When I was first writing on the immigration issue over a decade ago, I was pleasantly surprised to realize a group of allies existed beyond the conservative orbit—environmentalists, who don’t want America entirely covered by subdivisions. Very nice people, but they frighten easily.

Now it appears that another group of objective allies is emerging….Gays. Local Insurgents: ‘Islamic Thinkers’ Menace Gay N.Y. – Ben Smith and Jessica Bruder, New York Observer, June 25 2005, discusses the increasing Gay alarm about a radical faction of Muslim activists called The Islamic Thinkers, who operate in Jackson Heights, Queens.

The Islamic Thinkers Society had become a regular feature at local gay-pride parades, where they’ve called for the castration and death of gay men, according to several witnesses who spoke to The Observer…to New York’s gays…the scene in Jackson Heights bears a worrying similarity to communal conflicts that are challenging the idea of tolerance across Europe, with particular flashpoints in Holland and Scandinavia. There, young immigrants and the children of immigrants have been drawn to a more radical Islamic ideology… On the extreme fringes, these young men have committed acts of violence against Jews and gays…in a case that shocked Europe, one… murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street.

(Curiously, The Observer overlooks the late Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic gay Dutch political leader—also murdered—who made the threat to his community posed by Islamic immigration a centerpiece of his platform.)

Smith and Bruder report:

But the rise of gay bashing on European streets … has also opened up a heated debate within the gay community…over whether the proliferation of intolerant strains of Islam requires…a harder line on issues like immigration and assimilation.

The article is packed with US Islamic figures trying to deny that the sort of zealotry that has appeared in Muslim communities the world over will recur in America.

Anyone tempted by this delusion should read this chilling article, by a Muslim immigrant to Australia who has become a Christian Minister:

The Islamic worldview will ultimately present Western nations with a huge political problem. Muslims don't send missionaries like the Christian church. They just send floods of people. And once their numbers grow, then they begin to exert political pressure…in recent years growing numbers of Muslims have maintained that it's a universal religious obligation for all true Muslims to join the jihad to promote a global Islamic revolution…I cannot understand the ignorance of people in the West who say that Islam is a religion of peace.”

(Hat Tip, Aussie News and Views)

Poor Stephen Steinlight appears to have had little success convincing his fellow Jews that immigration might be bad for them.

The Gay community, facing more immediate physical threat, will hopefully be more alert.