Hungary– 888.hu News Site Publishes Video Sensationalising Muslim Birth Figures and Reproducing Great Replacement Narrative
This article is part of the Media Monitoring Highlights of June, a monthly overview of the most significant results of our monitoring of traditional and new media in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, and the United Kingdom.
Date of publication: 12 June 2020
Author: Marcell Békési
Media outlet: 888.hu, government-friendly news site
Headline: “Europe's Islamisation is happening at an alarming pace. VIDEO”
Link: https://bit.ly/31kjtTu
Description of the anti-Muslim content: The pro-government news site 888.hu has published a video datavisualisation of the changing percentage of the Muslim population in Western countries from 1948 to 2019. To accompany the video is a short explanation that highlights Sweden as the most emblematic case. “Thirty years ago, even in Sweden, there was no noticeable number of immigrants, today more Muslim children than white are slowly being born,” the article says. The author uses fear-mongering expressions, such as “The process can become irreversibly fast, even within a single generation”, to refer to the Muslim population currently living in Western and Northern Europe.
Myth Debunked: The video used by 888.hu has no sources, nor does the article provide any, which means that the data provided cannot be trusted. Even if these figures were true, the article frames the presence of Muslims in Europe as a problem. The alarmist tone used, suggests that this trend is something we should be worried about. The underlying narrative is the Great Replacement, a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that believes that white people in Europe are being outnumbered by POC, especially Muslims, who want to “destroy the European civilisation”. This mythology is what has motivated white supremacists to kill people in Germany, New Zealand and Texas. Sweden is also a recurring example in the far-right and conservative scene. Seen by white nationalists as the poster child of the disasters brought of immigration, small incidents are sensationalistically inflated and treated as emblematic of the importance of anti-immigration policies.
More to read:
The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream
