In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Dibi said anti-LGBT attitudes are a real problem in some immigrant communities, and the issue needs to be confronted.
Tofik Dibi, a gay man who is the son of Moroccan immigrants who was a member of the Dutch parliament from 2006 to 2012, often went toe to toe with Wilders on the floor of parliament. If you reject our country in such a fundamental manner, I’d rather see you leave.” He ended with an ultimatum to immigrants that has become a VVD campaign slogan: “Act normal or leave.” This includes the current prime minister, Mark Rutte, of the right-leaning VVD party, who framed his re-election bid with a letter published in January declaring, “We are feeling a growing unease when people abuse our freedom … harass gays, howl at women in short skirts or accuse ordinary Dutch of being racists. But he has already won a major victory regardless of the election outcome: setting the terms of the debate about immigration in the Netherlands so fundamentally that other Dutch politicians are picking up his message. He now stands to win about 15% of seats in parliament, but all six other major parties have declared they will not join his Freedom Party in a governing coalition. Wilders stands almost no chance of becoming prime minister even if he makes a strong showing, and polls suggest his support is declining as election day approaches.
THE GAY TEST PEN FREE
“The freedom that gay people should have - to kiss each other, to marry, to have children - is exactly what Islam is fighting against,” Wilders told BuzzFeed News last June in the wake of the attack on a gay club in Orlando, adding that the shooting should force a reckoning with the fact “that we’ve imported so much Islam to the Western free countries." The next month, he brought this message to the Republican National Convention, where he told a Gays for Trump party, “Anywhere in the West, if you allow Islam to be planted on your soil, don't be that you will harvest Sharia law, because Islam and Sharia law exactly the same." Politicians are “using gay rights, as almost a national identity,” Suhonic said, but only when debating the place of “asylum-seekers and the immigrants.” It’s an attitude Suhonic calls “homonationalism.” Immigrants are constantly being subjected to a “pink test,” said Dino Suhonic, founder of the queer Muslim organization Maruf and organizer of the evening’s gathering.
But today Wilders seems like he was just ahead of his time, with politicians from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen following his lead and saying they are defending LGBT rights by opposing Muslim immigration.įor many in the room, this is just racism dressed up in liberal drag, helping make nationalism respectable again in the West. Wilders’s professed support of gay rights once put him out of step with other nationalist politicians in the West, who generally have also been social conservatives. A 29-year-old named Abdi, who was born in Somalia and fled the country’s war in 1991, said this focus on gay rights is just one of the constantly changing “rules of integration” into Dutch society, which makes it feel “impossible to integrate into a society that does not accept your humanity as a person of color.” (Abdi asked to withhold his last name because he hasn’t come out to his entire family.) “If you’re looking for a dramatic shift, I think it’s already happening,” said Manju Reijmer, a 27-year-old born in Sri Lanka who was adopted by a family from a small Dutch town. And several more moderate politicians have echoed the message that Muslim immigrants threaten gay people. His candidacy is being watched as the next test of the nationalist wave that drove Britain out of the EU and put Donald Trump in the White House.īut the race is also uniquely focused on gay rights, because Wilders has framed his crusade against Islam in part as a defense of national values in the country proud to have adopted the world’s first marriage equality law and has remained a leader on LGBT rights in the years since. The race has been dominated by Geert Wilders, the bleached-blonde leader of the Party for Freedom who polls show could win the largest bloc of votes in parliament. AMSTERDAM - On a chilly evening in late February, a small group of queer and immigrant activists gathered on the west side of Amsterdam to prepare, as one attendee put it, “for the apocalypse.”įor months they had endured an increasingly strident debate about immigration ahead of elections on March 15, and they were tired of being caught in the crossfire.