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Thursday, April 06, 2006

Open season: Death squads targeting gays in Iraq



Homosexuals being hanged in Iran



A shout out to Allah's Willing Executioners for alerting me to this.

Like most straight Westerners, my attitude towards homosexuals is live and let live, although I have some rather uncompromising views on same sex marriage and its effect on society as a whole.

In Iraq apparently, homosexuals don't even have the live and let live option.

According to a story by the well known gay publication the Advocate, Shiite Muslim leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a death-to-gays fatwa in Iraq last October, and now squads of the local Badr Corps are systematically targeting gay Iraqis for execution.

The Badr Corps is the militia belonging to the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the the largest Shia political party in Iraq...who were, for some reason, allowed to run freely in the election that was supposed to cement Iraqi democracy, if you listen to Washington. (?!)

“The Badr Corps is committed to the ‘sexual cleansing’ of Iraq,“ Ali Hili, a 33-year-old gay Iraqi exile in London who fled to the United Kingdom five months ago, told veteran reporter Doug Ireland. “We believe that the Badr Corps is receiving advice from Iran on how to target gay people.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been known for a long time for persecuting and executing young gay men.

The Ayatollah Sistani, 77, is an Iranian-born cleric who is the supreme Shia authority in Iraq and the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council. His fatwa says that “people involved” in homosexuality “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

And Sistani is widely known as a moderate!

"Badr militants are entrapping gay men via Internet chat rooms," Hili continued. "They arrange a date and then beat and kill the victim. Males who are unmarried by the age of 30 or 35 are placed under surveillance on suspicion of being gay, as are effeminate men. They will be investigated and warned to get married. Badr will typically give them a month to change their ways. If they don't change their behavior or if they fail to show evidence that they plan to get married, they will be arrested, disappear, and eventually be found dead. The bodies are usually discovered with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolds over their eyes, and bullet wounds to the back of the head.”

This coincides with information I have from some of my contacts in Israel, who have told me that the Shin Bet is aware of a number of gay Palestinian men living illegally in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel but refuses to deport them, knowing it would be a death sentence.

I wonder how that computes with people on the Left who claim to espouse gay rights but reflexively demonize Israel?

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