The Left Can Have Islam or LGBTQA+. Not Both

Regenbogen, Vienna’s ‘rainbow’ gay pride parade, began with the announcement that three Muslim teenagers with roots in Bosnia and Chechnya, were arrested for planning an attack using axes and knives. The alleged Muslim terrorists were reportedly supporters of ISIS.

Dominik Nepp, the leader of Austria’s conservative Freedom Party, blasted a “completely misguided red-green-pink mass immigration policy that promotes radical Islam in Vienna and throughout Austria.”

“Perhaps at some point the self-proclaimed left-wing moralizers will realize that they are inviting exactly those groups to our country that are in fact their greatest opponents and represent exactly the opposite of what they always preach.”

There’s little chance of that. Austria, like America, still lives in a fantasy world in which the black flags of Islam can co-exist with the rainbow flag, but the fantasy is rapidly coming apart.

Not long ago, the media was hailing Hamtramck as a model with its first all-Muslim city government. Now it’s shocked when the Michigan city banned pride flags on public property.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” former mayor Karen Majewski complained. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

Majewski has no reason to be surprised. Neither does the media. She broke a city council tie in 2021 between Muslim and non-Muslim city council members in support of the LGBTQ flag.

Asm Kamal Rahman, the president of the local NAACP and a member of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, had compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia.

After hailing the all-Muslim council in a city overrun by Yemenis and Bangladeshis as a sign of progress, the realization has arrived that Democrats can have Islam or LGBT, but not both.

How is a party based around building coalitions of minorities supposed to choose?

Islamic teachings were always incompatible with the sexual politics of its new leftist allies. Muslim Brotherhood groups, eager to capitalize on their newfound status after 9/11, avoided directly addressing those issues. CAIR signed letters and appeared at events alongside gay rights groups like HRC. Muslim candidates running for public office even invoked sexual identity

Rep. Ilhan Omar has an entire page dedicated to the “fight for LGBTQIA+ rights”. But local Muslim officials, like those in Hamtramck, are breaking away from the rainbow coalition.

Muslims vocally protested at a school board meeting in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn, like Hamtramck, has a nearly 50% Muslim population. And that appears to be the tipping point. At a quarter of the population, Muslims generally toe the liberal line in public, while approaching the halfway mark, the masquerade ends and Democrats have to make some difficult choices.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country’s biggest gay rights group, has a page promoting homosexuality’s compatibility with Islam. The Institute for Social Policy & Understanding (ISPU), under Dalia Mogahed, a former Obama adviser and Islamist ally, with an office in Dearborn and backing from Rep. Rashida Tlaib, however released a survey claiming that 0% of Muslims are lesbian or gay.

Even while the visual language of wokeness seen in innumerable ads and stock photos depicts women in hijabs next to gay and transgender people, the reality on the ground is very different.

When Omar Mateen, an Afghan Muslim terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, a cover-up was launched that persists to this day in which the annual anniversary of the Pulse massacre is marked each year as a testament to homophobia, not Islamic terrorism.

While Omar may not have even known that he was in a gay nightclub before he began killing people, other Islamic terrorists have set out to target gay pride events in the United States.

Elvin Hunter Bgorn Williams, a Muslim convert who joined ISIS, discussed driving a “semi-truck” through “the gay pride parade in downtown Seattle”. Amer Alhaggagi, a Berkeley High School graduate, a Yemeni Jihadi whose lawyer called him an “all-American boy”, had declared, “I’m going to place a bomb in a gay club, Wallah or by Allah.”

The media treats Muslim terror attacks as meaningless outliers, but it’s harder to dismiss events in Dearborn and Hamtramck the same way. Or to ignore the fact that Muslims and the LGBT movement have incompatible values and agendas. And the Left can’t claim to champion both.

The Democrats believed that they could build a ‘rainbow coalition’, a majority of minorities that would swamp the nation, overthrow the old America and replace it with their new alliance. The strategy appeared to be working as long as the minorities were united by their opposition to a majority. But the cracks are spreading, and not just among Islamists and gay rights activists.

Urban Democrats are being forced to come to terms with the fact that they may not be able to secure the support of both black community groups and Asian voters at the same time. Latinos are displaying a growing tendency to go their own way. Even the Jewish electorate, once a reliable rubber stamp, is turning conservative and religious in strongholds like New York City.

Immigrants, once seen as a vanguard of demographic transformation, are securing cities and states for the Democrats, but those groups whether Latino, Muslim, Asian or even African, are proving to have their own agendas that are at odds with a party that claims to be diverse, yet has become politically monocultural, imposing a ruthless ideological discipline that has purged non-black religious conservatives, traditional feminists, immigration restrictionist environmentalists and working class whites in pursuit of the ideal leftist collective.

But the new immigrants are much more likely to hold traditional values on matters of sexual morality: to be opposed to abortion, pride parades and everything white lefties love so much.

Muslim Democrats, like Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib, who built their national political power to implement an anti-American agenda based on this big intersectional lie, are caught in the middle.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, whose district includes parts of Hamtramck, responded to the gay pride flag ban by tweeting, “I can’t imagine how it feels for our LGBTQ+ neighbors in Hamtramck to watch their own elected reps decide their existence doesn’t matter. This is painful to see in a city that has always fought for equal justice for all. This action divides our communities.”

Hamtramck legalized animal sacrifice in homes, and made Eid a paid holiday, as did Dearborn. Despite their protestations, Muslim elected officials in cities on track to have an Islamic majority are representing their community and not anyone else’s. They are the most obvious example that the notion of multicultural “communities” that transcend identities through collective solidarity is a myth. And so is the entire majority of minorities coalition that claims “brown people” or the “oppressed” have anything in common beyond a hostility toward white people.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan lashed out at Hamtramck by declaring, “The City of Detroit proudly raises our Pride Flag at the start of every Pride Month.” And it will until it has a Muslim majority.

Democrats have dismantled tolerance and opened the door to a gold rush by members of its coalition to impose their most extreme agendas on the public with no regard to everyone else.

A leftist majority will force pride flags and LGBT pornography in schools on everyone. A Muslim majority will force sharia on everyone. That is what happens in a country that has abandoned both its traditional consensus on values and its respect for individual beliefs leaving regions with a choice between female genital mutilation and transgender masectomies, between marrying 7-year-old girls and grooming first graders.

America has three choices, either imposing sharia or sexual identity politics, or returning to what we were before we had to choose which group of extremists to allow to abuse our children.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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