Gays in the Islamic
World
by Deroy Murdock,
austinreview.com/archives from the Web, July 14, 2005
This weekend’s Gay Pride festivities
in New York City climaxed with Sunday’s 36th annual parade down Fifth Avenue.
As usual, the raucous affair thrilled some and rattled others, but everyone
walked away intact.
One would have to fantasize about such an occasion, however, in most Muslim
nations where homosexuality remains as concealed as a bride beneath a burqa.
When it peeks through, it isn’t pretty. While many liberals (and President
G.W. Bush) call Islam a religion of peace, “celebrating diversity” is hardly on
its agenda. Consider these recent examples of the Islamic world’s
institutional homophobia:
In Saudi Arabia, 105 men were sentenced in April for acts of “deviant sexual
behavior” following their March arrests. Al-Wifaq, a government-affiliated
newspaper, claimed they illegally danced together and were “behaving like women”
at a gay wedding.
“Calling the event a ‘gay wedding’ has become a lightning rod to justify
discrimination against gay people,” Widney Brown of Human Rights Watch told
Patrick Letellier of gay.com.
Seventy men received one-year prison sentences while 31 got six months to one
year, plus 200 lashes each. Four others face two years behind bars plus
2,000 lashes. If these four receive their lashes at once, Brown fears
their wounds will prove fatal.
“Anyone caught committing sodomy -– kill both the sodomizer and the sodomized,”
Islamic cleric Tareq Sweidan demanded on Qatar TV last April 22. As the
Middle East Media Research Institute (memri.org) reports, Sweidan continued:
“The clerics determined how the homosexual should be killed. They said he
should be stoned to death. Some clerics said he should be thrown off a
mountain.”
Ogudu Emmanuel and Odjegba Tevin admitted that they were male lovers after their
neighbors reported them to Nigerian cops. They were arrested January 15
and charged with “crimes against nature.” The pair apparently escaped from
jail while awaiting trial and potential 14-year prison sentences. Gay
rights activists worried that cops or other inmates may have killed them in
custody.
Last November, an Islamic court in Keffi, issued an arrest warrant for Michael
Ifediora Nwokoma after neighbors accused him of having sex with a man named
Mallam Abdullahi Ibrahim. Nwokoma quickly fled. Ibrahim was charged
with the “unholy” act of “homosexualism.” The court postponed Ibrahim’s
trial indefinitely and incarcerated him until Nwokoma surfaces.
In northern Nigeria, where Sharia law governs 12 Muslim states, homosexuality
requires capital punishment by stoning.
Iraq’s terrorist Ansar al-Sunnah Army, the Islamic Army in Iraq, and the
Mujahedeen Army issued a statement last December 30 urging Iraqis not to vote in
last January’s elections, lest democracy spawn un-Islamic laws such as
“homosexual marriage,” in their words. To be sure, many Americans also
oppose gay marriage, but they at least have the good manners not to detonate
advocates of same-sex unions. Ansar-al-Sunnah is incapable of such
restraint. It scored major headlines when it claimed responsibility for a
December 21 bombing at a U.S. military mess tent at a base in Mosul. It
killed 22 people, 18 U.S. GIs among them.
Egyptian cops have met gay men online and through personal ads, then arrested
them, according to a March 1, 2004 Human Rights Watch report. Since 2001,
HRW says at least 179 men have been charged with “debauchery,” prompting
five-year prison sentences for at least 23. As the Associated Press’ Nadia
Abou El-Magd wrote, HRW “interviewed 63 men who had been arrested for homosexual
conduct. It said they spoke of being whipped, bound and suspended in
painful positions, splashed with cold water, burned with cigarettes, shocked
with electricity to the limbs, genital or tongue. They also said guards
encouraged other prisoners to rape them” -– thus using coercive gay sex to
penalize consensual gay sex.
While he notes that secular nations such as Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and
Syria are more relaxed about homosexuality, Robert Spencer, director of
JihadWatch.org and editor of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, warns against
equating the homophobia of strict Muslim states with, say, American social
conservatives’ opposition to gay-rights laws.
“Jerry Falwell and others like him do not call for the deaths of homosexuals,
while these people do,” Spencer tells me. “This demonstrates the
bankruptcy and, ultimately, the danger of such moral equivalence arguments,
which are nonetheless ubiquitous today in discussions of Islamic terrorism.”
Unlike Sunday’s marchers, many in the Muslim world literally risk their lives
and limbs by merely peering out of the Islamic closet.
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a syndicated columnist
with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a fellow of the Atlas Economic
Research Foundation.
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