The Real Danger To Homosexuals

It isn't traditionalists in America who believe that the government should not recognize same-sex marriage, or add homosexuals to the list of protected groups. It is the emerging Islamist movement. Bruce Bawer has a column here about how homosexuals like himself used to feel reasonably safe in European cities--but not anymore:

One day last month, I gave a talk in Rome about how the supposedly liberal ideology of multiculturalism has made possible the spread in Europe of the highly illiberal ideology of fundamentalist Islam, with all its brutality and – among other things – violent homophobia. When I returned to my hotel, I phoned my partner back home in Oslo only to learn that moments earlier he had been confronted at a bus stop by two Muslim youths, one of whom had asked if he was gay, started to pull out a knife, then kicked him as he got on the bus, which had pulled up at just the right moment. If the bus hadn’t come when it did, the encounter could have been much worse.
Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men.
It’s not just Oslo, of course. The problem afflicts most of Western Europe. And anecdotal evidence suggests that such crimes are dramatically underreported. My own partner chose not to report his assault. I urged him to, but he protested that it wouldn’t make any difference. He was probably right.
The reason for the rise in gay bashings in Europe is clear – and it’s the same reason for the rise in rape. As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West’s defiance of holy law.
Multiculturalists can’t face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.

It is well worth reading, because he points out that for all the whining about religious conservatives in Europe (what, all five of them?) from the left, the greatest hazard to homosexuals there isn't going to be disapproval, but the willingness of multicultural leftists in Europe to tolerate shari'a law being applied there:

Yet politicians, journalists, activists, and others who cling to the multicultural mindset can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the Islamic foundations of all this bullying. Instead, they offer the same kind of nonsense that was served up by a Human Rights Watch spokesman after the Chris Crain incident. “There’s still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society,” that spokesman said. “Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities they have to suffer.”
So powerful is the determination to turn away from the plain and simple truth that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen recently commissioned a study by the University of Amsterdam. Its purpose? To try to figure out what motives underlie the increase in attacks on gay men and lesbians by Dutch-Moroccan men in Amsterdam. “Some researchers,” wrote a reporter for UPI, “believe they [Muslim gay-bashers] lashed out at local gays after feeling stigmatized by Dutch society.” In other words, as the straight-talking Norwegian immigration expert Inger-Lise Lien put it sardonically when I showed her the article, “it’s the assailant who’s the real victim.”
As for Cohen, he would appear to be operating out of pure cynicism. This is the same mayor, after all, who has called for the Netherlands to reach some “accommodation” with its male Muslim residents that would allow them to oppress their wives, sisters, and daughters – though he hasn’t been entirely clear as to just where he would draw the line. (Beatings? Rape? Forced marriage? Genital mutilation? Honor killing?) Given such an extraordinary record of pragmatism, it seems safe to assume that Cohen would also be more than willing, in the name of peace in our time, to turn away with respectful discretion when Muslim gangs beat the living daylights out of the occasional flikker.
In any event, another mayor, London’s Ken Livingstone, has already blazed that trail. In 2004, playing host to Sunni scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has supported the execution of gay people, Livingstone hailed him as a “progressive.” When gay activists called him on this ridiculous assertion, Livingstone retaliated by putting out a dissertation-length report whitewashing Qaradawi and smearing his critics as racists.

The fact is that as Muslims become a sizable fraction of the population of European cities, politicians like Livingstone and Cohen decide that it makes sense to play to that crowd. America isn't at that stage yet--but I am beginning to think that it may be time to find some way to discourage Muslims from moving to the United States, perhaps by revival of the national origins quotas used until 1965.

Obviously, a lot of Muslims come to America because they do not want to live under shari'a law--but there are a lot who come here to enjoy the economic benefits of living in a free society, while retaining attitudes that are contrary to the American values of relatively minimal government and tolerance for differing religious beliefs.

Ah, you say, discouraging Muslims from moving here isn't very tolerant. There comes a moment when you have to draw some lines--and tolerance for intolerant philosophies is societal suicide. In Europe, Islam is going to take over because non-Muslims Europeans have stopped reproducing, while Muslims are having kids. In America, we are not quite to that level, but the combination of immigration and reproduction means that we have to worry, in a couple of generations, of Muslims being such a major voting bloc that our foreign policy is driven by Muslim interests, not American interests. The left end of the Democratic Party is already controlled by a mixture of multicultural delusion, the desire to make Muslims happy (especially terrorist front organizations like CAIR), and the Michael Moore/Noam Chomsky collection of America-haters. There are disturbing signs that the Republican Party could similarly be infected.