Leftists in Hamtramck, Michigan, are feeling a bit like parents with ungrateful children these days. After all they’ve done for the Muslim community that now has made Hamtramck the first city in the United States with a completely Muslim city council, their former allies and proteges have turned against them and rejected the increasingly aggressive and intrusive “Pride” madness.
As Rick Moran reported Thursday, “The all-Muslim city council held a vote on Wednesday evening about flying the Pride flag on government property. Mind you, the Pride flag can still be flown by businesses and private residences. Mayor Amer Ghalib said, ‘We serve everybody equally with no discrimination but without favoritism.’”
There’s nothing unreasonable about that at all, but the UK’s Guardian on Saturday painted the whole affair in a markedly different light, stressing the palpable ingratitude of Hamtramck’s Muslims to the Leftists who did so much to help them get to where they are today. The Guardian began by reminding us all of how much the local Muslims owed to the Leftists who allied with them: “In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.”
This was a truly great thing that grew even greater in retrospect, for it amounted to a repudiation of the man who before too long was to become the source and summit of all evil in the modern world, one Donald J. Trump. “They viewed the power shift and diversity,” the Guardian explained, “as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.” So the Leftists and the Muslims were both on the side of the angels, happily united to strike back against racism, xenophobia, bigotry and “Islamophobia.” How could such a perfect partnership possibly go bad?
That’s just the question Leftists are asking now, if the Guardian’s report is to be believed: “This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had — like many others being flown around the country — been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.”
Being wholly on the side of the Left in this unexpected and unprecedented breach, the Guardian went out of its way to portray the Muslims who were standing against the “Pride” madness in the ugliest possible manner: “Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: ‘Fagless City,’ read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.” As if that weren’t enough, “In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: ‘I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.’” For all their crocodile tears over alleged threats to “our democracy,” Leftists don’t want the majority to have what it likes. Leftists want to give the majority and the minority what Leftists know is good for both. The job of the great unwashed masses is to submit meekly and accept what our moral and intellectual superiors prescribe for us, from eating bugs and giving up fossil fuels to turning in our weapons and avoiding what the elites claim is “hate speech.”
Former Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski summed up the Left’s sadness over the Muslims’ rejection of this scenario. “There’s a sense of betrayal,” she said sadly. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.” Neither her rights nor those of anyone else are actually threatened, but you get the idea.
The breakdown of the Leftist/Islamic alliance was inevitable. Anyone who has studied the history of Islam, and particularly alliances between Muslims and non-Muslims, could have seen it coming, and it was also inevitable that Leftists would get the worst of it, as Iran’s Communist Tudeh party did when it backed the Ayatollah Khomeini, only to have him throw members of the party into prison once he attained power.
Related: Detroit-Area City Bans Pride Flag From Public Property
Such alliances have never, throughout history, inspired a sense of gratitude in the Muslim party that led to a period in which Muslims and non-Muslims lived together as equals. Instead, the Muslim party turned on its non-Muslim allies again and again, once the alliance was no longer convenient. One notorious example of this was the fourteenth-century Roman Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, who appealed to Muslims for help in a dynastic dispute. They came into Europe and stayed. And they did not hesitate to continue to wage jihad against the Roman Empire, which they finally destroyed in 1453.
All that said, the fact remains that the Muslims are absolutely right in Hamtramck: the city shouldn’t be pushing the Left’s obsession with sexual deviance and perversion any more than it should be pushing any other religion. But the lesson here is also that Muslim leaders in the U.S. understandably want to uphold Islamic values, and the dissonance between those values and Western values is going to become increasingly apparent. For years, Leftists have been shutting down open discussion of that fact by claiming that it’s “Islamophobic.” Now they’re the ones cast as the “Islamophobes.” Grab some popcorn and pull up a chair.
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