Pam’s got the horrific story of two gay Iranian teens who were hanged for the crime of being gay. It’s even more horrific when you realize that 4000 gays and lesbians have been executed since the Islamic revolt of 1979
Two gay Iranian teenagers — one 18, the other believed to be 16 or 17, were executed this week for the “crime” of homosexuality, the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) reported on July 19. The two youths — identified only by their initials as M.A. and A.M., were hanged in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad in north-eastern Iran, on the orders of Court No. 19. The hanging of the teens was also reported by the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
Consensual gay sex in any form is punishable by death in the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to the website Age of Consent, which monitors such laws around the world, in Iran “Homosexuality is illegal, those charged with love-making are given a choice of four deathstyles: being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword, or dropped from the highest perch. According to Article 152, if two men not related by blood are discovered naked under one cover without good reason, both will be punished at a judge’s discretion. Gay teens (Article 144) are also punished at a judge’s discretion.
…And Outrage, in its release about the gay teens’ execution, noted that, “according to Iranian human rights campaigners, over 4000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979. Last August, a 16-year-old girl was hanged for ‘acts incompatible with chastity.'”
In the case of the two teens hanged in Mashhad, “They admitted having gay sex (probably under torture) but claimed in their defense that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death,” according to the ISNA report as translated by Outrage. “Prior to their execution, the gay teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes.”
Deplorable and despicable. This sort of Shi’ite Islamic Fundamentalist disregard for human rights and freedom is exactly why it was so necessary for the Bush administration to undertake the nation-building exercise in Iraq. Those poor oppressed people, free from Saddam’s rape rooms and torture chambers, will greet us as liberators and embrace democracy, which will then spread like a weed throughout these hotbeds of religious radicalism like Iran. And then the whole world will live in glorious peace and harmony and… I’m sorry, Professor Cole, you wanted to say something?
(Salon) …[T]he Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week.
Jaafari’s visit was a blow to the Bush administration’s strategic vision, but a sweet triumph for political Shiism. In the dark days of 1982, Tehran was swarming with Iraqi Shiite expatriates who had been forced to flee Saddam Hussein’s death decree against them. They had been forced abroad, to a country with which Iraq was then at war. Ayatollah Khomeini, the newly installed theocrat of Iran, pressured the expatriates to form an umbrella organization, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which he hoped would eventually take over Iraq. Among its members were Jaafari and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. On Jan. 30, 2005, Khomeini’s dream finally came true, courtesy of the Bush administration, when the Supreme Council and the Dawa Party won the Iraqi elections.
Ooh, I wonder how many yellow-ribbon-sportin’ flag-wavin’ SUV drivers realize that our soldiers are dying to secure the country so “Ayatollah Assaholla”‘s homeboy can make nice with the government that held American hostages for 444 days. I guess it’s a mixed bag for your typical Repugnican. On one hand, the hostage drama ousted Carter and brought St. Reagan, and by extension, Bush 41 & 43. On the other hand, it created “Nightline”.
Still, we’ve got to expect that neighboring countries have to get along, right? Won’t Iraq’s flowering democracy have a positive impact on defusing fanatic religious tensions in the region? It’s that Islamic theocratic law that gets the gays executed, right?
Iraq has a Shiite Muslim majority of some 62 percent. Iran’s Shiite majority is thought to be closer to 90 percent. The Shiites of the two countries have had a special relationship for over a millennium. … Although neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz maintained before the Iraq war that Iraqis are more secular and less interested in an Islamic state than Iranians, in fact the ideas of Khomeini had had a deep impact among Iraqi Shiites. When they could vote in January earlier this year, they put the Khomeini-influenced Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in control of seven of the nine southern provinces, along with Baghdad itself.
Oh. Well, still, Iraq’s burgeoning democracy still has influence from the Sunnis and Kurds, not to mention our emphasis on human rights and liberty. Just because the country is over 60% Shia doesn’t mean they’re going to institute religious law.
When Jaafari met the head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, on Tuesday, the two discussed expanding judicial cooperation between the two countries. Shahrudi said that cooperation with Iran’s Draconian “justice system” has had a positive impact on other Muslim countries. He called for Iraq to coordinate with something called the “Islamic Human Rights Organization” — an Orwellian phrase in dictatorial Iran, a state that tortures political prisoners and engages in other acts of brutality. And he urged the Iraqi government to put greater reliance on “popular forces” (local and national Shiite militias) in establishing security.
… [Jaafari’s] Dawa Party certainly does hope to have Islamic law play a greater role in Iraqi society. The New York Times revealed on Wednesday that the new draft of the Iraqi constitution will put personal status matters, many of them affecting women, under religious courts.
I see. Doesn’t sound too promising for gay Iraqi teens.
The Iranians hold a powerful hand in the Iraqi poker game. They have geopolitical advantages, are flush with petroleum profits because of the high price of oil, and have much to offer their new Shiite Iraqi partners. Their long alliance with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani gives them Kurdish support as well. Bush’s invasion removed the most powerful and dangerous regional enemy of Iran, Saddam Hussein, from power. In its aftermath, the religious Shiites came to power at the ballot box in Iraq, bestowing on Tehran firm allies in Baghdad for the first time since the 1950s. And in a historic irony, Iran’s most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran’s neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime — but succeeded only in defeating itself.
The ongoing chaos in Iraq has made it impossible for Bush administration hawks to carry out their long-held dream of overthrowing the Iranian regime, or even of forcing it to end its nuclear ambitions. (The Iranian nuclear research program will almost certainly continue, since the Iranians are bright enough to see what happened to the one member of the “axis of evil” that did not have an active nuclear weapons program.) The United States lacks the troops, but perhaps even more critically, it is now dependent on Iran to help it deal with a vicious guerrilla war that it cannot win. In the Middle East, the twists and turns of history tend to make strange bedfellows — something the neocons, whose breathtaking ignorance of the region helped bring us to this place, are now learning to their dismay.
More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq’s neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.
Whoops…
