Hate and incitement: Coronavirus ascends extreme right’s rhetoric in Europe against immigrants

Menna Abdel Razek

The extremist right is using the Covid-19 pandemic, like the Islamic extremist organizations, to work on the growing frequency of hate speech against foreign immigrants and attract new sympathizers.

Claudia Walner, a researcher at the UK’s Center for National Security Studies, said that far-right groups have actively exploited the coronavirus crisis by promoting theories of misinformation and conspiracy to promote their agenda and attract a new set of followers.

The researcher continued that the state of uncertainty, fear, and psychological and economic effects is an ideal environment for conspiracy and misinformation theories, and it was able to take advantage of this widespread fear of the spread of the virus and the governmental measures associated with it to introduce and publish a wide range of theories of encouraging racially motivated violence, political violence and even biological terrorism.

She pointed out that spending more time for individuals on the Internet because of the quarantine in the country may increase the opportunities for their recruitment and joining the extremist right-wing groups that are increasingly active on the communication sites as well, especially on the “Telegram” website through their channels dedicated to broadcasting hate speeches.

Calls for violence and bioterrorism

In New York this May, the Foundation for the Fight against Hate for Good indicated a rise in the number of incidents of racist right-wing victims targeting people from Asia and the Pacific in the United States of America, and blaming them for “bringing the virus” into the United States, or signaling to them with racial slurs, or physical assault.

While the British National Socialist Movement published a poster on the “Telegram” application entitled “What do you do if you suffer from coronavirus, incite to visit mosques and temples and incite to transfer infection to minorities?”

The Swedish security chief, Klaas Freibery, warned in late March that the coronavirus could be an opportunity for the far right to attract new sympathizers, and to spread misleading information that fueled feelings of violence and hatred.

While a number of residents in Germany were subjected to harassment, on the first of last April, a migrant opened his home mailbox and found a letter in which it was written that he was from a person infected with coronavirus.