In the last few months, European newspaper headlines have repeatedly highlighted xenophobia and intolerance in post-communist Europe. In the Czech Republic, anti-Islamic narratives have appeared as a strong part of the anti-refugee reaction. This paper explores Czech Islamophobic discourse. We have deployed tools of cultural and interpretative sociology to explore discursive strategies of anti-Islam movements.
We focus on imaginations portrayed superdiversity as a threat for dominantly ethnic homogenous societies of Central Europe. Through discourse analysis of anti-Islamic blogs, Facebook pages and mainstream media, we examine how proponents of anti-Islam movements frame Islam and how their frames culturally resonate within post-communist society.
Although Muslims represent under 0.1% of the total Czech population, the anti-Islam discourse resonates with the Czech public. For the last two years, the Czech initiative We don't want Islam in Czech Republic convened a series of demonstrations to demand laws against Islam and managed to get thousands followers on Facebook. Since the beginning of the last year, the initiative has been referred approximately 1000 times in mainstream media. Given the lack of experience with superdiversity, the Islamophobic discourse construct seductive imaginations and fantasies.
We argue that islamophobic discourse in the post-communist context replicates rhetoric of its Western European counterparts. The form of Islamophobia in the Czech Republic corresponds with the discourse of new realism described by Baukje Prins in her study of the Dutch public debate, however, in the post-communist context this genre has been lived up by the specific historical memory and experience with political ideologies.
