Guardian: The left seem to be very stupid, I suppose,” Mike Holt says. The Queensland-based former One Nation candidate is bemused when I ask him why he believes some progressives support both the expansion of rights to LGBT people, and the building of mosques in regional Australian centres.
Holt is one of the key figures in the anti-mosque campaign. He takes credit for launching the Concerned Citizens of Bendigo organisation that emerged to fight the construction of a mosque in that town, but denies any involvement with the near-identical Facebook pages that have cropped up in the wake of announcements to build mosques in Maroochydore, Kalgoorlie Boulder, Kalgoorlie, and Currumbin.
I contacted him about an image on his Islam 4 Infidels website: a photo of a dreadlocked protester run through an online meme generator. “SUPPORTS MUSLIMS AND GAYS; MUSLIMS KILL GAYS” is superimposed on top in chunky white Impact. On Holt’s site, the image appears alongside a Photoshopped picture of Hitler wearing a Palestine tee.
“It’s more like a dig,” Holt explains, when I ask whether the protester image is designed to encourage people to modify their views about Islam. “The left have a very strange worldview: they support the gay lobby and also support Islam!”
Holt is not the only one eager to point this out. Repeatedly drawing attention to the inimical position much of the Muslim world has on LGBT rights appears to be part of a broader rhetorical strategy used by the anti-Islamic rightwing in Australia.
In the lead-up to an anti-mosque meeting in Bendigo earlier this year, the Q Society – “Australia’s leading Islam-critical organisation” – distributed a pamphlet in which they suggested that “wherever Islam spreads … misogyny, sectarian violence and homophobia increases”.