For months they had endured an increasingly strident debate about
immigration ahead of elections on March 15, and they were tired of being
caught in the crossfire. The race has been dominated by Geert Wilders,
the bleached-blonde leader of the Party for Freedom who polls show could
win the largest bloc of votes in parliament. His candidacy is being
watched as the next test of the nationalist wave that drove Britain out
of the EU and put Donald Trump in the White House.
But the race is
also uniquely focused on gay rights, because Wilders has framed his
crusade against Islam in part as a defense of national values in the
country proud to have adopted the world’s first marriage equality law
and has remained a leader on LGBT rights in the years since. And several
more moderate politicians have echoed the message that Muslim
immigrants threaten gay people.[...]
Wilders’ professed support of gay rights once put him out of step with
other nationalist politicians in the West, who generally have also been
social conservatives. But today Wilders seems like he was just ahead of
his time, with politicians from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen following his lead and saying they are defending LGBT rights by opposing Muslim immigration. [...]
Immigrants are constantly being subjected to a “pink test,” said Dino
Suhonic, founder of the queer Muslim organization Maruf and organizer of
the evening’s gathering. Politicians are “using gay rights, as almost a
[trait of] national identity,” Suhonic said, but only when debating the
place of “asylum-seekers and the immigrants.” It’s an attitude Suhonic
calls “homonationalism.” [...]
Ineke cited a 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Justice that
found that 86% of people accused of violence against LGBT people in the
Netherlands were of Dutch background and 14% of immigrant background,
roughly equal to their representation in the population as a whole.
Another analysis by researchers at the University of Amsterdam of
anti-LGBT violence just within their city did find that people of
Moroccan descent were overrepresented among suspected perpetrators, but
also found that people from Turkish backgrounds were underrepresented
and less likely to commit these crimes than people of Dutch descent.
Religion was not the issue, the researchers concluded, but rather a
“street culture” specific to Moroccan young men that “enforces
hyper-masculine behavior.”
No comments:
Post a Comment