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INVESTIGATION


UNLIKELY CRUSADE: ARE MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS JOINING THE ANTI-LGBTQ RIGHT? YES AND NO


CONSERVATIVES EXULT IN A NEW CULTURE-WAR COALITION — BUT HOW LONG CAN RIGHT-WING
CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS COEXIST?


BY KATHRYN JOYCE

Investigative Reporter


PUBLISHED JUNE 18, 2023 6:00AM (EDT)


Armenian parents and their supporters protesting a Pride assembly are met by
LGBTQ+ advocates at Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood on Friday, June
2, 2023. Tensions were heightened last week when a Pride flag was burned at the
school. (Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty
Images)
--


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Last Tuesday afternoon, in the Canadian capital city of Ottawa, several hundred
people gathered outside the headquarters of the Ottawa-Carleton District School
Board for the second time in several days. They were there to protest against
what they called "gender ideology" in public schools. After the last several
years of culture-war battles in every conceivable educational space, that might
seem unremarkable. But both this demonstration and another the previous Friday
were notable for who was foregrounded in the protests and social media coverage
that followed: Muslim-Canadians standing alongside right-wing white activists,
mixing chants of "Leave our kids alone" with charges that Canadian schools were
"targeting" Islam, and pledging to form a united front against the left. 

Over the last two weeks, a series of contentious and even violent LGBTQ Pride
month protests, from Southern California to suburban Maryland to Ottawa to
Calgary, have given rise to a new hope on the right: Has the push for LGBTQ
rights and representation so badly alienated immigrant and Muslim communities
that these generally liberal or left-leaning constituencies are switching sides?
Across social and right-wing media, conservative pundits and activists have
trumpeted that claim. "The Arab community is sending a message to the woke that
they are not accepting this!" "Selling immigrants on hating liberals would be
the easiest thing in the world." "The Crusade nobody saw coming. Muslims,
Christians, and Atheists vs. Pro-Child Mutilation groomers." 

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Memes followed: a Muslim-coded Gimli, from  "Lord of the Rings," reflecting that
he never thought he'd die "fighting side by side with a Christian"; a medieval
Muslim warrior standing beside a Templar Knight against a horde of feminists,
rainbow flags, BLM activists and other liberal foes.

Related

Self-described "Christian fascist" movement trying to sabotage Pride Month

This all appeared to start in Southern California, where two raucous protests in
early June turned violent. The first was June 2, outside Saticoy Elementary
School in North Hollywood, where a small Pride flag stuck in a planter on school
grounds had been burned a few days earlier, and the transgender teacher who
placed it there was doxxed. 

As the school prepared to hold a Pride assembly that would include a reading
from "The Great Big Book of Families," anti-LGBTQ activists gathered outside to
protest. When counter-protesters formed a human chain in front of the school,
the protesters tried to push through. Some threw punches and homophobic slurs;
one reportedly shouted that he wanted "to zip tie the principal." A homeless man
attending the pro-LGBTQ counter-demonstration was knocked to the ground and
badly beaten, in an attack caught on video. 


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The following Tuesday, June 6, many of the same protesters gathered in another
Los Angeles suburb, outside the headquarters of the Glendale Unified School
District. Inside the building, the school board was voting to recognize June as
Pride month, as it had done for the last five years. But outside, some 500
protesters and counter-protesters squared off, many drawn there after a
conservative group, GUSD Parents Voices, called for people to "Join the fight
against indoctrination in our schools." 

As in North Hollywood, many of the protesters wore matching white T-shirts
reading "Leave Our Kids Alone." Later, as numerous videos on social media would
show, there was an all-out brawl in which people were punched, kicked, dragged
and pepper-sprayed, including at least one pro-LGBTQ clergy member. Police
repeatedly shouted "Do not fight" through megaphones before declaring an
unlawful assembly and ordering the school board meeting attendees to "shelter in
place." 

The melee made national news, adding to what was already a uniquely tense start
to the month. In 2022, Pride celebrations around the country were marred by
nearly 200 right-wing protests and intimidation efforts, from ugly
demonstrations outside gay bars to Proud Boys storming library story hours to
the U-haul of Patriot Front activists arrested in Idaho. This year, as Insider
reported last month, the far right was determined to top those spectacles,
vowing to "come at the normies full force and with something new, each day." 

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So far, that threat does not seem empty. 

Pride flags have been burned or vandalized in numerous states, from California
schools to New York's Stonewall Inn — site of the 1969 LGBTQ uprising that Pride
month commemorates. Some of the attacks have been laughable, like Arizona
anti-LGBTQ activist Ethan Schmidt — who posts videos of himself trying to pick
fights in retail stores over Pride merchandise — burning a rainbow flag to audio
clips from "The Purge," while wearing a get-up worthy of the Village People. But
most of it isn't funny at all. On social media, prominent anti-LGBTQ accounts
like Libs of TikTok have attracted reader comments that the proper response to
school Pride displays include "mass shooting," a "woodchipper" or more violence
like that in Glendale. 

Following recent anti-LGBTQ boycotts against the Target retail chain, this week
flyers were left on cars outside one store in Redding, California, reading
"Child groomers get the rope," with the "o" represented by a noose. The
potential for escalation seems so evident that far-right activists have claimed
to identify what they call "Operation Drag Floyd": a supposed plot by Pride
activists to incite conservatives to acts of violence, in order to create
"another J/6… another George Floyd." The LGBTQ equality group Human Rights
Campaign has declared a state of emergency nationwide. 

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Amid all this, the Southern California suburbs — generations ago, the heartland
of the New Right — is emerging as a hotspot. The same day as the Glendale
protest, Orange County voted to ban Pride flags on all county buildings, and the
cities of Carlsbad and Huntington Beach and the school district of Chino Valley
have done the same. The mayor pro tem of Huntington Beach signaled her intent to
restrict access to LGBTQ books not just in schools but in city libraries as
well, while Chino Valley's school board — which previously invited an anti-trans
activist to lead the Pledge of Allegiance — is considering a policy to compel
schools to out trans students to their parents. 

A conservative-dominated school board in Temecula justified banning a social
studies textbook on the grounds that it included a section on murdered civil
rights leader Harvey Milk, California's first openly gay elected official, whom
two members of the new conservative majority baselessly called a pedophile. Last
Tuesday, more flyers, reading "Every single aspect of the LGBTQ+ movement is
Jewish," featuring the Star of David stamped across photos of roughly 20
prominent LGBTQ figures, were found outside homes in Huntington Beach and San
Bernardino County.

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These protests have fueled jubilant claims on the right that liberal extremism
on social issues was driving some of the Democrats' most stalwart supporters to
make common cause with Christian conservatives.

As the protests hit North Hollywood and Glendale, local activists and
independent media identified a number of their leaders as familiar faces from
far-right organizing in the region, including affiliates of the Proud Boys, Jan.
6 participants, anti-vaccination activists and more. Ahead of the Glendale
protest, noted the progressive public education parents' group GUSD Parents for
Public Schools, flyers advertising the demonstration had been shared "on known
violent, racist and anti-lgbtq pages & telegram channels throughout the region."
And after police cleared the area, Proud Boys stickers were found stuck to
barricades outside GUSD headquarters. 

"In covering the far-right in LA and Southern California," tweeted local
photographer and journalist Joey Scott, "[i]t is always the same people who have
been fixtures since even before 2020." Others noted that many of the concerned
"conservative parents" cited in media reports didn't seem to "even know which
school district they are protesting." 

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"From Los Angeles to Glendale, it is clear that organized white-supremacist,
fascist forces such as the Proud Boys, the Patriot Front and potentially others
are specifically targeting LGBTQ+ students, families and educators," wrote the
labor union United Teachers Los Angeles in a statement. "They have put our
schools on the front line of their hate; preying on existing fears and
prejudices in our communities. We expect the tactics at Saticoy and Glendale to
be replicated." 

Indeed, the day after the Glendale brawl, a right-wing social media account from
Temecula shared a tweet about the protest clashes, writing, "Get ready
Temecula." 

*  *  *

On the right, however, these protests became instant fodder for jubilant claims
that liberal extremism on social issues was driving some of the Democrats' most
stalwart supporters to make common cause with Christian conservatives.
Right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo, who has frequently made false or misleading
claims about left-wing activists, celebrated the fact that the Glendale and
Saticoy protesters included members of  the area's large Armenian-American
community, as well as Latinos. In a tweet, Ngo claimed that Armenian-American
men "want to fight #Antifa outside the school board meeting" because "immigrant
families oppose pride celebrations in schools." 

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In another tweet, Ngo claimed that Armenian Americans, who are mostly Orthodox
Christians, were specifically outraged by an Instagram picture of a Pride
collage on one Saticoy classroom door, which Ngo described as combining
"Armenian colors/symbols mixed with LGBTQI+, pup play pride in the shape of a
Christian cross." Ngo's specious claim that the elementary school was promoting
"pup play"— a niche form of BDSM role-playing — was apparently based on the fact
that the classroom door bore a stenciled image of a paw print. Locals on Twitter
quickly pointed out that the school's mascot is a bear, and the paw print logo
is featured elsewhere in the school. That didn't prevent the false claim that an
elementary school had decorated its classrooms with "fetish" imagery from
spreading widely on right-wing websites and social media. 

Christina Pushaw, the flame-throwing spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis,
now an announced presidential candidate, breathlessly shared the "pup play"
charge as well, among nearly a dozen tweets about the Glendale and Saticoy
protests. "I know this community well," she wrote in one, noting that she grew
up in the area. "[T]he leftists made a big mistake trying to indoctrinate these
kids behind their parents' backs." In another tweet, she continued, "Armenians
in Glendale will never tolerate the alphabet indoctrination of their kids." 

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This emerging narrative was soon reinforced by additional protests elsewhere.
Also on June 6, in Rockville, Maryland, a group of roughly 50 people — many of
them Muslims, but also familiar right-wing factions like Moms for Liberty —
demonstrated against a recent decision by the Montgomery County school district
to stop sending parental notifications for every school reading that makes
reference to LGBTQ issues. Maryland law requires districts to allow parents who
don't want their children to attend sex-ed classes to opt out, but in March the
district declared it would no longer offer that opt-out choice for other
classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues. In response, the right-wing legal
advocacy network Becket Law has filed a lawsuit on behalf of an interfaith group
of parents. Two activist groups,  Family Rights for Religious Freedom and
Coalition of Virtue, began holding rallies outside the school district offices. 

At one such demonstration on June 6, author and activist Asra Nomani (who wrote
for Salon in the early 2000s) was on hand to record the protests for Twitter and
present them as evidence of a coming tectonic political shift: "The hard-left
came after the kids and Muslim parents aren't having it." Touting the thesis of
her recent book, Nomani went on to argue that a longstanding "Red-Green
Alliance" between "Marxist" liberals and "establishment" Muslims was coming
apart. 

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"Muslim parents are waking up to the fact that that unholy alliance now means
that their children are in the crosshairs of the WOKE ARMY," she wrote. "And
they aren't having any of it, just like parents in other communities, from
Armenian immigrants to Asian Americans." 

After the protest in Montgomery County, Maryland, Richard Hanania, a right-wing
academic provocateur who recently suggested that the U.S. needs "more policing,
incarceration, and surveillance of black people," tweeted that this offered a
golden opportunity for Republicans. "Selling immigrants on hating liberals would
be the easiest thing in the world if conservatives had a real interest in
winning," he wrote, sharing a video of a Muslim girl in Maryland talking about
religious liberty in ways that, he said, "could've been written by Moms for
Liberty." 

Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro likewise declared, "Essentially what you
have is a cadre of upper-class white liberals who have a particular set of
morals that do not match the morals of particular ethnic minorities in the
United States, and the backlash is going to be very, very strong." 

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In videos from the Ottawa protest, Muslim women in hijab can be seen chanting
"Leave our kids alone" and encouraging their children to stomp on a string of
mini-Pride flags.

On June 9, these claims got another boost by the first Ottawa protest, which 
had been planned weeks in advance by Canadian anti-trans activist Chris Elston,
better known as "Billboard Chris" for his campaign of wearing sandwich-board
signs with anti-trans slogans around the U.S. and Canada. It gained additional
steam after the school district recommended that staff use gender-neutral
pronouns for students until they clarified which pronouns they prefer, and a
recent controversy elsewhere in Canada after a teacher admonished Muslim
students who'd skipped school to avoid Pride celebrations. 

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In videos from the protest (including one video viewed nearly 31 million times),
a number of Muslim women in hijab can be seen chanting "Leave our kids alone"
and encouraging their children to stomp on a string of mini Pride flags.
Conservative Canadian columnist Rupa Subramanya tweeted that "Chants of Allahu
Akbar and Christ is King" had come from the same side of the demonstration. The
protest also devolved into scattered violence, including contested claims about
whether a provincial legislator had been punched. 

In another photo shared widely online, a white woman in a pink polo shirt and a
Muslim woman wearing a multi-colored hijab held up opposite ends of a peculiar
flag: black with a white slash running across it. It was the flag of the
"Diagolon" movement, which emerged during the 2022 "trucker convoy" protests in
Canada as a mock-serious call for a new right-wing country, stretching
diagonally across North America from Alaska to Florida, comprising states and
provinces that rejected mask mandates, Marxism, globalism and "moral
degeneracy." 

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The subtext to that image, however, reveals why the notion of a "Diagolon Muslim
Ottawa chapter #LMAO," as Subramanya tweeted — or of an alliance between Muslim
immigrants and the far right more broadly — is problematic. The white woman in
pink on one side of the flag, it turned out, was Stephanie McEvoy, a Canadian
far-right activist with a long track record of supporting vehemently
anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups and positions (including an
unintentionally hilarious online complaint about encountering a Muslim cashier
at a Victoria's Secret). 

As for the Diagolon movement, frequently described by conservatives as nothing
more than an amusing meme, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) has called it a
far-right separatist movement "with militant accelerationist overtones" that
endorses "the formation of an illiberal republic, a halt to 'mass immigration,'
and the maintenance of Euro-centric societies." According to CAHN, movement
"founder" Jeremy McKenzie and his followers have shared content from far-right
influencers, including white nationalist "groyper" leader Nick Fuentes, and has
promoted the white supremacist book "The Day of the Rope," which depicts "a
guerrilla war against a ruling class or pedophilic elite." 

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In an editorial about the two protests, CAHN's Evan Balgord noted that Canada's
2022 "trucker convoy" movement, which drew together many threads of the far
right and has since shifted its focus from COVID-19 to LGBTQ rights, originated
with "anti-Muslim organizing that took the the streets to protest M-103, a
motion broadly condemning Islamophobia, in early 2017."

Nonetheless, after the Ottawa protest, McKenzie responded to a pro-LGBTQ Muslim
woman counter-protester by declaring on a podcast, "I am more Muslim than you,"
claiming that his right-wing values were more aligned with Islam than were hers.
(Adopting an ambiguously "foreign" accent, McKenzie continued, "Women no talk-y
in Islam; women shutty-uppy.") 

*  *  *

In California, Sophia Armen, co-director of the Armenian-American Action
Network, a civil and immigrants rights group, was dismayed by what had happened
in Glendale and North Hollywood, and also at how the clashes were being covered
in the media, which in many cases has uncritically repeated claims that the
anti-LGBTQ protesters represented the dominant community view. 

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"At the last meeting," Armen told Salon, "the majority of all public comments at
Glendale Unified School District were Armenians in favor of LGBTQ+ rights and
standing with GUSD and queer Armenian kids." But that reality, she said, "is
being continually drowned out by coverage of outside agitators and opportunists
looking to further divide us." That particularly means by "extremist social
media influencers," she said, who are seeking "to use this moment to build their
platforms and make money off clickbait headlines that rely on old racist tropes
of our community, Orientalist attitudes, and worsen the safety risks of LGBTQ+
Armenians in our community." 

Armen's organization, as well as the GALAS LGBTQ+ Armenian Society and the
Southern California Armenian Democrats, released a statement last week "to
correct the record" on what had happened in Glendale. It read, in part: "The
monolithic perception of Armenians vs. LGBTQ+ people is a false, inaccurate
account of the events at the GUSD Board meeting and further systems of
oppression that erase LGBTQ+ Armenian people and voices, and enables
discrimination." While the statement cautioned that "opportunistic social media
influencers" were exploiting the conflict, it also acknowledged their concern
"that protesting parents and community members are acting from a place of
misinformed fear." 

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Ani Zonneveld, founder and president of the nonprofit Muslims for Progressive
Values, described a similar tension. Overall, she said, polling suggests that
Muslim support for LGBTQ rights has grown significantly: from 27% in 2007 to 52%
in 2017, and higher still among Muslim youth. "In the future, that's not going
to be a problem within our Muslim community," Zonneveld said. However, she said,
"very orthodox" U.S. and Canadian Muslim institutions were "still pushing the
homophobic agenda." 

"The Christian right and the Muslim right have been strategizing around LGBT
issues and women's reproductive rights, as well as opposing Black Lives Matter,
because they share the same values."

In May, Zonneveld noted, more than 130 U.S. and Canadian imams had signed onto
an anti-LGBTQ statement, which roiled the progressive Muslim community but was
little noticed by the non-Muslim world. Last fall in Dearborn, Michigan, members
of the city's large Muslim community joined a heated school board protest,
calling to ban LGBTQ books, with support from prominent Michigan Republicans as
well as Moms for Liberty. The state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations was present at the meeting, she said, distributing flyers about
religious freedom and parental rights. 

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"I can attest to the fact that the Christian right and the Muslim right have
been strategizing around LGBT issues and women's reproductive rights, as well as
opposing Black Lives Matter, because they share the same values," Zonneveld
said. Conservative Muslims, she continued, "see a brotherhood" with the
Christian right, "and are collaborating with these folks. And I've seen them be
successful: filing amicus briefs in partnership with those organizations in
regards to LGBT and women's reproductive rights. So I do think this is a monster
in the making." 

This past Monday, right-wing pundits were thrilled again when California
Assemblyman Bill Essayli, the first Muslim-American elected to the state
legislature, walked out of the state capitol in protest of a celebration of
Pride honorees, which this year included a member of the Sisters of Perpetual
Indulgence, a drag performance-activist collective whose nun-inspired costumes
have been condemned by many conservatives as anti-Catholic bigotry. A picture of
Essayli holding a sign reading "Religious bigotry is bigotry" went viral. (On
Friday night, right-wing Catholic media outlets and organizations held a protest
march against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who honored the Sisters during a Pride
celebration at that night's game. Also on Friday, more than 1,500 miles north,
yet another Canadian anti-LGBTQ protest, this time in Calgary, drew a large
crowd of Muslims and other immigrants.)

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In a subsequent interview with the right-wing Daily Caller, Essayli said he was
giving voice "to a lot of conservative Muslims" who would now feel more
"comfortable speaking out to this radical leftist ideology." Declaring that the
U.S. was in a "weird and perilous time" where all forms of religious faith were
under attack, Essayli continued, "we cannot afford to have division among the
different faiths between Christianity and Islam. I think it's time for us to
unite and take on this existential fight that faces all of us together." 

The next day was June 13, when an interfaith group of several hundred protesters
gathered for the second Ottawa protest. In a speech live-streamed on social
media, a Muslim man stood in the center of the protest and spoke into a
megaphone, telling the crowd that while the media tried to drive Christians and
Muslims apart, "Today, ladies and gentlemen, you are proof that we are one
nation under God." Then he led the crowd in a familiar chant: "The people united
will never be defeated." 

Read more

from Kathryn Joyce on the far right

 * Lone Star hate: Right-wing activists in Texas drive a new wave of anti-LGBTQ
   bigotry
 * School's out forever: Arizona moves "to kill public education" with new
   universal voucher law
 * "New America": Avowed white nationalist, LGBTQ-hater pushes vision to
   Catholic right



BY KATHRYN JOYCE



Kathryn Joyce was an investigative reporter at Salon, and the author of two
books: "The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption"
and "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement."

MORE FROM Kathryn Joyce


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RELATED TOPICS ------------------------------------------

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Pride Month Reporting


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