We already mentioned the 12 Iraqi police officers who beat up, blindfolded, and carried off six occupants of an “emergency shelter” run by the UK-based Iraqi LGBT. The group says the two gay men, one lesbian, and one transgender person arrested have been transported to Baghdad to be interrogated (i.e. tortured) for information about the group. If past experience is any indicator, these individuals are at serious risk of ending up in the hands of a radical Muslim militia to be mutilated, killed, and abandoned. Iraqi LGBT says the action reeks of the police and state modus operandi, but while the American and British governments have stood by promising to “investigate,” they’ve done nothing because of a lack of evidence and “religious sensitivities.” Does foreign inaction make them an accomplice to gay genocide?
Last year Rep. Jared Polis got the State Department to investigate claims of arrests, beatings, rapes, trials, and executions of LGBTs by Iraq’s interior ministry security forces. But Patricia Butenis of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad cut the investigation off at the legs saying, “We have no evidence that security forces are in any way involved with these militias.”
Meanwhile, the British foreign office merely states “official figures do not show a significant overall increase in violence against, or systematic abuse of, the homosexual community by fundamentalists or militia groups” and repeats the claims by Iraq’s human rights and interior ministries that “homosexuality is not a crime in Iraq” and that LGBT murderers “will be prosecuted”, although none have.
In short, there’s a lot of concern and promises of investigations, but no real action. British authorities have cited “religious sensitivities” as their reason for inaction, but at some point one has to wonder whether the US and UK governments see LGBTs as politically expendable.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Iraq’s already a morass of political and security issues, and between the Iraqi militias who pledge their allegiance to powerful anti-gay clerics and the corruptible and destabilized Iraqi government, the U.S. and U.K. may see LGBT rights as a less important problem in the larger picture. Charging the Iraqi government with systematically targeting its LGBT citizens would upset the already tenuous relationship between the country and its Western allies, but more practically, neither the the Americans or British are offering suggestions on how Iraq could reform its own system or a pledge to help them do so.
It’s ultra-cynical and ignorant to think either government wants Iraqi LGBTs to suffer as they have. (Even those claims about American soldiers killing gay Iraqis turned out to be false.) And though our troops have their own problems with The Gays in Iraq, Iraqi homophobia is hardly a Western export.
It has more to do with traditional Muslim beliefs and roving bands of religious extremist vigilantes. But those vigilantes happen to work for the Iraqi government now, and if the U.S. and U.K. are serious about addressing the problem, they need to offer real solutions and consequences for Iraq’s continued harassment of their LGBT citizens. Otherwise, our continued inaction is tantamount to permission.
Larry
They care more about “religious sensitivities” than they do about the lives of GLBT people.
Jonathan
The Iraqis were better off with Saddam Hussein. The rest of the arab world hated Hussein, but can anyone really say that Iraq is improved after the bombing of it’s cities , the killing of its’ people and now the hunting and murder of gay people? The only ones who have benefited are the Kurds.
ewe
Don’t expect much to change until some actual gay people become the spokepeople that comment on this issue.
jason
Why didn’t Gay Inc. ask Obama about this at its little get-together in the White House the other day? Oh, right, the gays were more interested in happy snaps with their cameras and cell phones.
Bill Perdue
1) There is no Iraqi government. It was destroyed by the US invasion and occupation. It’s replacements are cliques of sunni and shiite collaborationist quislings.
The situation remains unstable because the US wants it that way. Divide and rule or in this case divide and grab the oil.. U.S Senate approves partition plan in Iraq – By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau Sept. 26, 2007 “the Senate adopted a resolution… urging the Iraqis to decentralize their federal government and hand more control to the ethnically divided regions dominated by the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. The 75-23 vote on the resolution (was) offered by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, D-Del…. Biden, at the time the Senator from Bank of America was hustling money from BP and Texaco. As a result of American efforts like this hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in US armed and inspired inter-communal warfare,
2) Iraqi society remains devastated and cannot be rebuilt while occupied. This month is Obama’s self imposed deadline for massive troop withdrawals but it won’t happen unless they decide to give up the oil or get kicked out.
3) Homohating is a feature of all three Abrahamic cults but in former English colonies like India, the United States, Uganda and Iraq it was given the force of law by the English.
4) The US military brass in Iraq train and arm the shiite and sunni jihadists police who compete in killing and torturing our brothers and sisters. In spite of pleas from Iraqi GLBT folks the US military brass refuses to lift a finger to stop the murders. The campaigns of torture and murder, in the absence of a real Iraqi government and since all decisions are ultimately in the hands of the invaders, the US and English bear the direct and sole responsibility for the anti-LGBT pogroms.
5) We should demand that Obama and H. Clinton (who voted for the resolution cited above) offer unconditional, open asylum to GLBT victims in the region and in Africa were American evangelists and dominionists like Rick Warren, Obama’s bbf, are promoting anti-LGBT laws and violence.
Daniel
@Bill Perdue: Hey Bill, excellent analysis. I cherish commenters like you. Thanks for sharing!
paulcanning
As I mention in the Guardian piece, all other safe houses now have to be moved. Support is really desperately needed.
To help Iraqi LGBT please visit http://iraqilgbt.org.uk/
Bill Perdue
@paulcanning: Thanks for the link Paul.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
When is this country going to learn there is no reasoning with those savage scumbag fundamentelistic muslims? A culture that can torture and imprison for 2 years with whippings and then just prior being released bring “newly discovered” charges of rape against 14 and 16 year old Gay teens and hang them in front of a cheering mob, bury a rape victim up to her chest and have the members of her village stone her to death including her brothers and father are simply incapable of acting like civilized human beings. Animals do not treat their own like these scumbags treat other human beings. We need to get the hell out of that region, continue to support Israel and then make an unmistakable statement that any country who inflicts any harm on the United States will be bombed back to the stone age and let them destroy each other………..
For simply being born Gay………….
[img]http://thesportinglife.typepad.com/the_sporting_life/images/iran1_1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.thewe.cc/thewei/&/&/images4/2005_war_photos/iran_execution_3.jpe[/img]
[img]http://pridetb.homestead.com/files/Iran_Hangs_Gay_Teens_3.jpg[/img]
Bill Perdue
@PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: Nothing excuses the often violent hatemongering caused by religious cults and terrorist religious states like Iran and the zionist colony.
They murdered young GLBT folks at the LGBT center in Jaffa, in zionoit occupied Palestine. They practice excorcisms that regulary end in the torture and death of children in areas of Africa infested by christer missionaries. And it includes the mass murder of Palestinian children in Gaza.
The problem is epidemic wherever religion rears it’s ugly head. In muslim countries where the islamist are encouraged by the state, like Iran and US occupied Iraq GLBT people suffer horribly. And they’re fighting back http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/queermuslims/
[img]http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/images/palestinian_child_400.jpg[/img]
Hilarious
Our country was founded on genocide and slavery yet we go on and on about “terrorism” and how horrible “3rd world countries” are.
This is a surprise to people?
Sure we have many freedoms here, but the current good shouldn’t cause you to forget the past or ignore the bad in the present.
Don’t even get me started on Britain.
kim
To “plays well with others”. When you make a blanket statement about a HUGE group of people (Muslims) who are very diverse, you add to the problem. There are Muslim LGBTs too. And Muslim LGBT sympathizers.
Queer Supremacist
@kim: And they all get murdered unless they escape to a safe haven.
There are gay Muslims, but that doesn’t make Islam any less of a despicable religion. And those who survive usually become apostates. Plays Well With Others is correct about that hate group.
Better to have a country that tries to right the wrongs about its past than a whole fucking part of the world hopelessly devoted to genocide because their religion is based on a mistranslation and misinterpretation of some ancient book written by bigoted kooks.
Western secularism made gay rights possible. Western secularism must be spread to all countries of the world, and then and only then is world peace possible. The barbarian cultures that attack gay people must be destroyed.
Bill Perdue
@Queer Supremacist: @PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: Strange bedfellows…?
Mysanthropic Destiny
Religion is the pathology of righteous cognitive dissonance. I cannot abide such things, but you cannot make people see or live life the way you do. Those who cling to this theology that condemns them to death do so because on some ecumenical level they feel they deserve it. Break free from it. Live your life as a stigma, (try to) change your society, or find a place where you can life free. Easy words and lofty ideals that millions (more most likely) have died for, but a choice must be made.
Silence is just another form of consent.
alan
@PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: To begin with, the pictures you have posted are from Iran, not Iraq. They are of 2 allegedly homosexual teenagers from 2005.
Second, Israel has not done anything to help homosexuals in its own country or any where else in the middle east unless you think raining bombs on lgbt Arabs somehow benefits queer people in the region. A number of lgbt Israelis are part of the peace block and would reject your hateful, ill informed diatribe.
No humans are savages. Iraq is known as the cradle of human civilization. The situation there is dire for all minority groups and the US and its allies should take moral and fiscal responsibility for destabilizing and dismantling that nation.
I’m an atheist from the US but even I know we need solutions for this crisis, not bigots with underhanded motives and prejudices. You are part of the problem.
I, for one, would like to hear from Iraqi lgbts themselves on how internationals can help.