This Washington Post article tells the story of a betrayal–a double betrayal, really. The first betrayal is the one mentioned in the article itself. The Muslims of Hamtramck, Michigan accepted the generosity and hospitality of pro-immigrant activists, including Pride activists, then stabbed them in the back.
In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.
“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”
That betrayal is obvious. The other one is harder to see, but just as real. The Muslims of Hamtramck have not only betrayed their neighbors but their co-religionists: Muslims abroad fighting for gay rights and pride.
The last time I taught philosophy at Al Quds University in Palestine, I taught Mill’s On Liberty, and asked my students what taboos they encountered in Palestinian society that needed to be overcome. Their answer? Gay rights and gay pride. It was hard to discuss it, harder still to fight for it, but the struggle was on if you knew where to look for it. An external military occupation, the people involved in both struggles know, is no excuse for an internal one.
I still remember the day I walked down Salahuddin St in East Jerusalem and saw graffiti on a wall saying, “It’s okay to be gay.” The word “gay” was crossed out the next day, then re-written the day after, no doubt to be crossed out the day after that. That’s what jihad–the jihad for gay rights and gay pride–looks like, and is. The Muslim leadership of Hamtramck has made that struggle harder than it already is, but once begun, a jihad isn’t so easy to stop.
It’s interesting that the leadership of Hamtramck feels obliged to take down the Pride flag but has no qualms flying the MIA/POW flag–interestingly craven. That gambit might have flown fifty years ago, but not today. The MIA/POW flag is no longer about getting POWs or MIA remains out of Vietnam. It’s a public celebration of unbridled Western militarism, mostly targeting Muslims. Look at Libya, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan today. Who created those disasters? It wasn’t the Pride movement. It was the Pentagon and its allies, the entities that the Muslim leadership of Hamtramck is so eager to valorize. The moral priorities expressed here are clear enough: gay pride is a threat to Muslim “identity,” but warfare, occupation, and mass death targeting actual Muslims is just fine.
Tens of thousands of Muslims have died in Derna through the hubris of NATO and the civil war it instigated in Libya. The Muslim leadership of Hamtramck would rather throw gay people under the bus than face that truth or deal with its implications.
“Woe to those who want but to be seen of men, but fail to supply even neighborly needs….” It’s a political game that only goes so far. That won’t stop the opportunists of Hamtramck from taking it as far as it’ll go, I suppose. But their ethno-theocratic special pleading shouldn’t stop us from holding them to account, either. One declaration of jihad deserves another.
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To tolerate the intolerant, or not? Better to have not, in this case, maybe
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Well, if it was mere intolerance, I might say “ignore it.” But intolerance + hypocrisy + betrayal + political power needs a response.
There’s a historical dimension here, too. American Muslims have made real progress over the last two decades–the newer generation is less wedded to the reactionary ways of the old, and even the older generation has mended its ways to some extent. That took a lot of work. The behavior of the Hamtramck leadership is the last gasp of the worst of the old guard, and it threatens to overturn some of that work.
Already Hamtramck is being seized on by our own notoriously homophobic right wing as evidence of the general character of the American Muslim community. It’s really just their cynical attempt to drive a wedge between different parts of “the Left.” If we don’t respond to the intolerant, we’ll be saddled with yet another stereotype to overcome: every cause we espouse will have to overcome a default accusation of homophobia before it gets a hearing. The work of the last twenty years will not only be undone, but treated as though it had never been done.
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