Anders Breivik’s manifesto: measuring violence indicator in anti-Islamic extremist discourse
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik had massacred 75 people in a bomb attack and mass shooting out of his hatred towards Islam and Muslims, his actions shocked Norway and the world. He left behind a manifesto ‘2083, A European Declaration of Independence’ which clearly indicates his imagination abou...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Proceeding Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
ISTAC-IIUM Publication
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://irep.iium.edu.my/116804/1/ICRITC%202024%20PROCEEDINGS%20OFFICIAL.pdf http://irep.iium.edu.my/116804/ https://conference.iium.edu.my/icritc2024/ |
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| Summary: | On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik had massacred 75 people in a bomb attack and mass shooting
out of his hatred towards Islam and Muslims, his actions shocked Norway and the world. He left
behind a manifesto ‘2083, A European Declaration of Independence’ which clearly indicates his
imagination about Islam and Muslims and the reasons that let him to commit this mass murder.
Breivik is studied extensively in the academia through the lenses of Islamophobia and terrorism;
there are few studies done on the levels of violence in anti-Islamic discourse. This study uses
Richard A. Nielsen’s methodology which measures numerically to which extent Muslim clerics
support for violent jihad and ideology in their writings. Such algorithmic approaches that evaluate
extremist Muslim discourse have been mainly applied in Western academia to show level of
violence in it. This study is unique as the Nielsen’s approach is applied to anti-Islamic extremist
discourse. It takes Breivik’s manifesto as a field of analysis. First, it takes as a baseline the five
topics (along its exclusive and its frequent keywords) in Jihadi corpus calculated by Professor
Nielsen. Second, main key-terms of Breivik’s anti-Islamic position are measured to see the level
of violence according to Nielsen’s methodology. After this, both key terms are compared. Results
show that Breivik’s anti-Islamic position contains more violence indicator than the jihadist
position. This research will be the first to apply algorithmic approach and it will demonstrate that
using extremism measure tools developed by the Western academic can be applied to antiIslamic extremist discourse. In conclusion, if extremism measure tools are applied fairly on both
Islamist thought and anti-Islamic discourse, it will not only show that both streams of discourse
contain levels of violence, but anti-Muslim discourse accommodates higher levels of violence as
well. This research will open the way for Muslim academics to apply algorithmic methods to
counter anti-Islamic discourse |
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