Gay Bashing in the Netherlands  

For years, gay-bashing has been on the rise in Amsterdam. It's well known among Dutch gays that young immigrant-group men are disproportionately responsible for these attacks (the great majority of which go unreported).

There's no need for any study to prove this: the anecdotal evidence is immense. In the last couple of years, there have been several high-profile – and increasingly audacious – assaults on gay people, and routinely the perpetrators have been young Muslim men.

It's obviously no coincidence that the perceived climb in gay-bashings over the last decade has seemed to track the increase in Amsterdam's Muslim population during the same period. (Meanwhile, the proportion of ethnic Dutch Amsterdammers has declined steadily.)

Nonetheless, Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen asked researchers at the University of Amsterdam about a year ago to find out what kind of people were responsible for antigay attacks and what their motives were. Anyone familiar with Cohen’s call for an “accommodation with the Muslims,” including (among other things) toleration “of orthodox Muslims who consciously discriminate against their women,” could be forgiven for fearing that the fix was in – that the study’s conclusions were foregone and would be thoroughly, safely PC, with any mention of Islamic teachings about homosexuality neatly airbrushed away.

The study was finally released last week. I first learned of this from an AP bulletin sent me by Dan Savage. Then, this weekend, I heard a brief report on Sirius OutQ radio news about the study's findings.

The thrust of OutQ’s report was that the perpetrators of antigay violence in Amsterdam are overwhelmingly native Dutchmen, and that this finding disproves the notion (which OutQ represented as a fallacy spread by the media) that these offenses are committed mainly by immigrants.

Online I found an article at DutchNews.nl that made the same claim. Headlined “Gay attackers usually young Dutch men,” it read as follows:

Most of the 150 cases of verbal or physical violence against gay men and women in the first six months of this year were committed by native Dutch men or no attacker was listed, according to home affairs ministry figures.

But in only 16% of the registered incidents between January and June was the attacker described as non-white, the figures show.

Meanwhile the aforementioned AP bulletin made no (...)