laissez fairy

As a follow up to yesterday’s post  on the situation in the Netherlands, I thought I’d bring up Bruce Bawer’s blog, which I stumbled upon this morning.  In case you’re not familiar, Bawer is an American homo who ran off to Europe in the late 90’s, ostensibly to escape from the oh-so mean and oppressive American Taliban and their RethugliKKKan leaders.  But, as outlined in his book While Europe Slept, he quickly found that the Eurotopia of liberal dreams didn’t quite match reality: 

“As an American living in Europe since 1998, Bruce Bawer has seen this problem up close. Across the continent—in Amsterdam, Oslo, Copenhagen, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Stockholm—he encountered large, rapidly expanding Muslim enclaves in which women were oppressed and abused, homosexuals persecuted and killed, “infidels” threatened and vilified, Jews demonized and attacked, barbaric traditions (such as honor killing and forced marriage) widely practiced, and freedom of speech and religion firmly repudiated.

The European political and media establishment turned a blind eye to all this, selling out women, Jews, gays, and democratic principles generally—even criminalizing free speech—in order to pacify the radical Islamists and preserve the illusion of multicultural harmony. The few heroic figures who dared to criticize Muslim extremists and speak up for true liberal values were systematically slandered as fascist bigots. Witnessing the disgraceful reaction of Europe’s elites to 9/11, to the terrorist attacks on Madrid, Beslan, and London, and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bawer concluded that Europe was heading inexorably down a path to cultural suicide.”

 Indeed.

Bawer’s latest blog entries discuss a number of misleading media headlines summarizing obviously fudged government “studies” that purport to show that it’s not Muslim immigrants who keep attacking gay men on the streets of Amsterdam:

“Bosma notes that this other report, which was issued by the Ministry of the Interior, inspired a slew of mainstream-media headlines, such as the one at DutchNews.nl, claiming that most antigay attackers were ethnic Dutch. But the headlines misrepresented what was actually in the report: as the DutchNews.nl article itself noted, 16% of the perpetrators were identified as “non-white,” while 84% of assaults were “committed by native Dutch men or no attacker was listed [my emphasis].” In other other words, it’s absolutely false to say that a majority of antigay attackers were ethnic Dutchmen or that only 16% were members of immigrant groups; even if one takes these figures seriously, they by no means rule out the possibility that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators were indeed Muslims. The headlines that suggested otherwise seriously misrepresented the report’s contents, and did so in an apparent effort to shift blame for gay-bashing away from Muslims.”

 

 

Misleading news stories on misleading government “studies” always amuse me.  You find it all the time in US newspapers.  Typically, it’s some 24-year-old AP writer with nothing but a B.A. in journalism (which isn’t even a real degree) trying to summarize some alleged “study” on, say, healthcare or global warming. 

For the most part, these so-called “studies” are attempts to get us to believe the opposite of what our experience and commonsense tell us:

“It’s well known among Dutch gays that young immigrant-group men are disproportionately responsible for these attacks (the great majority of which go unreported). There’s no need for any study to prove this: the anecdotal evidence is immense. In the last couple of years, there have been several high-profile – and increasingly audacious – assaults on gay people, and routinely the perpetrators have been young Muslim men. It’s obviously no coincidence that the perceived climb in gay-bashings over the last decade has seemed to track the increase in Amsterdam’s Muslim population during the same period. (Meanwhile, the proportion of ethnic Dutch Amsterdammers has declined steadily.)”