 2017 came second in the contest for that party’s leadership. Joining them in the role of ‘coordinator’ was Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), former leader of the English Defence League (EDL), the grassroots anti-Muslim street movement 1 that had organised chaotic and often violent demonstrations in multiethnic towns and cities across Britain from the summer of 2009 until it went into decline following Robinson’s departure in late 2013. During its relatively short lifespan, the EDL had become a model for similar ‘Defence League’ mobilisations across Europe and beyond, and had formed important alliances with American Tea Party activists and other parts of the dissident US right (Copsey, 2010; Jackson, 2011). At just after 2pm, the small crowd, made up mostly but not exclusively of young white men, began a ‘silent walk’ of a few hundred yards to a purpose-built stage in the adjacent industrial estate where they gathered to hear speeches by the Pegida UK organisers. Many marchers wore pre-printed stickers with the Pegida logo and the words ‘Save Us’ over their mouths as a symbol of their silence. Somewhat incongru- ously a rainbow flag, the symbol of LGBT emancipation, and an Israeli flag, theStar of David on a white and blue background, fluttered in the wind alongside the red cross of St George, a symbol associated with both English nationalism and the medieval crusades against Islam. The incongruity would, however, be familiar to anyone who had witnessed demonstrations by the EDL, whose attempts to forge a multiethnic and multiconfessional alliance against the ‘Islamisation’ of Britain had involved the creation of LGBT and Jewish ‘divisions’, the latter of which had links to the far-right Jewish Defence League and Jewish Task Force (Bhatt, 2012; Jackson, 2011).