A/HRC/38/52 violates international refugee law,61 and national origin discrimination blatantly violates the international human rights laws and principles analysed above. In the light of the contemporary prevalence of national identity anxiety targeting Muslims, it is important to highlight that the substantive core of such anxiety is often Islamophobia, defined by one legal scholar as “the presumption that Islam is inherently violent, alien, and inassimilable”.62 43. Blanket exclusion of entire categories of minorities or migrants justified by claims of cultural preservation too often aims to achieve racial preservation. The use of culture in this way has historical roots in Europe and North America. In Europe, traditionally, racism was understood as “an ideology that claims the fundamental inequality and hierarchical order of different biologically defined races”.63 In the wake of German Nazism, scholars in Europe identify the shift in salience from racism traditionally defined to “a new form of racism … not based on biology and hierarchies but on culture and difference”.64 Today, radical rightwing parties in Europe are characterized by ideology that constructs cultural difference as an existential threat to European nationhood that can be neutralized only by migrant exclusion to achieve ethnic purity. 65 A similar dynamic exists in parts of North America, where arguments for national identity preservation have sought to achieve racialized ethnic purity. 66 Culturally coded racism is still racism, and must be strongly condemned. 44. The Special Rapporteur notes that the resurgent xenophobic and racist rhetoric and policies rooted in ethno-nationalism do not only harm non-citizens of any given nation. They also make formal citizens who are ethnic, racial or religious minorities vulnerable to discrimination and intolerance. For example, Islamophobic or anti-Semitic ethno-nationalism undermines the rights of Muslims or Jews irrespective of citizenship status. Ethno-nationalist rhetoric and policy have also reinforced and escalated discrimination against indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent through various measures relating to citizenship and immigration status, even when these communities have deep and enduring ties to the nations in which they reside.67 45. In the global South, nation-building and nationalist ideology privileging certain racial, ethnic or religious groups have played an equivalent role to extreme right-wing ideology in the global North. Ethno-nationalist ideologues continue to use civilian and military force to exclude minorities and indigenous peoples from the benefits of national membership. Such forms of intolerance fuel extreme forms of discrimination, including ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide. The case of Rohingya Muslims offers a chilling example. In this regard, in March 2018, the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide stated that: Rohingya Muslims have been killed, tortured, raped, burned alive and humiliated, solely because of who they are. All the information I have received indicates that the intent of the perpetrators was to cleanse northern Rakhine state of their existence, possibly even to destroy the Rohingya as such, which, if proven, would constitute the crime of genocide.68 46. The 1982 Myanmar nationality law discriminates on the basis of ethnicity, and is largely inaccessible to the Rohingya, rendering many of them stateless. The law and the way 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 14 place for discrimination, xenophobia in migrant crisis in Europe”, 20 August 2015. Available at https://goo.gl/sk8VtS; CCPR/C/POL/CO/7, paras. 31–32. See Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, art. 3. See Khaled A. Beydoun, “Islamophobia: toward a legal definition and framework”, Columbia Law Review Online, vol. 116 (2016). Jens Rydgren, “Meso-level reasons for racism and xenophobia”, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, No. 1 (2003), p. 48. Ibid. Jens Rydgren, “Immigration sceptics, xenophobes or racists? Radical right-wing voting in six West European countries”, European Journal of Political Research, vol. 47, No. 6 (October 2008), pp. 745–746. See, for example, Juan F. Perea, “Demography and distrust: an essay on American language, cultural pluralism, and official English”, Minnesota Law Review, vol. 77 (1992). See, for example, CERD/C/GBR/CO/21-23, para. 15; A/HRC/35/41, paras. 48–59. See www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/note-correspondents/2018-03-12/note-correspondents-statementadama-dieng-united-nations.