Introduction

This chapter examines three interlinked publications by the Norwegian extreme-right civil society organisation Human Rights Service (HRS), to explore how illiberal political logics are legitimised through discursive technologies of xenophobic populism against Muslims and Islam. Hosting a widely distributed (primarily via Facebook) social media platform, HRS lends itself as an important case to examine how forms of far/extreme-right political persuasion are manufactured and increasingly pushed from the outer fringes to enter the mainstream of Norwegian public/political debate through circulation of digital demagogy. I focus here on unwinding some of the threads within ongoing developments of Norwegian anti-Muslim illiberalism that I suggest are of particular significance, namely the organised manufacture and circulation of what I term ‘fear appeals’. Illustrative of the type of conflict performance that I am interested in examining, the HRS recently published a commentary stating that:

To track the semiotic conditions under which ‘fear appeals’ are systematically enabled and circulated against Islam/Muslims in Norway via HRS publications, I draw on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (2001[1985]) discourse theory and on Sara Ahmed's (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Herein, I examine three HRS articles published online during 2017– 18 (henceforth referred to as ‘the photo case’) and the formal properties of the HRS webpage from which articles have been disseminated. My argument falls along three main lines. First, I unpack the HRS webpage as a meta-discursive framework to discuss how the embedment of a distinct liberal democratic and human rights agenda serves as an ideological basis for sanctioning anti-Muslim, illiberal political logics of exclusion. Second, I analyse the textual content of the photo case, which frames several secretly taken photos of Norwegian Muslims.