Western Europe Accepts Gay Bashing

It’s not just anti-Semitism that is on the rise. In Western Europe, the home of liberal democracy, certain groups of people have been systematically assaulting gays people. Bruce Bawer reports on it from Europe.

I do not need to tell you which groups are responsible for the violence. And I do not need to explain that the leaders of these countries, champions of open borders and multicultural diversity, refuse to take any responsibility for the surge.

Bawer reports about incidents in Paris:

On October 22, about three thousand people rallied in central Paris “to denounce assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and demand urgent action from the government.” Among the many recent incidents that had sparked the protest, noted Reuters, were “the beating of a gay couple by their cab driver” the previous week and the murder in August, in the Bois de Boulogne, of a “transgender sex worker.” Another report on the rally mentioned two additional, and particularly high-profile, incidents: in September, an actor named Arnaud Gagnoud was beaten up after giving his boyfriend a hug outside a theater in Paris's 20th arrondissement; on October 16, Guillaume Mélanie, founder of the gay-rights group Urgence, was gay-bashed in a Paris street.

Evidently, the perpetrators are Muslim. Have the newspapers mentioned this salient detail? Not quite:

I looked at several news stories (in several languages) about these incidents – and about that October 22 rally. None of them included the words Muslim or Islam, even though the Religion of Peace is, to put it mildly, a major part of the problem – not just in Paris, of course, but all over Western Europe. Everybody knows this, even though virtually nobody feels comfortable talking about it. In most media reports of such incidents, indeed, the Islamic factor can only be discerned through exceedingly careful reading.

When the Irish Times reported about gay bashings in Berlin it blamed the assaults on white male homophobia:

Consider a piece about gay-bashings in Berlin that appeared last June in the Irish Times. There was no mention of Muslims in the first several paragraphs, which, on the contrary, attributed gay-bashings in Berlin to a “backlash” against gay rights by “straight men who have problems with their own sexuality.” Only if you made it all the way to the end of the piece did you encounter a curiously phrased reference to – get this – “the threat to the gay community, real or perceived, from conservative Turkish and Arab men, and criminal gangs from Romania and Bulgaria.”

Happily, the liberal propaganda machine is hard at work downplaying the story. They cannot make it look as though these newly welcomed citizens are bringing a deviant culture with them:

Given all this subterfuge and circumlocution, it was almost shocking to come across an October 9 article in the Berliner Zeitung that not only reported that gay-bashing in Berlin is steadily increasing (last year, 324 such attacks were recorded, with the real number surely far higher than that) but also admitted, quite matter-of-factly, that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are Muslims.

At one time, such candor was not quite so surprising. Ten years ago – ten years! – Der Spiegel quoted a gay activist who stated quite frankly that homophobia was on the rise in Berlin and noting that many “Muslim kids raised in Germany...have been raised to hate homosexuals.”

But, what about gay rights activists? They are insisting that nothing is wrong. If you cannot blame white conservative males, there is no problem:

Alas, gay-rights activists in Western Europe don't talk like that anymore. Nor do the media. For whatever reason, the worse things have gotten, the more widespread and adamant the insistence that nothing's wrong at all – or at least that, if something is wrong, then Islam has absolutely nothing to do with it. Even as the growing Muslim population in Dutch cities has driven gays into the provinces and reduced Amsterdam's gay scene to a shadow of its former self, Dutch gay activists have backed off entirely from truth-telling about this topic, not only insisting that Muslims pose no threat to gays but anathematizing the likes of Geert Wilders for daring to suggest otherwise.

As a gay man himself, Bawer no longer feels comfortable walking around the major cities of Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, where immigration has been halted, they feel fine:

No surprise, then, that I feel considerably more comfortable today walking around Warsaw and Prague than around parts of Oslo and Amsterdam – and, yes, Berlin. Just as many of my Jewish friends have said that they feel less threatened sporting a yarmulke or Star of David in Eastern than in Western Europe, I can say that I feel safer as a gay man in some of the former Iron Curtain countries than in some parts of what was, not all that many years ago, called the Free World. Shame, that.