While all you supposedly “liberal” & “pro-gay” bloggers post or click “like” on anti-Israel or pro-Islam propaganda, remember this:

Israel, Palestine, and Gays
by Paul Varnell

Originally appeared August 28, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

LET’S TAKE A QUIZ. No peeking at the answers directly below.

1. Which Middle Eastern country has no sodomy laws nor uses vague charges such as “offenses against religion” or “immoral conduct” to prosecute and imprison gays and lesbians?

2. Which Middle Eastern country has a variety of gay organizations which safely conduct gay advocacy efforts?

3. Which Middle Eastern country has a gay and lesbian community center in its capital city?

4. Which Middle Eastern country holds annual Gay Pride parades?

5. Which Middle Eastern country has members of parliament who actively support and speak out on behalf of gays and lesbians?

6. In which Middle Eastern country did the head of state meet with gay activists?

7. Which Middle Eastern country lets gays and lesbians join its military services?

8. Which Middle Eastern country has broadcast programs about gays and lesbians on its television stations?

9. And a bonus question: When gays in Palestine are forced to flee persecution, what Middle Eastern country do they usually flee to?

Answers:

1. Israel
2. Israel
3. Israel
4. Israel
5. Israel
6. Israel
7. Israel
8. Israel
9. Israel

The contrasting treatment of gay men in neighboring Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt is well known: Gays are beheaded or sentenced to long prison terms.

What seems less well known, however, is the appalling treatment of gays under Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. At least it was less known until Yossi Klein Halevi wrote about it in the August 19th New Republic. Palestine makes rural Texas look like San Francisco.

According to Halevi, one young man discovered to be gay was forced by Palestinian Authority police “to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects.” During one interrogation Palestinian police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle.

When he was released he fled to Israel. If he were forced to return to Gaza, he said, “The police would kill me.”

An American who foolishly moved into the West Bank to live with his Palestinian lover said they told everyone they were just friends, but one day they “found a letter under our door from the Islamic court. It listed the five forms of death prescribed by Islam for homosexuality, including stoning and burning. We fled to Israel that same day,” he said.

The head of a Tel Aviv gay organization told Halevi, “The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority doesn’t just come from the families or the Islamic groups, but from the P.A. itself.”

Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic religion law, he said: “It’s now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A.” He recalled that one gay man in the Palestinian police went to Israel for a short time. When he returned to the West Bank, Palestinian Authority police confined him to a pit without food or water until he died.

A 17-year-old gay youth recalled that he spent months in a Palestinian Authority prison “where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds.”

The U.S. State Department, which more and more seems to be living on some other planet, blandly noted in a 2001 human rights report, “In the Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized and occasionally receive physical threats.” That’s one way to put it.

In the last few years, Halevi reports, hundreds of gay Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have fled to Israel, usually to Tel Aviv, Israel’s most cosmopolitan city. Many are desperately poor, he says, “but at least they’re beyond the reach of their families and the P.A.”

So it seems clear that Israel is the one country in the region in which gays have legal rights as citizens and live in safety and freedom.

Oddly, however, some gays and lesbians over on the anti-capitalist (“progressive”) left sympathize with Palestinian terrorists and support the Palestinian Authority. One such fledgling group calls itself “Queers for Palestine,” another is named “Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism” (as if trying to stop terrorism against Israeli civilians is itself terrorism).

To be sure, no one should argue that gays and lesbians must support Israel just because it is vastly more gay-friendly. They don’t. They may feel that some other political principles are more important than gay-friendliness.

But gays who support Palestine, and they seem almost entirely on the far reaches of the political left, give the lie to the frequent demand made by gays on the left that the rest of us must support some “progressive” politician or position because it supposedly benefits gays, even though doing so would compromise or violate some basic political principle we as individuals may hold.

Keep “Queers for Palestine” in mind next time some gay left advocate says that because you are gay you have to support some approved “gay” position. And remember the pit, the sewer water, the bag of feces and the toilet bowl cleaner.

from: http://www.indegayforum.org/news/printer/27154.html

The Islam-sanctioned treatment of gays:

(These men were hanged in Iran for “Homosexuality”)

EDIT/UPDATE :

A person reblogged this saying this: “Two wrongs, don’t make a right. People are people and both situations are wrong. So I disagree with this. While it’s great that Israel has a good policy on gay rights, they’re still killing innocent people. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends children, in short HUMAN BEINGS. All based on who lives on what side of the fence. How is that any better than hating people for who they love. BOTH ARE WRONG. As for Palestina I agree completely that they should not treat gay people the way they do. Once again PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE. No matter who they love, what side of the border they live, no matter the color of skin, sex or what ever ridiculous issue people choose to hate on. We’re all human beings it’s time we start focusing on that fact. Spread love not hate!”:

Perhaps you should also read [ this post ] that explains how the majority of the so-called “Palestinians” you so love are in fact Nazis. In my mind, it is completely acceptable to “hate on” Nazi-ism.

Israel does not fight with these people because of their “color”, as you so erroneously suggest (obviously Jews come in all colors-and yes, there are Arab Jews too).

The fight is over the fact that these people not only do not have historical right to the land, but they also want to establish the Arabic Islamist equivalent of a Nazi state that is in constant total war with Israel, where homosexuals are tortured and executed publicly, where Jews are hated and killed by both the government and citizens, where marital rape is sanctioned and non-martial rape claims must to have a quorum of MALE witnesses to prosecute or else the raped woman is killed.

Is this the “Free” Palestine you want?:

(Muslims depicted partially burying this Muslim woman, in preparation for her being stoned to death in accordance with the Koran)

ANOTHER person reblogged this saying this:”There’s a serious problem with this post. It’s not clear at all that the photo is what it is claimed to be. Posting photos of serious trauma without accurate contextual information (source, date, location, etc) is irresponsible. The only contextual information provided here is the claim that these men were hanged under “Islam-sanctioned treatment” for being gay. This is a serious accusation against an entire religion. But is it true?

1. Look at the text on the banner.
2. Flip it around to see it from the point of view of the spectators in the photo.
3. Get a rough translation: “Carrying out justice = Increasing security”
4. Do a logical Google search.
5. We find that these five men were, according to the New York Times and other mainstream sources, hanged in Mashad, Iran, on August 1st, 2007 for “rape, abduction, taking drugs and armed robbery.”



6. Capital punishment is wrong and most of the world opposes it (the U.S. and Iran are exceptions). The whole world opposes dishonesty.

(via apack)”

Propaganda like this, with pure lies being used to try and distract the reader and change the very subject of the discussion are commonplace in the anti-Israel scene.Does this person believe that homosexuals are not falsely accused with trumped-up charges of “rape”, “taking drugs” and other crimes simply based on the fact that Islamic society views gay sex as rape, because they believe all homosexuals are on drugs and that killing gays is “justice”.

A simple Google search for “Iran gays” brought me to several versions of the photo of the hanged men posted above, all with captions and tags which say “Gays lynched in Iran” and “Gay Iranians executed” showing that there is a good amount of doubt around the idea that these men were just common criminals who were hanged for random crimes and have supposedly nothing to do with being gay.

This fits right in line with the claim of Iran’s dictator that “There are no gays in Iran”. If they find any, they get executed.

Even if you, for some reason, doubt this photo, do they not see the NUMEROUS photos of the occurrence which exist and are easily accessible online and in print? Does this person doubt that countries run under Islamic law ROUTINELY execute and/or torture gays? If so let’s view some more treatment of the “crime” of homosexuality in Islamic nations:

“These two boys were charged by the Islamic Republic of Iran with “rape” — but multiple testimonies from inside the city of Mashad and from gay Iranian activists and journalists inside Iran make it clear  that the “rape” charge against these two hanged boys was trumped up by the government as part of its lethal anti-gay pogrom against gay people.” (link)

 Al-Tirmidhi (Hadith 1456) The Prophet said, “Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets if be done to him.”