ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the anti-Islamic framing and ideology. It makes two meso-level contributions and one macro-theoretical contribution. First, it shows that anti-Islamic views are broadly coherent across a wide variety of initiatives in Britain, Germany, and Norway. This underlines the transnational characteristic of the anti-Islamic movement and subculture. Their proclaimed defence of liberal values and minorities is a noteworthy and recurring aspect in their official platforms. To understand how this inclusion of values and groups so historically at odds with the far right plays out, this chapter narrows things down to the way they frame women’s rights vis-à-vis Muslims. Distinguishing between protector frames anchored in a traditional, male-oriented perspective and equality frames anchored in a modern, feminist perspective, this study finds that the equality frames are most salient in the Norwegian context. Nonetheless, both are used, side by side, by all the anti-Islamic actors across cases. Their embrace of a broad and inclusive “us” vis-à-vis Muslims while simultaneously maintaining traditional perspectives is a form of strategic frame ambiguity. In sum, these positions are sufficiently coherent and distinct from previous iterations of the far right to define anti-Islam as a separate master frame. The anti-Islamic master frames main novelty lies in transcending the cleavage between Green–Alternative–Liberal and Traditional–Authoritarian–Nationalist positions on the cultural dimension.
