Bruce Bawer looks at the Islamization of Europe and sees the rise of gay bashing by Muslim youths as a barometer:

As the number of Muslims in Europe grows, and as the proportion of those Muslims who were born and bred in Europe also grows, many Muslim men are more inclined to see Europe as a part of the umma (or Muslim world), to believe that they have the right and duty to enforce sharia law in the cities where they live, and to recognize that any aggression on their part will likely go unpunished. Such men need not be actively religious in order to feel that they have carte blanche to assault openly gay men and non-submissive women, whose freedom to live their lives as they wish is among the most conspicuous symbols of the West's defiance of holy law.

Multiculturalists can't face all this. So it is that even when there are brutal gay-bashings, few journalists write about them; of those who do, few mention that the perpetrators are Muslims; and those who do mention it take the line that these perpetrators are lashing out in desperate response to their own oppression.

But such relative affluence has not prevented Muslim anti-gay violence, which has gone largely unchallenged and pretty well reversed Western Europe's climate of tolerance:

....for a while there, in much of Western Europe, homosexuality was on its way to being a non-issue. In Amsterdam in the late 1990s, I was delightfully surprised to discover that when groups of straight teenage boys passed gay couples in the streets, they just walked past without any reaction whatsoever. The sight of gay people didn't upset, threaten, amuse, or confuse them; the familiar, insecure urge to respond to open homosexuality with some kind of distancing, disdainful word or gesture - and thereby affirm to one another, and to themselves, their own heterosexual credentials - was simply not part of those kids' makeup. For me, it was a remarkable experience. Amsterdam then seemed to me the leading edge of a new wave in the progress of human civilization.

Well, I suppose it could be worse. At least they're not being defended as upholding traditional Islamic values.

From a leftist standpoint of course, gay self defense would constitute "oppression." I think the gays should arm themselves, but of course this is pacifist Europe, where not only are guns illegal, but self defense is increasingly seen as a crime.

Read the whole thing and see what a sickening and sordid spectacle Europe has become. (Again.) I see the Anne Frank house as a reminder of what happened all over Europe to the Jews. While today's Anne Frank will be more likely to be a victim of an "honor killing," the cowardly Europeans will do just about as much to save her.

Bawer's conclusion is ominous.

Europe is on its way down the road of Islamization, and it's reached a point along that road at which gay people's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is being directly challenged, both by knife-wielding bullies on the street and by taxpayer-funded thugs whose organizations already enjoy quasi-governmental authority. Sharia law may still be an alien concept to some Westerners, but it's staring gay Europeans right in the face - and pointing toward a chilling future for all free people. Pim Fortuyn saw all this coming years ago; most of today's European leaders still refuse to see it even though it's right before their eyes.

who confessed in court to murdering Fortuyn to stop him exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" and targeting "the weak parts of society to score points" in seeking political power.

It's sad to contemplate that even England -- which once proudly stood defiantly against Hitler -- won't even stand up for the classic childrens' story of the Three Little Pigs, even absent a demand from Muslims.

What would Porky say?

Meanwhile, in this country, the feminists who publish Ms. magazine refuse to allow images of successful and tough Israeli women to be published, and Americans who have no problem with bashing Christianity admit that they fear criticizing Islam. (Little wonder that Muslim gay bashing is ignored by the left and swept under the rug.)

Better to give the bullies whatever they want, yield to their demands, apologize profusely, and tell them they're victims.

And if that doesn't work, help them go after the people who dare stand up to them.

It might sound like the madness, but there's a certain logic to it. If we are all victims (especially the bullies), then it stands to reason that those who refuse to be victims are the enemy.

UPDATE: History professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author David Levering Lewis has written a new book -- God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, a revisionist history which promotes the idea that it would have been better had Islam conquered Europe long ago.

Fortunately, Lewis's book received an unfavorable review in the New Yorker:

Lewis's book is part of that revision. The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as "the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior" to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating "an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war." It was "one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire." This is a bold hypothesis.

(I guess it's Glenn's fault that I found the book review, because he linked these Amazon reviews, and my curiosity made my fingers do the clicking.)

MORE: In a great discussion of the "Three Little Pigs" ban,
Pam Meister notes that this cowardly mentality has led (in England) to not teaching students about the Holocaust:

Better to ignore history than to offend a handful of Holocaust deniers.

Bending over backwards to keep from offending certain groups of people doesn't appease them. They begin to feel entitled and start demanding more, like the ACLU, Greenpeace, and the Anti-Smoking league. Sure, condemning a book about fictional pigs isn't such a big deal... until the books are banned outright because sensitive eyes might see them... or pork is banned from restaurants because some customers may feel offended by its presence on the menu... or pork is banned from supermarkets because seeing it in the refrigerated case causes the vapors - putting hog farmers out of business and depriving food lovers everywhere of bacon, sausage, ham, and other tasty morsels.