>"Throughout 2009, the gay community in the Netherlands increasingly began turning towards anti-immgrant nationalist parties. The reason was simple: the Muslim community locally, as the strongest and most organized immigrant group, had become more and more vociferous in its homophobia, including even occasional recourse to violent acts."
>"How should one react to this tension? Who should we support? The pure liberal multiculturalist line gives a clear answer: we should support tolerance and symmetry. It is unfair to demand of the gay community that they work hard to convince the Muslims of their acceptability-they are what they are and nobody should be made go justify what he or she is. The first move should thus be made by the Muslim immigrants-it is they who have to accept a multiplicity of (religious, sexual,etc.) ways of life, accept that the properly political struggle shouldn't concern particularly ways of life. There is also an obvious asymmetry: when in November 2009, the Swiss decided in a referendum to prohibit the construction of minarets. Turkey (along with other Muslim countries) vigorously protested-calls were made for the boycotts of Swiss banks etc. But what about the fact that in Turkey itself, a country which sees itself as modern and wants to join the European Union, the construction of all sacred objects with the exception of mosques is prohibited? How about a new Catholic church or synagogue in Istanbul, or even better a center for atheist studies in Riyadh?"
>"What nonetheless complicated the simplicity of this position is the underlying gap in economic and political power: the tension is ultimately between the upper middle class Dutch gays and the poor exploited Muslim immigrants. In other words, what effectively fuels the Muslim animosity is their perception of gays as part of a privileged elite which exploits them and treats them like outcasts. Our question to the gays should be what did you do to help immigrants socially? Why not go there, act like a Communist, organize a struggle with them, work together?"
>"The solution of the tension is not to be found in multicultural tolerance and understanding, but in a shared struggle on behalf of universality which cuts diagonally across both communities, dividing each of them against itself but uniting the marginalized in both camps."
>"Something along these lines occurred during 2009 in the West Bank village of Bilin, where a Jewish lesbian group, complete with pierced lips, tattoos etc, came each week to demonstrate against the village's partition and demolition, joining ranks with conservative Palestinian women, each group developing a respect for each other. It is through such events, rare as they are, that the conflict between fundamentalists is exposed for what it is: a pseudo struggle, a false conflict obsfucating the true issue."