Other sirens were going off across Europe. In the early 2000s in Holland and then Norway the gay American author Bruce Bawer began to grow worried that increasing numbers of gay men of his acquaintance in Europe’s most liberal cities (including Amsterdam) were being beaten up by Muslim men. Bawer had left his native country in the 1990s partly because of what he saw as the rise in the influence of Christian pastors who were virulently opposed to gay rights. In Europe, Bawer began to notice that there was a different type of cleric, from a different religion than the one he was used to, who didn’t just think that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry but thought that they should be thrown from tall buildings. Like Pim Fortuyn, Bawer started to wonder why a society that prided itself on its liberalism seemed to be worrying about offending Muslims more than it worried about protecting gays. Islamic homophobia – an issue that had barely occurred to the gay press, much less to the mainstream press – began to get a tiny airing. But the gay-rights groups that had been so virulent in their attacks on the Catholic and other Christian churches seemed willing not only to sit out this sharper problem, but to attack people like Bawer for raising the facts. In two books and many articles he attempted to highlight the oddity of liberal societies going quiet on such bigotry just because it was coming from a community of immigrants. A set of competing victimhood narratives appeared to exist, Bawer showed, but gays were being trumped in that narrative by Muslims.

Like every other early-warning siren Bawer was considerably defamed for his trouble, often by the liberal gay press and others who might have been expected to heed his call. He was just one more demonstration of the fact that when the messenger was not actually shot, he or she was in other ways silenced as much as possible.1 But throughout the first decade of the century it was the early-warning sirens on blasphemy and free speech that finally became most audible on the front line.

The publication of a set of cartoons of Islam’s prophet in a small-circulation Danish newspaper – Jyllands-Posten – demonstrated one flashpoint of the era. The ‘cartoon crisis’ was another demonstration, like the Rushdie affair sixteen years earlier, that the issues brought about by mass migration would continue to surprise Europeans. If a Dane in the 1990s had said that the story which would bring most attention to their country in the next decade would most likely be a ‘cartoon crisis’ (a phrase people increasingly uttered with a straight face), people would have thought the person unhinged.