A much heard argument National Socialists bring forward when spreading fear and hate among non-Muslim citizens is that the Islam demands its followers to attack gays, lesbians and bisexuals. This is blatant propaganda, but it finds a willing ear in a scared community. In the fight against homophobe misconduct and intolerance, where are the gays and lesbians, and heterosexual people, so famous for their tolerance?
Since the mid 1970s, in many Western nations, homosexuals have fought for, and often won, the battle for liberation, equal opportunities, and human rights. Homosexuals can marry, serve in the military, and walk the streets hand in hand. In some European countries at least, let’s ignore what nice Catholic boys like Italian PM Berlusconi recently said on the subject. While acceptance and understanding is still difficult to ask for, most homosexuals are tolerated by the community, as long as they assimilate in it. Those who blend in have led an easy live during the last 25 years.
All was well in Oz, until a few years ago, when stories about gay-bashing started to pop up again in the media. Even in a city like Amsterdam, world renowned for being an ‘Oasis of Tolerance’ for homosexuals, gays were beaten up quite severely. In some neighborhoods, gays are verbally attacked and bullied badly, and are often forced to move. Just like in ancient history, prior to 1980 that is, nobody seems to come to their rescue, even though this happened in the middle of the gay district, in the middle of a city with 700.000 inhabitants. Also, and perhaps unlike 30 years ago, there was no public outrage, nor did the streets were these offences took place flood with people, gay or otherwise, to protest these intolerable acts against some of their own. Fear rules in these days, and people rather stick their head in the sand than risk sticking their necks out.
Islamaphobe National Socialists, always on the prowl for ammunition to target the Muslim community, quickly stood up for the rights of the gay victims. They started telling the media that Muslims condone gay-bashing, and that, according to the Koran, the Sharia, and many Imams, it is a Muslim’s duty to throw homosexuals of tall buildings, making sure the homosexual goes down head first. If this was common practice in many Islam nations, I think we would have heard of it, or at least of the strange habit to spend most of the nation’s income on the building of tall towers. Martin Bosma, ‘spokesperson education’ of the PVV, and the propaganda machine behind Wilders’ rhetoric, analyzed the dire state of gay liberation and toleration in the Netherlands: “A Muslim beating up homosexuals acts fully in line with Islam theory. His behavior is also in accordance with the macho culture of his home country, and with what he hears from the Imam, what he hears through the ‘homesick dishes’, the satellite receivers through with they watch Moroccan television programs, and with the legal practice within Muslim dictatorships, or with what he reads on Marokko.nl, a hate site subsidized under the responsibility of the government.” Wow, that’s a whole lot of half-truths, outright lies, and information sited out of context in one sentence!
Of course, more objective studies were conducted as well, and these showed the perpetrators of the gay-bashing are mostly (very) young men of Moroccan descent. These (pre)pubescent, obnoxious and unruly teens roam the streets at all hours, looking for things and people to terrorize. Much like their inner city black brothers in the US, they seek ‘respect’, and power within a gang culture and hierarchy, and they’ll do anything to get noticed. Why do they do this? Because they lack education from a stimulating school system, discipline from their fathers, a motivating example from their peers, and acceptance by the community. Whatever their reasons may be to terrorize the streets, religion has nothing to with it.
These young Moroccans are to be pitied, in a way, because all they really want is to fit in somewhere, to belong, to have a reason to live, and to confirm that their existence has some value. Lacking all of that, and lacking the interest of society to provide this, they turn to gang violence and prey on the community. This widens the division between law abiding citizens and this group of lost youngsters, creating the traditional “us against them” environment in which fear, hate, and aggression thrives.
Why don’t the kids belong to the society at large? Because there is no society at large they belong to. When Western companies were desperate for cheap and low-level laborers in the 1960s, they turned to the Mediterranean region. In countries such as Greece, Turkey, and Morocco, they found people willing to abandon their families and work in the wealthy and growing economies of Western Europe. While the Turks and the Greeks brought their cultures with them, and held on to them while in the West by seeking each other’s company and support. They also protected these cultures by shielding them, and themselves, from the influence of Western society as much as possible. With Moroccans, however, things were different. Most of the laborers enlisted for the Western workforce came from the mountainous Rif region, where inhabitants never felt much allegiance to the Moroccan society, nor to the power and influence of the Moroccan Royal family.
Company reps visiting Morocco in the 1960s seeking unskilled, cheap laborers to do the work wealthy Westerners thought was beneath them, were welcomed by the Moroccan King, who saw in them a clever way to get rid of this subversive mountain folk.
As these workers were welcomed whole-heartedly into the West, the social-democrat parties in power did not feel it was ethical to force them to integrate. This caused a giant gap between the culture young men were taught at home, and the Dutch culture they encountered outside. The result is that young men of Moroccan descent aren’t accepted anywhere. Not by the Amsterdam youth they so desperately long to belong to, nor by the folks in the home country, who seem then as anything but true Muslims, and a bunch of spoiled, obstinate, and lost kids.
Another problem is that the Moroccan king, although glad he got rid of his adversaries, did not want to part with their descendents. Everybody born anywhere in the world to Moroccan born parents is, in the eyes of the king, a Moroccan citizen. The Moroccan State Department even demands that these people, born in other countries are registered there as Moroccan, in addition to the Nationality of the country they were born in. As Morocco is an Islam State, so is everybody born to Moroccan parents.
Because of this strange law, the majority of Amsterdam youngster is now ‘a National from an Islam country’. Never mind they were born in Amsterdam, and often even the second generation Moroccan to do so. “With the rising immigration floods, the growing radicalization plus the many children born in Islam families, the Islam majority in (firstly) our capital is a fact,” says Bosma. “From gay capital to Sharia capital of Europe. What will this mean to homosexuals? Will the third gay emancipation wave the government refers to really materialize? Or will the city counsel of Amsterdam decide very democratically to outlaw homosexuality. In the Eastern department of the city, the police seldom act against misconduct by Muslims against homosexuals. Whoever complains will hear “why don’t you move to another part of town. Don’t you know there are Muslims living here?”
Well, it’s not only the police that don’t act (if this is true to begin with); neither do the ‘tolerant’ white inhabitants of Amsterdam, nor the gays themselves, for that matter. I can only imagine the enormity of the protest such acts against gays would create in a city like San Francisco. One man: the famous Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf stood up. He organized a party that was supposed to rattle the cages and awaken the community. Some 200 gays marched through Amsterdam. Where are the tens of thousands of gays and lesbians, where is the outcry, the protest of this community under attack? No, instead of rising up to defend their own rights and privileges, to tell Amsterdam they ‘are mad as hell and they are not going to take it any longer”, gays turn to the National Socialist PVV en masse. More than one in five gays (22.3%) prefers the PVV over social-democrats and Christian-democrats, according to a study by the Dutch gay newspaper ‘De Gaykrant’. The visitors of the Stone Wall bar in New York, who stood up to police brutality in 1969 in a fight that went on for three days, would lower their heads in shame. They started the battle for gay liberation, which is still celebrated yearly on the last Saturday of June, dubbed Gay Pride Day. The remnants of this battle are, apart from a huge party once a year, very, very difficult to find in the gay community.
