Not A "Rosie" Picture

For about a month last year I became a dedicated viewer of “The View.” It wasn’t by choice.

Forced into an unused classroom with two other substitute teachers to organize testing materials, I became dependent on ABC – the one station that came in clearly on the television – to relieve the daily tediousness with some background noise.

Warning: Don’t try to get any work done while listening to Rosie O’Donnell.

Most people are now familiar with the infamous line I heard the ex-host utter live on September 12. Of all her outlandish statements, this was the most controversial. It came after co-host Elizabeth Hasselbeck mentioned the threat posed by radical Islam. O’Donnell, a lesbian, replied, “And just one second, radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.”

As my two co-workers nodded their heads in agreement, I wondered whether Christian fundamentalism really was as big a threat to the openly gay Rosie as Islamic extemism.

Now it’s true that most fundamentalist Christians oppose giving gays the right to marry or join the army. But a sampling of stories from across the world the last few years shows that far greater horrors await Western homosexuals if one day they are forced to live under Koranic law.

Don’t take my word for it. A better authority is Arshad Misbah, the leading imam in Manchester, England. In a conversation last year with Manchester psychotherapist John Casson, Misbah confirmed that the execution of sexually active gay men is justifed under Sharia law. Casson wanted to get the imam to clarify the Islamic position on the execution of gays in Iran, where thousands of men have been executed for being homosexuals since 1979. Amnesty International reports that at least three male homosexuals and two lesbians were publicly beheaded in Iran in January 1990.

On his blog, gay writer Bruce Bawer documented how he was unable to find any article about the Misbah interview in major British newspapers. Bawer also cited a story claiming that the BBC had admitted “to a marked bias against Christianity and a strong inclination to pro-Muslim reporting among the network’s executives and key anchors.”

It also reported that “the corporation is dominated by homosexuals.”

Bawer found that the BBC took two days to report on the Misbah story. When it finally got around to it, Casson was portrayed as someone who was intent on criticizing Muslims unjustly. Meanwhile, there was no mention of the anti-homosexual tenets of Sharia law or the homophobic statements of many Muslim leaders other than Misbah. Bawer wrote on his blog:

“If the BBC is in fact dominated by gays, I as a gay man am ashamed of and disgusted by every last one of them. What can they possibly think they’re accomplishing by whitewashing Islam in this fashion? It’s as if a Jewish media organization in the 1930s kept itself busy propagandizing for the Nazis and covering up plans for the Holocaust.”

“One in three homosexuals feared to walk hand-in-hand in the center of [Amsterdam]”.Perhaps more than anyone, Bawer understands the threats gays face from Islamists. In 1998, he moved from the United States to the famously tolerant Amsterdam, where he sought a better life as a gay man. As Bawer explains in his book %%AMAZON=0385514727 While Europe Slept%%, while he escaped the homophobia of some fundamentalist Christians, he found that Muslim immigrants exhibited a much more virulent strain of hatred.

An example of this came just last month, when six men of Moroccan, Surinamese and Turkish descent assaulted two gay men in Amsterdam. The attackers shouted homophobic comments and threatened to murder their victims. The assault occurred in Rembrandtplein, which Bawer calls “the heart of the part of Amsterdam where gay people used to feel safest.”

The former editor of the gay magazine Washington Blade, Chris Crain, was also attacked by a group of Islamists in Amsterdam in 2005. A survey commissioned at that time by the gay lobby group COC found that one in three homosexuals feared to walk hand-in-hand in the center of the city.

Even though Muslim immigrants don’t feel that kind of fear when they walk through European cities, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch responded to Crain’s attack by portraying the attackers as victims. He explained: “There’s still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society. Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities that they have to suffer.”

The desire to hide the reality of Islamic homophobia is spreading. Consider a recent story from Madrid, Spain, where two lesbians were viciously attacked at a shopping mall by young Moroccans. Commenting on Pajamas Media, Spanish blogger Manuel Delgado described a column about the attack written by Tulio Demicheli in the Spanish daily ABC:

“The columnist chose to remind readers that this attack could have been made by anyone, such as Catholics, Gypsies, Poles, Spaniards or Latin Americans. For this writer, the background of the attackers did not add any information to the event. Instead, he made his point on the defense of the teaching of multiculturalism in schools, through a new compulsory course called “Education for Citizenship”, where [progressive] and politically correct values are taught to children as young as 12.”

Progressives like Rosie O’Donnell would do well to remember that not only is homosexuality punishable by death under Islamic law, but children as young as 16 are candidates for honor killings.

Aaron Hanscom is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.