Minority religious figures get elevated into symbols of an entire civilization’s threat

Evidence

One of the most prominent advocates of this thesis is the gay Christian writer Bruce Bawer, a literary critic based in Norway, who has accused Europe of ‘tolerating intolerance’ by supposedly pandering to the cultural ‘separatism’ of men like Khalil al-Moumni, the imam of the al-Nasr Mosque in Rotterdam, who described homosexuality as a ‘contagious disease which threatens humanity with extinction’ and described Europeans as ‘lower than pigs and dogs for tolerating this disease’. — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s work on moral panics over immodest dress: a single provocative statement about bodies and morality becoming the proof-text for a whole group’s alleged backwardness.
• CANDY: The ‘tolerating intolerance’ paradox, plus an imam calling Europeans lower than pigs and dogs for tolerating a ‘contagious disease,’ is quotable elevator material.