Why is everyone suddenly outraged?

“Do you think being gay is haram?” asks the ZDF reporter during a chat at the dining table. “Yes,” replies Qatar’s World Cup ambassador and former footballer Khalid Salman, “being gay is haram. why is it haraam Because it’s mental damage.” The scene, which can be seen in the ZDF documentary “Geheimsache Qatar”, triggered a scandal. By “haram” Khalid Salman meant forbidden, condemnable. The German Foreign Office of Annalena Baerbock (Greens) protests. Journalists are outraged by the “inhuman statements” (SRF), demanding distancing and “clear statements”. Media representatives, writes the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk, which belongs to ARD, should “inform about critical findings from Qatar alongside sports reporting”.

As understandable as the outrage is, the surprise that comes from the reactions is amazing. Like many Muslim states, Qatar is a religious, homophobic country that is no coincidence an exile for extremists, such as those from Hamas. Gays and lesbians face arbitrary arrests, lashes and torture, and in the worst case even the death penalty. Surveys and crimes also show that there is a connection between Islamism, homophobia, anti-democracy and hatred of Jews in Europe. For example, a Syrian refugee attacked a homosexual couple in Dresden in 2020 and killed one of the two men – out of religious blindness and deeply rooted homophobia, as the court chairman later determined.

Germany is also “slightly Qatari”

These connections are not kept secret in the media. But they don’t want to be consistently named and denounced either. As soon as they are discussed, journalists, scientists and politicians are on hand to indulge in relativisation, accusations and self-accusations. This has now gone so far that even state institutions act as fundi understanders.

Even now, the criticism is by no means unanimous. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, for example, finds the excitement about Khalid Salman out of place and self-righteous, especially since sex among young men in Germany was forbidden until 1994. Even in this millennium, conservative politicians would have made fun of sending homosexual couples to the forestry office to get married. And if you think about how non-binary people are treated today, Germany seems “slightly Qatari” anyway.

As if there were no difference between outdated discriminatory laws and systematic police prosecutions. What Khalid Salman said is almost harmless by Qatari Islamist standards if you study the writings and sermons of Arab greats. Here it would be the task of the media to spread “clear statements” by working out the extremist ideologies behind such statements.

Homosexuals as symbols of western decadence

Often, however, the opposite happens. You could see that at the end of September, when the TV preacher Yusuf al-Karadawi died at the age of 96. Karadawi, a native Egyptian, lived in exile in Qatar. Alongside Turkey, Qatar is the most important sponsor and financier of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which is also active in Europe: in mosques, clubs and associations that have recently been successfully currying favor with left-wing anti-racists. The DNA of the Muslim Brotherhood includes a revulsion against the alleged Western decadence and materialism – both embodied in openly lived homosexuality and “the Jew”, whom it is necessary to fight by all means. The late Sheikh Karadawi was considered the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. He influenced millions of people with his televised sermons on al-Jazeera.

The views of this “pop star and terror godfather” (“Tages-Anzeiger”) can be read in his bestseller “Allowed and Forbidden in Islam”. He describes homosexuality as a deviancy and “unnatural” activity that should be punished with lashes or death. “While such punishments may seem cruel,” he writes, “they were recommended to preserve the purity of Islamic society and keep it clean from deviant elements.”

A moderate sheik who admires Adolf Hitler

According to Karadawi, rebellious women, adulterers and Jews should also be punished. These, he explained in a television speech, had received divine punishment thanks to Adolf Hitler. In the obituaries published in leading international media, this attitude is often only vaguely expressed. The British “BBC” writes that Karadawi was described as “moderate” by his supporters, while some (western) states had classified him as an extremist, among other things because he had called for terror against Israel. Nothing is said about his views on Jews and homosexuals.

For the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” the preacher leaves a “ambiguous legacy”. On the one hand, he “ranted” against gays (how, is not said), supported the Holocaust and strived for a theocracy, but also rejected the violence of the IS. On the SRG channel “Swissinfo”, Karadawi’s statements on the Holocaust and homosexuality are suppressed. Instead, Islamic scholar David Warren claims that Karadawi was committed to democracy. The Islam expert Reinhard Schulze, who is often quoted in Switzerland, explained in the NZZ that the preacher’s views were “very conservative”.

A religious fanatic who harbored fantasies of violence and annihilation against women and minorities and praised Adolf Hitler was therefore a conservative, sometimes blustering democrat who can be seen either way. Criticism of religious fanatics, as the green German leading organ “TAZ” recently taught its readership, is fundamentally problematic. Those who fight against the headscarf law, like the Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, are using colonialist narratives of the superiority of the white man. Yet women are also oppressed in the West.

It wasn’t the only post of this ilk. Notorious whitewashers of Yusuf al-Karadawi and his Muslim Brotherhood also regularly have their say in the “TAZ” without their statements being classified. However, part of the editorial team bravely wants to boycott the World Cup in Qatar.

Islamic homophobia is only in quotation marks

The fact that such trivializations get into the media has something to do with the universities, where an alternative reality is constructed in the name of postcolonial and deconstructivist theories. In this reality, white colonialists are to blame for all the evils in the world, and continue to do so today. Referring to the literary theorist Edward Said, activist scholars claim that “the West” constructed “the other” with the Orient and Islam: an irrational enemy image characterized by racial prejudices that became dominant after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A representative of this direction is the Berlin researcher Iman Attia. The professor for critical diversity studies as well as for racism and migration is a sought-after expert in the media. Since 2020 she has been working in the German “Expert:innenkreis Muslimphobia” convened by Horst Seehofer. In her book “Western Culture and Its Other” she argues that criticism of Islam serves to legitimize wars and neocolonial, neoliberal politics as well as a “hegemonic discourse”. So it is not based on facts, but on imagination.

Appropriately, Attia writes the term “Islamic anti-Semitism” in quotation marks. According to Attia, statements about “Islamic homophobia” are also racist, since they are “known from anti-Semitic contexts for their scapegoat function”. Muslims, she claims, are the new Jews. Even if Muslim young people in Germany are anti-Semitic and homophobic – numerous studies show that these attitudes are more widespread in the Muslim population – this is a “reaction to their orientalization in the host society”.

Anyone who criticizes fundamentalists is racist – says the federal government

According to this logic, one would also have to classify Yusuf al-Karadawi or the Qatar World Cup ambassador Khalid Salman as victims of Western “dominance discourses”. It is hardly a coincidence that this legitimizes Islamist ideologies. Like other Islamophobia researchers, Iman Attia is involved in associations and projects that are co-financed by pro-government Turkish foundations or protest against the ban on pro-Islamist organizations in France. Nevertheless, their theories are taken seriously, also in Switzerland. Here, technical colleges, universities or the Federal Commission against Racism refer to their writings; Institutions whose verdicts are presented by journalists like SRF “Arena” moderator Sandro Brotz like court judgments.

The specialist unit for combating racism, which belongs to Federal Councilor Alain Berset’s (SP) interior department, is also inspired by post-colonialism. According to their definitions, there is only one religion in the world that is classified as a race, and that is Islam. “Anti-Muslim racism”, it is read further, can also manifest itself in the rejection of “a conservative or fundamentalist belief”. When asked by the NZZ, a spokeswoman explained that these definitions correspond to the latest research. In Qatar you should remember that.