Should we stay or should we go
Earlier this month came more shocking news from Iraq with the discovery of the bodies of 25 gay men and teens, killed by Islamic death squads -” many with pieces of paper with the Arabic word for pervert pinned to their chests.
Under the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, gays were largely left alone by authorities despite facing widespread discrimination, and there were parks where they knew they could find each other.
The killings began quickly in the lawless years following Saddam’s removal, with victims often tried in absentia by local religious tribunals without any legal authority.
Yet as order returns to the country, the sexual cleansing of Iraq has only accelerated.
Three years ago, Iraqi Shi’ite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling for gays to be killed in the most severe ways possible. Since then the campaign has been more organised but both Sunni and Shi’ite militias are known to be involved.
The militias are the security wings of the various parties in the Iraqi governing coalition and many work day jobs in the country’s police and security forces from whom GLBT Iraqis can expect little help.
Victims are typically tricked into meeting with their killers who pose as other gay men in chatrooms and on dating websites. Torture usually precedes death -” and in a country where heterosexuals have almost no sexual outlets outside of marriage, victims are often raped as well.
Our troops are largely out of Iraq. They never should have been there in the first place. All we can do to help gay Iraqis is apply political pressure and keep accepting gay refugees.
But the troops should stay in Afghanistan, where the Taliban treated gays far worse than the current regime, and where there is every chance they’ll come back.
The Taliban first executed gay Afghans by bulldozing walls on top of them, but as too many horrendously crippled prisoners were surviving (and under Islamic law then had to be set free), they moved on to burying them up to their necks and then crushing their heads with tanks.
If Coalition forces go home too early, this is the mindset that will come back to rule Afghanistan. Should the same forces take over Pakistan, they’ll have a nuclear arsenal at their disposal -” risking an atomic hot war with Israel or India.
Reality check time
Iraq,Iran & Afghanistan have a combined population of 140 million people. Assuming 5-10% are gay, there are between 7-14 million potential asylum seekers. Do you seriously believe Australia can take in that number of people? I hope you have a spare room at your place because every household in the country would have to take in about a dozen lodgers.
LOL Andrew, I haven’t been ‘in’ since before the Gettysburg Address, honey.
Shayne, out of curiosity, how many of these hospitable people were you out too?
Btw., Phil, “Btw, since when did the L precede the G in those initials?” Oh I dunno, ‘queer’ works fine for me.
I agree with much of Phil’s last post. Anti-gay violence is not so much a result of a lack of being uninformed. It’s carried out by people who have no need for more information. For religious fanatics, their religion cannot be wrong and cannot be challenged by more or alternative information. That’s why when these people are in power, things get very dangerous. It is often the case (but not always) that these zealots adhere to Islam.
Of course homophobia is often part and parcel of communist ideology. But those regimes are few and far between these days. And non-religious fascists are violently anti-gay and still around in Western Europe and elsewhere. They should be carefully watched.
Basically, absolutists ideologies are the problem and they include but go beyond religion.
Oh alright, ‘vast minority’ is oxymoronic, irony gets lost in this medium like a tourist in Marrickville.
Andrew, again you’re taking the extremes of a religion as being representative of that religion. Both Islam and Buddhism in Thailand had become politicised along ethnic lines. It doesn’t make Buddhism or Islam miltaristic any more than Zionism is a reflection of Torah Judaism. I don’t even think of those ‘Islamic’ fundies as being Muslim, they don’t follow the Quoran, they evoke some barbaric and warped Mediaeval creed, just as the dopey Pope is wont to do of Catholicism.
We could also discuss the slaughter of a million innocent Muslims in the last decade by the West if you want to discuss human rights.
As for the reality of life for gays in the ME:
“Saddam was a tyrant, but at least we had more freedom then,”said Hussein. “Nowadays, gay men are just killed for no reason….They say that since the US-led invasion, gay people are being killed because of their sexual orientation.” Homosexuality was legal under Hussein until the coalition of the witless destroyed Iraq and allowed lawlessness to flourish.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid…st/4915172.stm
There is implicit tolerance for same gender sex – the only issue is that it has to be done within the existing social framework.
Homosexual rights in M/E countries are at least a generation
or two behind Western nations …it’s tolerated if you keep it very private; the penalties for flaunting it in public are severe.
Islam has a commitment to justice and the challenge for practicing Muslims – as with any of the largely homophobic religions – must be to be consistent in exercising it. In fact it is impractical to give criminal sanctions to all homosexuals living in a Muslim country, and it is common knowledge (to foreigners visiting a Muslim country) that some young Muslim men will experiment with homosexual relations as an outlet to sexual desires that cannot be met in a society where the sexes are often kept segregated. And Islam does place a strong value on the right to privacy in the home and thus homosexual relations that occur in private are theoretically outside the bounds of the law. Liberal Muslims accept and consider homosexuality as natural, regarding those hadithic verses as either obsolete in the context of modern society, or point out that the Qu’ran is silent on homosexual love.
And again, I should remind you that attraction of men to men has always been a part of the culture of Islamic societies and the attraction is not generally condemned in itself (as reflected in the romantic love literature of Muslim Spain and in the Qur’an where Paradise contains beautiful male virgins – whatever they are). Shari’a is most concerned with public behavior and outwards, so there is no strong condemnation of homosexuality if it is not displayed in public.
I still maintain the expression “a vast minority” means a large minority. It’s not maths, it’s grammar.
I suppose there are peaceful religions: pantheism, for instance, though I have the impression Hinduism has been used to justify violence sometimes. (I can’t cite examples, it could just be my inbuilt cynicism.) Religion is invariably about power, it always was and it still is. Power corrupts.
There is no arguing with Shayne’s statement that being uninformed leads to fear and hatred. But being informed does not automatically preclude fear and hatred: sometimes it justifies those reactions (especially the former). Of course, it is extremists we need to worry about, and I suppose suicidal Islamic extremists are the scariest kind because no logical person could empathise with them.
It’s no news that a large slice of America is vehemently anti-gay, more actively so than Australia. When I was a kid, we had a healthy love/hate relationship with the USA and I would hope that hasn’t changed. I think we can still spot bullshit, can’t we? A lot of Australians, maybe even a vast minority, were dead against sending our troops to Iraq.
Finally, “dissolving hatred in our society” is a hell of a big call and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen. Human beings hate each other, sometimes for a reason but mostly for no reason at all. I’d rather aim for something within the realms of possibility, such as equality for GLBT citizens. (Btw, since when did the L precede the G in those initials?)
Shayne, the number killed isn’t 25 gays in the whole of Iraq- it’s 25 gays in just two months in just one Bagdadi suburb.
The claim in the BBC article makes no sense- why would family members kill their gay relatives and then leave their bodies on display with the word “pervert” pinned to their chests- thus advertising the family’s shame to the entire community?
Yes, what could basically be termed prison sex is common among heterosexual men in the middle east- it’s just another symptom of the repressive nature of the societies they live in.
“Oh how the medical profession could use a glue like that, if it existed.” The claim you mention has indeed not been verified, but such a glue does exist- it’s called Super Glue and can be bought at any supermarket and was developed to close battle wounds quickly on the field during the Vietnam War.
Islam is not so different to Christianity, but it’s 600 years younger and as a consequence has not settled many issues that Christianity has had to over the past few centuries- particularly concerning the rights of the individual, freedom of expression, freedom of faith etc.
Last time I looked out my backdoor, the USA was not my “own backyard”.
Buddhism is a very nice religion and one of the biggest influences on my personal faith, but it has its dirty secrets too- much of the persecution of Thai Muslims along the Thai-Malay border is sectarian in nature, after the Asian Tsunami a top Buddhist leader in Sri Lanka threatened to starve himself to death if international food aid was distributed to Tsunami effected Tamils, and historically, Buddhism’s entry into Tibet quickly resulted in mass persecution of practitioners of that country’s pre-existing Shamanic traditions (now absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism). The flayed skins of some of these victims are still kept on display in some Tibetan temples. Today the Shugden sect of Tibetan Shamanism has been banned by the Dalai Lama and its monks expelled on his order from their temples and sect members claim they are being persecuted by his supporters world wide.
Irrational fear of Islam is as wrong as irrational fear of homosexuality, but there are clearly very real reasons why GLBT people can have rational fears about conservative and fundamentalist streams of Islam- just as we have reason to fear anyone who would seek to jail us or otherwise deprive our rights, whether individually or through a political process.
And finally, Andrew, let me share a little of that which I gleaned from actually living in Muslim countries.
Most modern Muslims believe the word of the hadith is spurious (the matn is used to understand Islam). Even those few Muslims that follow the hadith know them to be lower in rank to the Qur’an. The hadith are the words of Muhammad and not of God, and not considered divine. The quote you give is from the hadith Sunan al-Tirmidhi. Sahih Muslim and Sunan Abi Da’ud are the most commonly accepted hadith by Islam scholars, the others are rejected as not reliable. The story of Lot to which the hadith you quote refers, condemns lack of charity to our fellow human beings (ironically.)
All the Muslim I have encountered have been the most hospitable and peace-loving people I have ever met, we could all learn from them.
Western commentators like too misrepresent Islam – it is akin to some Islam journalist quoting Deut. 21:18-21 (“”This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst…”) or Deut. 23:2 (“Those born of an illicit union shall not be admitted to the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.”) or Prov. 22:15 (“Folly is bound up in the heart of a boy, but the rod of discipline drives it far away”) or Deuteronomy 16 which concerns those that question the word of the Lord (“Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be first against them to execute them, and afterwards the hand of all the people. Stone them to death for trying to turn you away from the LORD your God,”) or any of the putting out of eyes and killing of one’s neighbour for various covetting, theft of an oxen or wearing cloth woven of more than one fabric….as the way of Western societies.
And representing our culture thus would be most dishonest, Andrew, wouldn’t it?
ps. OK, I did some quick research by way of looking in our own backyards before we demonise those of other cultures…
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there are more than one thousand physical attacks on gay men and lesbians a year, including more than a dozen murders. Gay men compose nearly twenty percent of all victims of bias-inspired crimes and are the group most likely to be murdered. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, reports at least twice the number of anti-gay incidents. According to the group, there were 2000 attacks per year in the US. Anti-gay incidents have increased every year since the Justice Department began tracking crimes based on sexual orientation in 1992. The FBI shows hate crimes based on sexual orientation to be the third most prevalent type. George Bush vetoed the Matthew Shepard Act when it landed on his desk in 2007. Wyoming, the state where Matthew Shepard was tortured and left tied to a fence to die in 1998, along with 18 other states, still does not have legislation that prosecutes hate crimes towards LGBT people. 90% of American LGBT students report being harassed or assaulted. The Westboro Baptist Church, calls for homosexuals to be killed. Only 10 US states protect students from bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation and only five protect students from bullying and harassment based on gender identity/expression.
Whether we are straight, LGBT, Muslim or Westerner, if we want to dissolve hatred in our society we must engage in a process of becoming informed. Ideologically, I don’t see a big difference between homophobia and Islamophobia, both are borne of hatred, ignorance, fear, and irrational anger.
I’m not too good with maths, but with reports of 25 gay men killed out of a population of nearly 30 million, Phil, I doubt that up to 49% of Iraqis are bashing gays. It’d be interesting to see a comparison with hate crime figures in the West. Anyway, none of this detracts from the fact that the death of one gay man to hate crime is one too many. My point is simply that I don’t see any evidence for the continued scapegoating of Muslims.
I’d also disagree with you about all religions being so nefarious. My Buddhist studies convinced me that theirs is a religion concerned with human suffering and how we can alleviate it. Similarly other religions – the Quakers, the Bahai etc etc – preach living in loving compassion with all things that breathe. Its just the big churches neurotic about their power bases that tend to do evil in the name of their religion. “My loving and compassionate god is better than your loving and compassionate god so I’m going to have to kill you.”
Shayne, you say “the people committing these acts are the vast minority”. That sounds like rather a lot to me. Could even be 49%.
Islam may call itself a “religion of mercy”, but (as with Christianity) the truth is that merciful people and violent people alike will act however they want and use their religion to justify it. Why? Because all religion is an invention, a trick designed to justify the specific agendas of the people who practise it. That’s why it is so adaptable, and so contemptible.
As the Star’s Middle East expert Andrew, you’d also know that a lot of man to man sex goes on in eastern cultures, largely because their young men can’t have it with a woman until they are married. It’s not a taboo, and it’s not what we understand as ‘gay.’ Its a tradition. There’s a fairly complex code wherein the top is not considered homosexual, it’s only bottoms that are. Having a guy on the side is a widely known practice all over the region. Read Wilde or any of the famous poofs who regularly visited Muslim countries for a bit of slap and tickle. In Britain, ‘gay’ used to be known as ‘the Persian disease.’
Sadly, since our intervention in Iraq, the rabid fundamentalists have become empowered. I feel for gay middle eastern men who face the double jeopardy of persecution at the hands of fundie minorities and – if they do manage to get to a western nation – face immigration and other difficulties because our miscreant media have branded them terrorists and all the other negatives that go with ‘being of middle eastern appearance.’
Islam is not so different to Christianity, same theory and ideologies. You may remember Ann Coulter saying that gays should be tortured. You may be aware that the US has and is torturing 1000’s of Muslims all over the world. Since 01 over a million have died. Its just that Islam is the new scapegoat in the West and uninformed readers are happy to swallow the most absurd bullshit without question. Currently there’s a ridiculous story about gays having their arses glued shut and then force fed medicine to give them diarrhea doing the rounds. Oh how the medical profession could use a glue like that, if it existed.
Shayne, I’ve been reading dozens of articles every year about the plight of GLBT Iraqis since the invasion and if there is any inconsistency here, it’s in what comes out of the mouths of Iraqi police, politicians and clerics.
That we are beginning to hear a more tolerant line now is because, finally, in 2009, after all the safe houses that have been shut down by the militias and the extra-judicial killings have escalated, this story has finally been picked up by mainstream Western media and donor nations to Iraq are beginning to ask questions.
You bring up Iran for some reason so I will deal with it quickly- the last execution in Iran may have been in 2005, but in that time hundreds of gay men have been brutally tortured, many have suicided and some have even undergone sex change operations (transgendered people are recognised by the Iranian regime, but not gays) to try to end the persecution they face- but to little avail. Their stories are not hard to find- perhaps you should read them.
Bar a few exceptions, draconian punishments against homosexuality are supported by a majority throughout the Islamic world just like they once were in Australia and other Western nations.
Of the few Muslim countries that do not criminalise homosexuality, none provide even the most basic protections from discrimination, let alone recognising same-sex relationships and with the exception of perhaps Indonesia, local gay rights groups are refused recognition by government at all levels
There is at least one other condemnation of homosexuality in the Koran other than the verses relating the story of Lot (or “Lut” in Arabic- and very, very few Muslims interpret this story as not being about homosexuality), and the Koran is not the only source that Muslims draw on in deciding Sharia. There is also the Hadiths (or passed down sayings of the Prophet) and many of these are far harsher than what is contained in the Koran in regards to homosexuality.
One Sunni hadith records the Prophet Mohammed as saying, “Whoever you find committing the sin of the people of Lut, kill them, both the one who does it and the one to whom it is done”, though traditionally in most Islamic societies the passive partner is the one that is blamed.
Yes, there are increasing numbers of progressive Muslims around the world (and I am grateful to have known some of them personally) but they still represent a small minority, and more often than not it is conservative and fundamentalist Muslims that are attacking them for “not being real Muslims”, not the other way around.
What it shows, Andrew, is that we need to source our news information carefully, not just take a story at face value when it suits our agenda. Even the National Enquirer requires two or more sources before they run with something. The last government sanctioned execution of gay men in the region was in 2005. Western media reported they were hung for being gay. Iranian authorities claimed they were hung for raping a 14 year-old boy, if my memory serves me.
For the record, the Koran itself only has one reference to homosexuality, and that’s the story of Lot, which is very similar to the one in the Christian Bible. Some people interpret this story to be a prohibition of sodomy, but others interpret it as a prohibition of rape, as the people of Lot forced themselves on their victims.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric is invariably misinformed conjecture. The people committing these acts are the vast minority, just as there are hate crimes against homosexuals in the West. Continuous exposure to propaganda especially from the US and Israel has clearly skewed many otherwise rational people’s views in a very destructive way.
Just as we need to be vigilant against homohate crimes, it’s also vital to address fear and ignorance-driven hate rhetoric before it begins to fester.
And yet, from the New York Times earlier this month-
“Clerics in Sadr City have urged followers to help root out homosexuality in Iraqi society, and the police have begun their own crackdown on gay men. -œHomosexuality is against the law, said Lt. Muthana Shaad, at a police station in the Karada district, a neighborhood that has become popular with gay men. -œAnd it’s disgusting. For the past four months, he said, officers have been engaged in a -œcampaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them.
What I think the denials by the Sadrists and Interior Ministry show is that media scrutiny and questioning by foreign governments (particularly those that supply a large proportion of Iraq’s governmental funding) on this issue is starting to have an effect.
I think the contradiction between the two articles also shows that many of Iraq’s police are badly undertrained and that “the law” is very often what their prejudices or the prejudices of their immediate superiors decide it is.
According to BBC News, “it is believed that their own families are killing homosexuals, out of shame for their behaviour. ” and “…officials in all categories deny that they support the persecution or killing of homosexuals.
“The Interior Ministry has no policy of arresting gays just for being gay,” said Brigadier Diah Sahi, head of the Iraqi police’s Criminal Investigation Department.
“There’s no law to justify it, unless they commit indecent acts in public.”
“It’s a psychological problem in any case. Arresting people and putting them in jail isn’t going to change anything,” he added.
A Shia cleric in central Baghdad’s Kerrada district, Shaikh Sadeq al-Zair, said he saw many young men dressing more effeminately than women.
“It’s a phenomenon which has to be fought, but through treatment,” he said.
“If these people are sick, they should be given therapy. But violence is rejected by all religions, especially by Islam, which is a religion of mercy.”
A spokesman of the Sadrist movement – followers of the militant young cleric Moqtada Sadr whose Mehdi Army militia used to rule Sadr City – also said that there was nothing in Islam to say that homosexuals should be killed. “
Hi Sublingo, the New York Times reported the Sistani fatwa decree as genuine as recently as April 7th of this year.
The fatwa was removed from the website on which it was posted after foreign media attention in 2006, but I’ve read nothing to indicate that it was non-genuine or that it has been revoked. A similar fatwa directed at lesbians remained.
According to veteran gay journalist Doug Ireland “That fatwa, or religiously-inspired legal pronouncement, led to the deployment of anti-gay death squads by the Badr Corps, the military arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the most powerful political Shia group in that nation and the cornerstone of the current Iraqi government.”
“The Badr Corps was integrated into the Iraqi Interior Ministry [in 2006], and its members now wear police uniforms and are able to operate with full police powers.”
I know that another Sistani fatwa, on armed resistance against foreign forces in Iraq was declared false last year- could that be what you’re thinking of?
Perhaps it should also be noted that homosexuality WAS NOT illegal under Saddam Hussein until 2001 – right before the US invasion. Homosexuals WERE NOT prosecuted under the Hussein government. The US invasion, which has emboldened religous extremists, has increased persecution of gays.
Ali Hili is a gay Iraqi who fled to London 3 years ago. -œAre gay people in the United States, Britain and Australia aware of what their governments have done to our country? writes Ali Hili on his group’s blog, Iraqi LGBT (iraqilgbtuk.blogspot.com). -œTheir armies invaded and occupied our land, destroyed the infrastructure of government, and created the chaos and lawlessness that has allowed religious fundamentalism to flourish and to terrorize women and gay people.
No, Ali, awareness is not a concern for the opinionated.
Check your facts, no such fatwa was ever issued. The hubbub 3 years ago was a result of a gay-rights group sifting through pre-existing material that, yes, was similar in content but was not part of any sudden fatwa or decree.
I’ll leave it up to you to determine if there’s a material difference there, but it’s important to get one’s facts straight nonetheless.