Gay Nigerians face Sharia death

[troonraider]

I honestly don't know what to say about this,I can't believe that in this day and age some of the world is still so backward.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6940061.stm

[peggygee]

http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l2/magi43/scotland4.gif

Thank you for the information.

[scroller]

MOST of the world is like that.

[troonraider]

Hey Peggy your Saltire is bigger than mine
@ scroller I sincerely hope not MOST of the world is not so backward in thinking and religiously motivated.

[TomSelis]

Africa and the Caribbean are deeply, violently homophobic. This wasn't known here?

[SarahG]

Hey Peggy your Saltire is bigger than mine
@ scroller I sincerely hope not MOST of the world is not so backward in thinking and religiously motivated.

I guess if you're blinded enough by denial or optimism it is easy to lose touch with the reality of how things go for most of the planet.

[peggygee]

Hey Peggy your Saltire is bigger than mine
@ scroller I sincerely hope not MOST of the world is not so backward in thinking and religiously motivated.


Oh no, I wasn't being sarcastic, I was thinking about the contrasts
between the strict interpretation of Shariac law in the the North of
Nigeria, and the fatwas which allow GRS, and do not condemn the
transgendered in other parts of the Islamic world.

A fatwa is a legal opinion or ruling issued by an Islamic scholar, judge
or mufti. It will be based upon the Qur'an, Sunnah and Islamic
Shari'ah. The Shari'ah is the revealed and the canonical laws
of the religion of Islam.

Fatwas allowing SRS have been issued in a number of Isamic countries,
including Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, etc.

Again my thanks for your bringing this to my attention as well as to the
forum's.

[Floyd R]

It's interesting that sexual reassignment surgeries are performed in Iran but gays and lesbians are often executed.

Do you remember this newstory from a few years ago?

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Iran Gay Teens Executed

Two male teenagers were hanged in Mashhad, Iran, July 19 for having sex with each other, the Iranian Students News Agency reported. The report was translated from Farsi by the British gay-rights group OutRage!.
The teens, one age 18 and one under age 18, reportedly were convicted by Court No. 19 under Islamic Shariah law, which punishes homosexual acts with death. They were identified only as “M.A.” and “A.M.”

The reports said the couple acknowledged having sex but said they didn’t realize it was a capital offense. They also testified that most Iranian boys have sex with each other.

Another report, by Iran Focus, claimed the two were hanged not for engaging in gay sex but for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy. Neither the ISNA report nor a report from the National Council of Resistance of Iran reported this information, OutRage! said.

However, The Times of London reported it on July 22. The paper said: “Iran’s religiously conservative judiciary determined that the pair had raped the 13-year-old boy at knifepoint while he was out for a bicycle ride in the northeastern province of Khorassan.”

OutRage! expressed skepticism over the rape claims.

“The allegation of sexual assault may either be a trumped-up charge to undermine public sympathy for the youths—a frequent tactic by the Islamist regime in Iran—or it may be that the 13-year-old was a willing participant but that Iranian law ... deems that no person of that age is capable of sexual consent and that therefore any sexual contact is automatically deemed in law to be a sex assault,” said OutRage!’s Peter Tatchell, who broke the story in the English-language media.

“This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran,” Tatchell said. “The entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder.

“According to Iranian human-rights campaigners, over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979,” he said. “Altogether, an estimated 100,000 Iranians have been put to death over the last 26 years of clerical rule.”

OutRage! urged the international community to begin treating Iran “as a pariah state” and to “break off diplomatic relations, impose trade sanctions, and give practical support to the democratic and left opposition inside Iran.”

The group also suggested people protest to their nearest Iranian embassy or consulate.

Iran’s capital offenses include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy, blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, repeated sodomy, adultery, prostitution, treason and espionage, according to Agence France-Presse.

[Floyd R]

Here's a recent article about gays being murdered in Iraq.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For gays in Iraq, a life of constant fear
Since the U.S.-led invasion, homosexuals have been increasingly targeted by militias and police, human rights groups say.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
Times Staff Writer

August 5, 2007

BAGHDAD — Samir Shaba sits in a restaurant, nervously describing gay life in Iraq. He speaks in a low voice, occasionally glancing over his shoulder.

The heavyset, clean-shaven Christian says that before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, he frequented the city's gay blogs, online chat rooms and dance clubs, where he wore flashy tight clothes, his hair long and loose to his shoulders.

After the invasion, he and other gays and lesbians were driven underground by sectarian violence and religious extremists. Shaba, 25, packed his flashy clothes away, started wearing baseball caps and baggy T-shirts and stopped visiting clubs and chat rooms. But he couldn't bear to cut his hair.

"I cannot change everything immediately," he said, fingering his black ponytail. "I suffered because I didn't cut it."

Recently, Shaba said, police commandos spotted his hair as he was riding in a taxi through a checkpoint in central Baghdad. Suspecting that he was gay, the four commandos dragged him out of the taxi by his hair, and forced him into an armored car. They demanded his cellphone, cash and sex.

When he refused, they beat him with a baton and gang-raped him. He rubbed the back of his shirt, feeling for the scars.

"They got what they wanted because I thought otherwise I would lose my life," Shaba said, and he began to weep. "They threatened me that if I told anyone, they would kill me."


Heightened attacks

Human rights groups say that Iraqi gays are increasingly targeted by militias and police. The United Nations and State Department have issued reports documenting some of the more recent killings.

A U.N. report in January cited attacks on gays by militants, as well as the existence of "religious courts, supervised by clerics, where homosexuals allegedly would be 'tried,' 'sentenced' to death and then executed."

Iraqi leaders dismiss those allegations, and Middle East experts say it's difficult to tell whether the attacks are state-sanctioned.

"Nobody's paying attention to this issue," said Ali Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. "It is not the custom of the people of Iraq. Not only Iraq, but the whole region."

In October 2005, Iraq's leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, on his website forbidding homosexuality and declaring that gays and lesbians should be "punished, in fact, killed."

"The people involved should be killed in the worst, most severe way," the decree said.

The fatwa against gay men was removed from Sistani's website last year, but it was not revoked, said Ali Hili, an Iraqi gay-rights activist living in London who petitioned Sistani's office to remove it.

Hili compiles details of the killings of homosexuals, including photographs of victims, and posts them online. Included in his list of victims are:

• Anwar, 34, a taxi driver who ran a safe house for gays in the southern city of Najaf. Hili said Anwar was shot execution-style after he was stopped at a police checkpoint in March.

• Nouri, 29, a tailor in the southern city of Karbala who had received death threats for being gay and was beheaded in February, Hili said.

• Hazim, 21, of Baghdad also received threats, Hili said, and after police seized him at home in February, his body was found with several gunshots to the head.

Shaba said his cousin Alan, 26, who also was gay, was shot in the head one day when he went to answer the door while the two were having lunch. Although Alan might have been targeted because he was working as an interpreter with U.S. forces in the Green Zone, Shaba said he thought his cousin was killed because he was openly gay.

"There are other translators in our neighborhood, and nobody killed them," he said.


Difficult to discern

Given the pervasiveness of sectarian violence in Iraq, it's hard to tell whether such men are targeted for being gay, said filmmaker Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim based in New York. Sharma just finished filming a documentary called "A Jihad for Love," set in Iraq and a dozen other Middle Eastern countries. It is to be released this fall.

Sharma's film concentrates on the prosecution of 52 gay men arrested in 2001 aboard a floating nightclub on the Nile; they became known as the "Cairo 52." No similar incident has been documented in Iraq, Sharma said.

"It's very difficult to tell whether there is a pogrom of any sort to kill gay men," he said, but the environment for gays in Iraq has clearly soured.

In the 1980s, Baghdad and Cairo were gay social centers, Sharma said. Many Iraqi gays settled into straight marriages and had families, but many continued to have homosexual relationships on the side.

Although President Saddam Hussein shut down many of Baghdad's gay bars in the 1990s and passed a law against sodomy in 2001, Iraqi gays and lesbians still socialized.

After the 2003 invasion, a man who gave his name as Ahmed still cruised Rubaie Street, a once popular gay thoroughfare in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Zayuna, but he was not openly gay, he said.

A year and a half ago, one of the men he'd met there showed up at his apartment wearing an Iraqi army uniform. He threatened to tell fellow soldiers that Ahmed was gay unless he paid a bribe of 160,000 dinars, about $135.

That was a probable death sentence, he said.

Ahmed paid, fled the country for Amman, Jordan, and considers himself among the lucky ones.

A 31-year-old gay pharmacist in the mostly Sunni west Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriya, said several of his friends were killed for being gay. He is often followed and stopped at checkpoints, he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, for fear that he might be attacked.

He dreams of getting a visa to Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, which have accepted the bulk of Iraqi refugees, and then applying for asylum because of political persecution.

The United States has recognized asylum claims by gays and lesbians since 1994, but the applications of only about 14% of lesbians and 16% of gay men have been approved, according to the San Francisco-based Asylum Documentation Program of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

In Iraq, the wait for visas is long. Fake travel documents cost at least $15,000 on the black market, out of the pharmacist's price range.

"I'm just looking for salvation," he said. "Maybe next month you will call and my family will say, 'Oh, he is killed.' "


'A cultural issue'

A U.N. spokesman said it was difficult to determine how many gays have been targeted and whether the Iraqi government is trying to help them.

"They have said they are trying to improve human rights for all Iraqis, but they are not even willing to say there are gays in Iraq. This is a cultural issue," U.N. spokesman Said Arikat said.

Wijdan Mikaeil, Iraq's minister of human rights, said her office had not received reports of attacks on gays. She said that gays may be afraid to come forward but that the United Nations is over-emphasizing the problem.

"The Iraqi people have been attacked all across Iraq — not because they are gay, but because of the sectarian issue," she said.

The State Department has urged Iraq to prevent attacks on gays, spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said, but the insurgency and sectarian violence have made it difficult for the government to protect human rights.

Gabor Rona, international legal director at New York-based Human Rights First, said the chaos shouldn't stop the U.S. government from pressuring Iraqi authorities to hold security forces accountable for abusing gays.

"We may not have any ability to do anything about suicide bombings and insurgent attacks, but we may have the ability to influence the Iraqi government if they have a hand in this," Rona said.

Some U.S. legislators are demanding that the State Department act.

Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), both openly gay lawmakers, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June demanding that she investigate attacks on Iraqi gays and pressure Maliki to respond.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has sponsored legislation that would prioritize gay Iraqi refugees in an expanded Iraqi refugee program.

Ahmed, now living in Amman, said U.S. forces in Iraq should investigate reports of assaults on gays and ensure that those responsible are punished.

"At least if they catch one of them, they may be afraid to do it again."

(copied from the Los Angeles Times)

[rick_932]

@ scroller I sincerely hope not MOST of the world is not so backward in thinking and religiously motivated.

sorry bro, time to open your eyes and see reality. most of the world is religously motivated. i have nothing against religion but some of the extreme things people do in the name of their religion is beyond me

[BrendaQG]

Hey Peggy your Saltire is bigger than mine
@ scroller I sincerely hope not MOST of the world is not so backward in thinking and religiously motivated.


Oh no, I wasn't being sarcastic, I was thinking about the contrasts
between the strict interpretation of Shariac law in the the North of
Nigeria, and the fatwas which allow GRS, and do not condemn the
transgendered in other parts of the Islamic world.

A fatwa is a legal opinion or ruling issued by an Islamic scholar, judge
or mufti. It will be based upon the Qur'an, Sunnah and Islamic
Shari'ah. The Shari'ah is the revealed and the canonical laws
of the religion of Islam.

Fatwas allowing SRS have been issued in a number of Isamic countries,
including Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, etc.

Again my thanks for your bringing this to my attention as well as to the
forum's.

Oh yeah. Just like Christianity, Judaism and Bhudism,... there are varying interpretations. Nigeria is the wild west of Islam. One set of Ulema (jurist) could condem transsexuals as being gay while another could extend protection to us. As I have mentioned many times and will provide a reference for. Muhammad knew people like us in Arabic they were called Mukhannathun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukhannathun) Who, for the most part everyone around knew were into men. Yet nothing was done to them.

Mabey they saw the clear difference between being MTF and being gay even as they recognized some simmilarities?

On the other hand....gay men were treated very differntly.
Though to be frank the plain act of Liwat is strictly and Quranically forbidden by almighty Allah! No person has the power to change that. If four independant male muslim witnesses can be produced to attest to the specific act of anal sex....not oral, not so called intercular (between the thigs)... these men will be punished. :-/ They may just be flogged, fined, imprisoned, or some such. Execution is not the only punishment the Quran Prescribes.

My personal view is that anything that two people do is between them and god and that others have no right to pry into that. I also feel that two gay people caght screwing on the corner of State and Madison should be whipped....for public indenceny. I dont need to see man ass.