Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Big Peace Tries To Links Anti-Gay Violence With Muslims, But Why?

Ned May must be jumping for joy with his new Big Peace article - he wrote on September 7th that violence against homosexuals in the Netherlands overwhelmingly comes from Muslim immigrants and their descendants.  May's post serves two purposes - one is to try to convince readers that conservatives aren't the enemy of gays (despite being opposed to every fiber of their being) and the second being that Muslims are "bad," which coincides with the theme of Big Peace.

I don't know where May got his information from - mainly because he fails to cite any real sources - but according to an article on 365Gay by The Associated Press, a recent (2008) University of Amsterdam study revealed "that most attacks were carried out spontaneously by poorly educated young men who feel their masculinity has been questioned."  The article that May cites states that a couple gay boys were beaten up by Moraccan girls and that beer cans were thrown at a group of lesbians - isn't it against Islam to consume alcohol?

I had found this explanation for lack of details found on a blog titled Dyneslines by author Wayne R. Dynes from earlier this year:
The prevalence of PC taboos makes useful statistics hard to come by. In fact my multiculturalist opponents rely (as far as I can see) only on impressionistic generalizations.
Dynes did however give a reasoning behind his assertion that a majority of anti-gay violence comes from Muslims - a man by the name of Bruce Bawer, who lived in Amsterdam for a number of years, played some number games:
Bawer consulted a Report posted at coc.nl, the site of the oldest gay-rights organization in the Netherlands, COC (which stands for Cultuur- en Ontspannings Centrum, or Culture and Recreation Center). On page six the Report states: “The suspects [in antigay attacks] are just as often native Dutch as of Moroccan descent (both 36%). Since 39% of all young people in Amsterdam under 24 years of age belong to the first group and 16% to the second, Moroccans are overrepresented among suspects in these kinds of violence.” However, Bawer notes that “if 36% of suspects are native Dutch, that means 64% are not native Dutch. Most of those who aren't either Dutch or Moroccan presumably belong to the other major immigrant groups in the Netherlands--Turkish, Surinamese, Indonesian, and Dutch Antillean.” Moreover, Bawer suspects that the statistics have been subject to PC manipulation--that they have been "cooked"--and that the real figures for immigrant antigay violence are higher.
I had added emphasis on a couple words in the passage above because they are very important - they show that there is zero supporting evidence to indicate the violence against gays are caused by Muslim immigrants. This is the same logic behind anti-immigration sentiments of the far-right - activists assume that these immigrants are the ones causing all the problems because their fuzzy math shows a disproportionate representation and because they have a strong distaste for Islam (Bawer blamed political correctness skewing the "real" numbers").

Dynes also wrote the following:
According to the Report “[r]esearch shows that religion in general has a strong effect on having a gay-negative attitude, even if one corrects for such attributes as gender, age and educational level. This includes all religions, not only Muslims but also Christians and in particular people with an active religious life. Among religious groups in the Netherlands, however, negativity toward gays varies, with Muslims being conspicuous for their extreme views.”
It is interesting that the article is pretty much inconclusive and relies on a handful of assumptions.  You know what happens when you assume things...

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