How many gay men recognize the name Ilan Halimi? Probably very few, in any.
The gay community has paid little to no attention to the shocking and horrifying kidnapping, three weeks of torture and murder of a young French man.
Ilan was not gay, so it's not on "our" radar screen. But it should be, no less than Mathew Shepherd. We cannot be in the business of ignoring hate crimes of any sort; hate crimes are not any more or less dangerous to us according to the background of the victim. If the victim is Black, Jewish, Hindu or Gay, our response as a society and as a community must be equal in its outrage and commitment. Anything less than that diminishes our credibility and our ability to inspire positive change.
It is fair to angrily criticize heterosexuals who discount the perils and abomination of gay bashing, especially fatal acts of gay bashing. It is also fair to angrily criticize homosexuals who discount and even ignore identical hate crimes that are perpetrated against heterosexuals.
Ilan Halimi, a lower middle class Parisian, a cellular phone salesman, was kidnapped by a group of men and women, taken to a Paris suburb and increasingly tortured and mutilated over a three week period until he was dead.
His kidnappers, with connections to Hamas and other other Islamic terrorist groups, took Ilan because they believed he was less than human, a declared enemy of Islam, connected to the Jewish agenda and unfairly and immorally rich "as are all Jews."
Emboldened and legitimized by the way Jews are portrayed by Islamic religious leaders and authorities, the kidnappers, numbering more than 20, repeatedly stabbed Ilan, poured acid over 60 percent of his body and extinguished cigarettes on his face over the three week period. Other residents in the Paris housing project, predominately Muslims, were aware of the the fact that their neighbors had kidnapped and were torturing a Jew. They didn't care. It was a Jew.
And despite the fact that the kidnappers sent various anti-Semitic notes to Ilan's family; and despite the fact that the authorities came to learn that Ilan was the fifth Jew that this group had attempted to kidnap, French authorities were slow to call this a hate crime. In an interview with French television, a young French-Arab man smiled when asked about the kidnapper's leader, explaining that the community would welcome him back as a hero.
This is the simple and horrifying truth about hate-mongering, whether it comes from an Islamic or Christian authority figure. When religious leaders and political leaders use their positions of authority to legitimize the persecution, abuse, torture and murder of people based on their ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, are these authority figures any less guilty of the ultimate crimes? When religious freedom is used to justify language that calls for criminal and barbaric behavior, is this not a crime against humanity and civilization?
Ilan Halimi, a heterosexual French Jew and Mathew Shepard, a homosexual American Christian were murdered by Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Hamas and the President of Iran,
Until we come to terms with this reality, Mathew Shepard and Ilan Halimi, united in death, will have died in vain.
And how many of my gay readers are right now shrugging this off because Ilan Halimi wasn't gay? How many are shrugging this off because Ilan Halimi was just a Jew and a Frenchman? And how many of these same readers would be outraged to discover that a heterosexual was indifferent to the murder of Matthew Shepard because he was just a fag?
You'll find photos and links to background on this here:
http://rjr10036.typepad.com/...