"Facts, not Fear": Islamophobia, Coronaphobia and the Language of Fear

Abstract

The world is currently living in a time in which crises are at the doorstep. The primary scope of this study is to shed some light on the role of fear and extremist discourses during security threats. Islamist terrorism and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic are frames for evaluating the responses of Islamophobia and Coronaphobia. The use of fear in politics has been convincingly linked by Wodak (2021) with extreme rhetoric and the refusal to conform to any value-normative model or stereotype. This article argues that extreme and divisive discourses surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic have not substituted fears of “otherness” (van Dijk 2009), but rather have created a new dimension of fearing the unknown. Looking for communalities between Coronaphobic and Islamophobic discourses, this study undertakes a corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006; Gee 2011) of online reports and instances of fear and extremist speech on traditional and social media, Facebook and Twitter (Zappavigna 2012). First, this article provides a background of representations of hateful and fearful rhetoric with the aim of evaluating differences and similarities in online reports, speeches, press releases and social media posts. A diachronic analysis of a self-compiled collection of texts containing an extremist and/or phobic stance, with a special focus on Australia, follows. The study can foster the understanding of the interplay between fear and insecurity.