In his speech at the Republican convention in 2016, Donald
Trump spoke of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, where a man
with jihadi sympathies murdered 49 people. “As your president, I will do
everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and
oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said.
اضافة اعلان
At the time, this sort of rhetoric was common among Trump
and his allies, who fashioned themselves in the mold of European right-wing
populists, demonizing Muslims as a threat to hard-won Western sexual freedoms.
Perhaps the hottest ticket at that year’s Republican National Convention was an
LGBTQ party called Wake Up! where the Dutch politician Geert Wilders warned
about Shariah law in front of a photo exhibition featuring skinny, shirtless
boys in MAGA hats, called “Twinks for Trump.” The photographer behind that
exhibition, a reactionary libertine named Lucian Wintrich, briefly served as
the White House correspondent for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit.
Seven years later, as the battle against wokeness has
supplanted the war on terror in the right-wing imagination, conservative
sympathies are reversing. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to
protect them from LGBTQ rights advocates whose demands conflict with their
faith,” David Weigel reported in Semafor this week. The Fox News host Laura
Ingraham, who once called for banning Muslim immigration from the Middle East,
recently ran a sympathetic segment about Muslim parents in Maryland who want
their kids to be exempt from reading books with LGBTQ characters or themes. “Us
Catholics and other Christians, other people of faith, have been waiting for
the Muslims to step up on this issue,” Ingraham told her guest, a Muslim father
and activist named Kareem Monib.
Us Catholics and other Christians, other people of faith, have been waiting for the Muslims to step up on this issue,
On Wednesday, a Gateway Pundit article celebrated the
all-Muslim City Council in Hamtramck, Michigan which voted to ban all but five
flags from flying on city property — a move widely seen as targeting Pride
flags. “The revolt against the radical LGBTQI+ takeover of the U.S. won another
battle this week,” the article crowed.
This nascent alliance between conservative Christians and
Muslims marks the resurrection of a right-wing project that was derailed, for a
time, by the Sept. 11 attacks. Back in the 1990s, American conservatives
founded a group called the World Congress of Families in an effort to unite
pious traditionalists from across the globe against the forces of secular
modernity. Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, they’d been planning
simultaneous conferences in Mexico City and Dubai. After the attacks, those
plans fell apart and cooperation between right-leaning Christians and Muslims
became more fraught, though it continued in international bodies like the UN.
In US, some conservative Christians held on to the
possibility of an alliance with conservative forces in Islam. The influential
activist Grover Norquist has been doing Muslim outreach for decades. Before he
was a major stolen-election conspiracy theorist, the right-wing propagandist
Dinesh D’Souza expressed his preference for Islamic radicalism over Western
liberalism in his book “The Enemy at Home.”
But at a time when abhorrence of Islam was an organizing
principle of the Republican right, such reactionary ecumenism was unpopular.
Some of Norquist’s fellow conservatives even smeared him, absurdly, as a Muslim
Brotherhood mole, and nearly got him removed from the board of the National
Rifle Association.
Now, however, the backlash against what’s sometimes called
gender ideology is so strong that it’s creating space for strange new political
bedfellows. Consider, for example, the political journey of the writer Asra
Nomani.
A former foreign correspondent, Nomani had been close to
Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in
Pakistan in 2002. After his killing, she became prominent as a Muslim critic of
Islamic fundamentalism. In 2004, The New York Times wrote about her “Rosa
Parks-style civil disobedience” in refusing to leave the men’s section of a
mosque. She co-wrote a Washington Post column denouncing the hijab as the
product of an ideology that “absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts
the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.” When Nomani, a
self-described liberal Democrat, voted for Trump in 2016, she described it, in
part, as a vote against Islamic extremism.
Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from LGBTQ rights advocates whose demands conflict with their faith,
So I was a little surprised when I saw that Nomani, who
lives in Virginia, had joined a protest last week organized by the Muslim
parents Ingraham lauded. In 2015, Nomani treated Muslim demands for a school
holiday on Eid al-Adha as an example of “creeping Shariah.” Now she was
aligning with parents who insisted that their kids be allowed to opt out of
school assignments that went against their religious values. But what seemed
like an obvious contradiction to me made perfect sense to her: Once again, she
saw herself struggling against a malign and totalizing ideology. Wokeism, she
told me, “is more of a danger to all of our societies than Islamism. Especially
when it comes to the kids.” Islamism, she said, “is not seeping into our K-12
system. But wokeism is.”
Nomani described “bonfire potlucks” in Virginia where
“Muslim parents are starting to speak with religious Christian conservative
parents.” Were it not inspired by an anti-LGBTQ backlash, such interfaith
dialogue would be touching. History shows us, however, that nothing drives
conservatives to reach out to groups they once feared as much as another group
that they fear even more.
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