BAGHDAD — The relative freedom of a newly democratic Iraq and the recent improvement in security have allowed a gay subculture to flourish here. The response has been swift and deadly. In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word "pervert" in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.
In 2005, the country’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a religious decree that said gay men and lesbians should be "punished, in fact, killed." He added, "The people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing." The language has since been removed from his Web site.
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. "Homosexuality 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. "And it’s disgusting." For the past four months, he said, officers have been engaged in a "campaign to clean up the streets and get the beggars and homosexuals off them." Gay men, he said, can be arrested only if they are seen engaging in sex, but the police try to drive them away. "These people, we make sure they can’t get together in a coffee shop or walk together in the street — we make them break up," he said.
Friends can send donations to IRAQI LGBT: The immediate urgent priority is to support and donate money to LGBT activists in Iraq in order to assist their efforts to help other Lesbians, Gay, Bisexuals and Trans gender Iraqi's facing death, persecution and systematic targeting by the Iraqi police and Badr and Sadr militia and to raise awareness about the wave of homophobic murders in Iraq to the outside world. Funds raised will also help provide LGBTs under threat of killing with refuge in the safer parts of Iraq (including safe houses, food, electricity, medical help) and assist efforts help them seek refuge in neighboring countries.
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We applaud Colorado Congressman Jared Polis for his efforts last week to shine the spotlight on the killings of homosexuals in Iraq, and to press the State Department to demand accountability from the Iraqi government. The first openly gay man to be elected to the House, Polis has been investigating the treatment of gays in Iraq for several months, according to The Post's Michael Riley. His research led to the discovery of a transgender Iraqi man who told the congressman he had been arrested, beaten and raped by security forces with Iraq's Ministry of Interior. Human-rights groups have passed information to Polis that claims another man was beaten into confessing he belonged to a gay-rights group and that the man had been sentenced to execution by an Iraqi court.
Polis, who toured Iraq last week, passed along a letter outlining his grim findings to State Department officials in Baghdad. He told Riley: "We will see whether the Iraqi government is serious about protecting the human rights of all Iraqis, and we can also see what role our own State Department can play in helping to protect this minority in Iraq."
Urgent action is needed to halt the execution of 128 prisoners on death row in Iraq. Many of those awaiting execution were convicted for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, according to IRAQI-LGBT, a UK based organisation of Iraqis supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq. According to Ali Hili of IRAQI-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week.
IRAQI-LGBT urgently requests that the UK Government, Human Rights Groups and the United Nations Human Rights Commission intervene with due speed to prevent this tragic miscarriage of justice from going ahead. "We have information and reports on members of our community whom been arrested and waiting for execution for the crimes of homosexuality,’’ said Mr Hili. "Iraqi lgbt has been a banned from running our activities on Iraqi soil." "Raids by the Iraqi police and ministry of interior forces cost our group the disappearing and killing of 17 members working for Iraqi lgbt since 2005," added Mr Hili.
Gay men and lesbians in Iraq have long been among the targets of both Shiite and Sunni death squads, but their murders have been overshadowed by the hundreds of overall weekly casualties during the height of sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007.
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Amsterdam, long hailed as the gay capital of the world, has lost much of that reputation due to some violent incidents in recent years. Whether or not Muslim youths are responsible for these incidents is a subject of debate, but a clash between the public acceptance of homosexuality and the rejection of that practice by Islam is most apparent in Slotervaart. The borough, which gained international notoriety as the neighborhood of Mohammed B., the murderer of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, is home to a largely immigrant population with 7,500 Moroccan-Dutch and 4,000 Turkish-Dutch people. At the same time, the borough contains a large recreational area, the Oeverlanden, that functions as a cruise area.
Every time Ahmed Marcouch leaves his house in Slotervaart, the Moroccan gay man looks through the peep hole in his door to check for gay-bashers. "But unfortunately the bastards will always be waiting on the corner of the street." When Marcouch passes, he gets called names and spat on. The chairman of this immigrant borough of 45,000 people, Marcouch has taken it upon himself to fight this type of homophobia. On Wednesday he presented a memorandum with measures to make the neighborhood more gay-friendly.
Ahmed Marcouch, the chairman of the Slotervaart borough council in Amsterdam, has chosen the confrontational approach to make his ethnic minority neighborhood more tolerant towards gays. Marcouch wants to see a gay bar opened, he wants to educate primary school children and organize a football tournament between Moroccan and gay teams. "The freedom of gay people is my freedom and my freedom is the freedom of gay people," the prominent local politician said at the presentation of his proposals.
Marcouch now wants to take the shock treatment approach to this intolerance. Marcouch, a Muslim who was born in Morocco himself, has already made an appearance at the 'Pink Eid Al-Fitr', a gay celebration of the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, and he has debated with religious leaders who say that Islam and homosexuality can't co-exist. And now he wants to take it one step further: "We're going to take the confrontational approach and it will be painful at times." In a controversial move, Marcouch now wants Amsterdam's famous Gay Pride parade to start in Slotervaart this year. The organizers of the parade, which takes place on Amsterdam's canals, say this is technically impossible. They have offered instead to give Marcouch a place on the first boat to sail in the parade in August. "If Gay Pride can't come to Slotervaart, Slotervaart can come to Gay Pride," organiser Frank van Dalen said.
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At last year's Istanbul International Film Festival, one of the major attractions is A Jihad for Love, a documentary about a taboo subject: homosexuality in Islamic countries. Homosexuality is strictly banned in most interpretations of the Koran. This is the first time the film is being screened in a Muslim country. The film, which Indian Muslim director Pervez Sharma filmed in 12 countries and took six years to make, is an intimate look at the lives of 12 gay Muslim men and women. Much of the material was filmed in secret in Muslim countries that ban homosexuality. But Sharma says the film is as much about the Muslim faith as it is about homosexuality.
"The world's first film, about Islam and homosexuality, because what is central to this film is Islam. The Koran is central to this film. I always say that I made this film with a Muslim camera, and if I had been a white Western filmmaker, as opposed to a gay Muslim filmmaker, I don't think I would been able to make this film, or get the kind of access that I did into these communities, that had been surrounded by silence." said Sharma.
(from Voice of America)
Sharma argues the film is not intended as an attack on Islam, but rather a defense of it. He says the movie is aimed as much at Western audiences as at Muslims, with the goal of challenging stereotypes about the Islamic faith, which exist in the post-September 11 world.
"It shows people, Islam is not a problematic monolith, but that is lived in very diverse ways, in different countries, that it is living religion. It is the world's fastest growing religion, for a reason, and it certainly enables the discourse about Islam to shift. It takes it away from violence and takes it towards love, and that is why I called the film a Jihad for Love," added Sharma.
(from Voice of America)
After the screening of the movie A Jihad for Love on the Amnesty International Film Festival 2008, Parliamentarian Samira Bouchibti (PvdA) interviewed the filmmakers director Parvez Sharma and producer Sandi Dubowski, as well as Mushin Hendricks, a homosexual imam from South Africa and alongside the Egyptian Mazen from the film.
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Islam 'recognizes homosexuality', at least there is a small ripple of a tide turning in Jakarta.
Homosexuals and homosexuality are natural and created by God, thus permissible within Islam, a discussion concluded here Thursday. Moderate Muslim scholars said there were no reasons to reject homosexuals under Islam, and that the condemnation of homosexuals and homosexuality by mainstream ulema and many other Muslims was based on narrow-minded interpretations of Islamic teachings.
Siti Musdah Mulia of the Indonesia Conference of Religions and Peace cited the Koran's al-Hujurat (49:3) that one of the blessings for human beings was that all men and women are equal, regardless of ethnicity, wealth, social positions or even sexual orientation. "There is no difference between lesbians and non-lesbians. In the eyes of God, people are valued based on their piety," she told the discussion organized by nongovernmental organization Arus Pelangi. "And talking about piety is God's prerogative to judge," she added. "The essence of the religion (Islam) is to humanize humans, respect and dignify them." Musdah said homosexuality was from God and should be considered natural, adding it was not pushed only by passion.
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One of the most basic tenants of Islam is quite similar to the biblical teachings of not judging others lest ye be judged. I'm told this is why most Islamic scholars withheld public condemnation of the 9-11 attacks, and in doing so, so infuriating the rightwing zealots in this country. This tenant is also true of the vast majority of Muslims views of homosexuality. Of course you get the extremists grabbing headlines and the thugs in power using us as scapegoats and easy targets to help maintain their tenuous grips on power. If you are incapable of true leadership, it's a tried and true political tactic to whip up mob mentality by encouraging zenophobia against the usual whipping boys. And as we know from our own circumstance, the less intellectually enabled among us are easily swayed by these tactics and by these thugs...