Let us celebrate Gay Pride in Ramallah & Gaza - You organize it: @BDSmovement @alQaws ok? I am Coming if all is fine https://t.co/Bpc5nMHp76— Volker Beck (@Volker_Beck) June 2, 2016
Labels: gay Palestinians, gay pride, gays, Tel Aviv
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:02 PM
0 comments
Mohammed Abu Khder, 16, was abducted from his Shuafat neighborhood in Jerusalem early Wednesday, and his charred body found not long afterwards in a the Jerusalem Forest.
Palestinians have blamed Jewish extremists for killing him in revenge for the kidnapping and murder in last month of three Israeli teenagers.
Palestinian news agency Maan quoted Palestinian Authority Attorney General Mohammed Aluweiwi on Saturday as saying the initial findings of a post-mortem indicated the presence of smoke in the boy's lungs, meaning he was still alive while being burned.
Abu Khder also suffered a head wound, but that was not the cause of death, Aluweiwi added.
Israeli police said they still could not confirm the motive for Abu Khder's murder.
A spokeswoman told AFP police were investigating "all possibilities", and that there was a gag order on all details of the investigation.The gag order would explain why the media isn't reporting the motive.
Labels: gay Palestinians, kidnapping, murder, Palestinian terrorism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:39 AM
0 comments
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki named the youth as Tariq Khdeir, 15. He was a cousin of Muhammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian whose burned body was found Wednesday in the Jerusalem Forest. Khdeir was visited by a U.S. consulate official, the statement said.
"We are profoundly troubled by reports that he was severely beaten while in police custody and strongly condemn any excessive use of force," Psaki said. "We are calling for a speedy, transparent and credible investigation and full accountability for any excessive use of force."
"We reiterate our grave concern about the increasing violent incidents, and call on all sides to take steps to restore calm and prevent harm to innocents," it added.
Khdeir, according reports in Orlando, Florida, is a high school sophomore in Tampa, who was visiting his Palestinian relatives in Shuafat, Jerusalem, for the first time in over a decade when he was beaten and detained.
The incident took place on Thursday outside the home of the murdered teenager, said to be his cousin. The Forward quoted the Council on American-Islamic Relations as saying that he suffered serious injuries in the beating and is being held under police guard at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
Khdeir is due to be brought before a judge in Jerusalem on Sunday, Ma'an news agency reported.The kid was beaten during a protest outside his house - at least he wasn't beaten in a police station - but he was handcuffed and on the ground. Haaretz reports that three border police officers beat the boy - I actually only saw one sitting on him and one hitting him until the end when they start to drag him away.
Labels: East Jerusalem, gay Palestinians, Israeli border police, Palestinian rioters, Palestinian riots
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:43 AM
1 comments
Labels: East Jerusalem, family honor, gay Palestinians, honor killing, kidnapping, murder
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:53 AM
2 comments
In a little-noticed report on Channel Two Wednesday night, analyst and reporter Moshe Nussbaum presented information which could upend the police inquiry into the murder of Muhammad Abu Khadr, the Beit Hanina youth whose burned body was found in the Jerusalem Forest early Wednesday.
In the report, Nussbaum cites contradictory statements by the youth's parents, who both told police different stories about another attempted kidnapping – that of Muhammad's nine year old brother – that may or may not have taken place.
Speaking on Israel Radio Thursday, Mohammed's father said he had called police at about 4 a.m. Wednesday to tell them that his son was being kidnapped, and said that they could trace his cellphone, which was still active. Police have not commented on the content of the call Mohammed's father said he made.
However, Nussbaum said, police were quite definitive that another call the family made to police on Tuesday turned out not to be the emergency the Abu Khadrs claimed it was. On Tuesday, police said, the mother called police to say that “settlers” had tried to kidnap her younger son. She said that individuals had stopped a car in front of her house where she was sitting with her son, and that they tried to grab him. She managed to hold onto him, she said, and they left, at which point she called police.
Officers arrived a few minutes later to take her statement, in which she said “settlers” had tried to kidnap her son, but could give no details. However, a few minutes later the father arrived, and he disputed his wife, saying that it was Arabs who tried to kidnap the son.
Police asked the father if he was positive regarding the identity of the would-be kidnappers, and he said he was. When they asked him to file a police complaint, he said he would, but that he would come down to the police station later on to do so in order to be able to comfort his son. He never showed up, police said, who contacted him several times asking him to file the complaint – but to no avail.
When asked on Israel Radio as to the identity of the kidnappers, Mohammed's father said he did not know – but that it should be an easy matter for police to figure it out, because their images were captured on video by one of the many security cameras in the area.
“All they have to do is put the pictures on TV and I am sure someone will identify them,” he said.But of course, the 'international community' will forgive this, because the 'Palestinians' cannot help but lie. Morally obtuse.
Labels: gay Palestinians, honor killing, kidnapping, murder, Palestinian lies, Palestinian terrorism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:42 PM
0 comments
#SecKerry on murder of #Palestinian teen: "There are no words to convey adequately our condolences to the Palestinian people."
— Matt Lee (@APDiploWriter) July 2, 2014
Labels: gay Palestinians, honor killing, John Kerry, Matt Lee, Palestinians, US State Department
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:20 PM
3 comments
Labels: East Jerusalem, gay Palestinians, honor killing, Palestinian rioters, Palestinian riots
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:05 PM
1 comments
Five years ago, I posted a video in which Yasser Arafat's personal physician testified that he died of AIDS (the video was taken down by YouTube, but it was posted on Daily Motion and it's saved to my laptop just in case). Many of you have seen the description of one of Arafat's trysts by Ian Pacepa, a Romanian defector.In an in-depth 1976 biography of Arafat, writer Thomas Kiernan chronicled the life of a young Arafat in Cairo. When Arafat discovered his girlfriend, Jinan al-Oraby, was friendly with the daughters of the Harkabis, an Egyptian Jewish family, he arranged for the murder of their father. When Jinan expressed sorrow for her friends, “Yasser went into a rage… he proceeded to beat me, tearing my clothes off…he threw himself on me… He tried to penetrate me, but he could not do so. This made him even more irrational.”Sick. Just sick.
Kiernan also relates Arafat’s relationship with a boy, Ahmed, whose parents ended up on the Israeli side of the border after the 1948 war. An associate of Arafat’s related, “Yasser tried to get the boy to publicly denounce his parents…Yasser really loved the boy. He was delicate, sensitive, like a flower. He was very much a part of Yasser’s inner circle – four of five boys who lived in the same place, and well, you can imagine what I mean.”
Kiernan continued: Arafat held a “kind of formal hearing for the boy” because of his refusal to denounce his parents. “Arafat sobbed and sobbed as [a young associate] proceeded to castrate the boy. The next day the boy was dead.”
Labels: AIDS, gay Palestinians, Yasser Arafat
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:47 PM
0 comments
Two Muslim Lesbians are being given a second chance to appeal for asylum in Canada because they claim that they will be killed if they return to... Israel (Hat Tip: Blazing Cat Fur). Judge Roger Hughes on March 8 granted the couple another hearing by an Immigration and Refugee Board based on new information that shows one of Mugrabi’s cousin confessed to the “honour killing” of his sister 12-years ago.I'm sure that once there is a 'state of Palestine' gays and lesbians will be able to live in safety. Right....
The couple in an emotional letter that was presented to court claimed they would be killed if turfed to Israel for being a same-sex Muslim couple.
“We have a same sex relationship, which is forbidden back home,” the couple wrote. “We have dishonoured our families by running away to try and start a life with each other.”
...
“Same sex relationships are not permitted or accepted in all Arabic countries,” they said. “There are many stories about honor killing and we are victims of this.”
They said same-sex relationships is banned by most Muslims worldwide.
“Musa’s brother has threatened to kill her if she does not leave her lesbian relationship and marry a male,” the women alleged. “There are several police complaints regarding the threats of her brother.”
Kingwell said the women will be killed if deported to Israel.
“The situation is not the greatest for gays or lesbians in some Arab countries,” Kingwell said on Saturday, adding many “honour killings” occur from family members who slay their same-sex or gay relatives.
“This couple face a real threat from Muslims in a Conservative country,”
Kingwell said. “It is not often the court will overturn a decision as this.”
Labels: Canada, gay Palestinians, honor killing
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:48 PM
1 comments
President Obama issued a memorandum on Tuesday in which he officially made the treatment of gays a criterion in determining how US foreign aid is allocated (Hat Tip: Weasel Zippers). Obama’s memo, which was followed by a speech in Geneva by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “will coordinate U.S. government agencies with respect to LGBT issues and make it a component of U.S. foreign policy to decriminalize LGBT status, make it a consideration for foreign aid and coordinate the asylum process for those who are being persecuted,” according to a person familiar with the policy.So what's he going to do between Israel and the 'Palestinians'? Will he make Israel an exception so that he can ignore the 'Palestinians' horrendous record on gay rights? Or will he finally admit that yes, Israel is a humane society more like the United States than anyplace else in the Middle East?
In practice, that means funding a lawyers defense group defending LGBT individuals imprisoned for being gay or funding the training of foreign journalists who cover the persecution of members of the community, an administration official said.
“The Obama administration has made a tremendous difference in the lives of LGBT people in the United States, and this new strategy helps to extend that presidential leadership across the globe,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese, who met with Clinton on Tuesday in Geneva.
The presidential memorandum is the first U.S. government strategy to deal with human rights abuses against LGBT people abroad, the group said — and it represents another White House outreach effort to a core Democratic constituency.
The measure directs all government agencies that engage in foreign affairs to promote LGBT human rights globally — including decriminalization of LGBT people and humane treatment of LGBT refugees and those seeking asylum, among other issues, the group reported in a statement on the policy shift.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, gay Palestinians, Hillary Clinton
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:59 AM
1 comments
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Sunday, November 27 (which actually came in long after I went to sleep last night). 1) Revolutions pit the Lexus vs. the olive tree
In his latest column about the "Arab Spring" (which as InstaPundit notes, doesn't seem so "springy" these days), In the Arab World, It’s the Past vs. the Future, Thomas Friedman pays tribute to ... himself:But the weight of their history is so heavy. The new Lexus-like values of “democracy,” “free elections,” “citizen rights” and “modernity” will have to compete with some very old Olive Tree ideas and passions. These include the age-old civil wars within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, over who should dominate the faith, the heated struggle between Salafists and modernists over whether the 21st century should be embraced or rejected, as well as the ancient tribal and regional struggles playing out within each of these societies. Last, but not least, you have the struggle between the entrenched military/crony elites and the masses. These struggles from the “past” always threaten to rise up, consume any new movement for change and bury “the future.”I guess this reference to "Salafists and modernists" is his way of warning about the Muslim Brotherhood. However, until now he has been mostly quiet about the Islamist threat to Egypt.
For example in the previous paragraph Friedman wrote:Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom. This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard. These young Egyptians, and Syrians, who have stopped fearing their military masters, are determined to unleash a true transformation in their world. We should be on their side.Implicitly here, he seems to be saying even the Islamists would "join forces ... to press for real freedom."
So how would Friedman explain this? Cairo rally: One day we'll kill all Jews (via memeorandum):Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen, as well as Palestinian guest speakers, made explicit calls for Jihad and for liberating the whole of Palestine. Time and again, a Koran quote vowing that "one day we shall kill all the Jews" was uttered at the site. Meanwhile, businessmen in the crowd were urged to invest funds in Jerusalem in order to prevent the acquisition of land and homes by Jews.So is the voice of the Lexus or of the olive tree?
Throughout the event, Muslim Brotherhood activists chanted: "Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgment day has come."
Speaking to Ynet outside the mosque following the prayer, elementary school teacher Ala al-Din said that "all Egyptian Muslims are willing to embark on Jihad for the sake of Palestine."
Just saw this tweet from Shadi Hamid.I'm at a Salafi "meeting" in Tahrir Sq. The speaker has an ipad and is quoting Dale Carnegie.Maybe it isn't the Lexus vs. the olive tree; but how effectively the "olive tree" uses the "Lexus."#egypt
2) Sauce for Peace Now
After five members of the Fogel family were butchered by terrorists earlier this year, the Washington Post reported:The Fogel family chose to live a routine life in Itamar. Their murders put them in the limelight. The regular incitement against Israelis and Jews was largely ignored by the media attention but could be seen as emblematic of the extremist challenge to Israel's existence, the peace process and the unlearned lessons of the Ze'evi assassination.Actually, that's not what the Washington Post reported.
Rather, the Washington Post reported today that In Israel, concerns about stifling of dissent:Ofran, 36, who prefers to work quietly in Peace Now’s unmarked office, was thrust uneasily into the limelight. The graffiti threats, following a similar incident at her home in September, generated intense media attention and were seen as emblematic of the extremist challenge to Israeli democracy and the unlearned lessons of the Rabin assassination.The article, written by Joel Greenberg is presented strictly from Peace Now's perspective. There's something odd about this.Addressing a rally in Tel Aviv marking the anniversary of Rabin’s assassination, Ofran said that the latest rightist initiatives in parliament were part of an attempt “to silence public debate,” and had inspired violence and threats against dissenters.There is something ironic about complaining about the stifling of dissent at a public rally. Towards the end of the article, Greenberg quotes Ofran again:
“What some people do to us on the street with spray paint and threats, parliament and the government are trying to do to us by legislation,” she said.“Our focus is Israeli public opinion, to constantly raise the issue for debate, so that journalists will report it and people will talk about it,” Ofran said. She added that while the graffiti threats against her were unsettling, they had not intimidated her from carrying on with her work, though she is keeping a more watchful eye on her surroundings.Note how careful she is here. She's claiming that her main goal is to influence Israeli public opinion. It's one way of sidestepping the issue of European funding.
At the end of the article Ofran shows her contempt for Israel's public at large:While Israelis of most political persuasions have come to realize that settlements will have to be evacuated as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians, there is little faith that such an agreement is possible, Ofran said. In the meantime, she argues, settlement expansion makes a two-state solution to the conflict progressively more difficult.Ofran, is identified as being 36. In other words her entire adult life has been post-Oslo. Israel withdrew from territories in 1995 (most of Judea and Samaria), 2000 (southern Lebanon) and 2005 (Gaza). Each of these withdrawals was followed by an increase in terrorists attacks against Israel. Israelis haven't "despaired" of peace, but they are skeptical that what Ofran and her organization promote will bring peace. It hasn't so far. But Peace Now lacks the self-awareness to question their certitude about how to bring peace even if their own prescription has failed time after time.
“Most of the Israeli public is apathetic about this issue and has despaired of peace,” Ofran said. “This terrible despair enables settlement to continue. It’s not that the public supports it. The public just doesn’t care enough.”
Finally, it's worth noting that towards the end of the article Greenberg reports:Aharonovitch, the public security minister, told parliament that the threats against Ofran and Peace Now were under “vigorous investigation” and that a suspect had been arrested.A suspect in the Peace Now attacks was arrested three weeks ago. As is the case with anyone who threatens someone else he should be prosecuted and if found guilty, punished accordingly. This is old news. Unless one wants to claim that the government's actions are encouraging the violence. (I would argue that the opposite is true. If those who oppose Peace Now's activities are trying to find legal ways to expose its agenda, it gives hoodlums less reason to attack them.) Clearly that's what Hagit Ofran and Peace Now want to do. That Greenberg does it too, exposes his reporting as activism.
Out of curiosity, I checked to see an official Peace Now statement on the Fogel murders. Here's what I found:"This attack is horrifying. We strongly condemn it. We hope that the Israeli and Palestinian security forces will act to find the perpetrators," Said Debra DeLee, APN's president and CEO. "The leaders of the Palestinian Authority acted appropriately by immediately and unequivocally condemning the attack, and Prime Minister Netanyahu appropriately warned Israeli settlers against acts of retribution," DeLee added.Despite the strong language in the beginning, the praise Abbas was generous (and misplaced), given that his words were spoken on Israeli radio, not in the Palestinian media, which were rife with incitement before the murders.
But scanning the few comments left at the site, once included the following sentiments:As for the settlers, they are all land stealing bastards. What they may think is of no interest to me.There were other offensive comments, but this was the worst. I understand that no organization can prevent louts from posting comments. But for an organization that is now complaining about incitement, to let such a comment (and similar ones) stand without comment is hypocritical.
When the Israelis steal land from the Palestinians, the Palestinians fight back and are called terrorists.
3) More on 'pinkwashing'
Israel Matzav links to an article by Yossi Klein Halevi about two Palestinian gay men who fled to Israel to avoid persecution. This shows how silly Sarah Schulman's assertion, "Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow" is.
Fresno Zionism writes:The New York Times will apparently print anything that is anti-Israel no matter how stupid or illogical — viz. Roger Cohen, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Kristoff — or authored by terrorists, like op-eds by Hamas official Ahmed Yousef. Today it gave its anti-Zionist pulpit to Sarah Schulman, an activist from Jewish Voice for Peace, the only Jewish organization to make the ADL’s list of the top ten anti-Israel groups in the nation.Legal Insurrection writes:Every time one thinks it is impossible for Israel haters to come out with a more bizarre justification for hating Israel, someone comes up with an even more bizarre justification.Daled Amos writes:
Today’s exhibit is City University of New York Professor Sara Schulman, who is feverishly anti-Israeli to the extent of advocating the boycott of Israeli universities based on the standard Islamist-Leftist accusation of Israeli Apartheid.... maybe it is Sarah Schulman herself who is guilty of pinkwashing--abusing the term for her own agenda and whitewashing the persecution of gays in the Muslim world.And finally, Elder of Ziyon, makes this devastating observation:Since the critics define Israel this way, they assume that Israel defines itself this way as well. If Israel exhibits any whiff of charity, or liberalism, or kindness - it is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover for its genocidal, racist ways. The idea that Israel has both good and bad parts, or that different Israelis (outside the enlightened anti-Zionist variety) can ever do something different or orthogonal to their real goal of oppressing Arabs, is simply not possible. If some Israelis start a charitable organization it is not because they actually want to help people, but because they want to cover up their constant crimes. Kindness and morality are not possible, so any examples must really be sophisticated manifestations of Israel's inherent evil.This reminds me of a cartoon from Mad magazine many years ago. (The details are from memory, so they may not be exact, but the point stands.)
To these sick people, it is literally impossible for Israel or Israelis to do anything admirable outside the context of the conflict. The conflict is everything. To them, Israel itself is defined by its own desire to rid itself of Arabs. Any counter-proof is readily dismissed as nothing more than PR. The concept that most Israelis are just trying to live their lives like everyone else, and that they might even be nice, normal, relatable people, must be combated. If Israelis are perceived by the world as human beings, their message of Israeli criminality gets diluted - and that must be fought. Anything that could blunt the demonization of the Jewish state is by definition as evil as the Jewish state itself is.
This is hate, pure and simple. It is the exact opposite of the liberalism these haters profess. It is the bigoted stereotyping of an entire people and their democratically elected government in order to twist reality to reflect their own visceral loathing.
The feature was titled "You can't win with a bigot." In one series, two waiters are discussing a party dining at their restaurant. One says to the other, "They're cheap Jews. Bet they won't tip." The next scene shows the second waiter exclaiming, "Wow, what a generous tip." The first one responds, "Well what do you expect, they own all the banks!"
The Schulman op-ed had all the sophistication of the bigoted cartoon waiter. There is no virtue that Israel has that can't be portrayed as a vice. The problem is less a hack like Shulman, than that the once prestigious New York Times stoops to publishing such hate filled drivel.
4) Speaking of "pinkwashing"
In a followup to his post on "pinkwashing," Prof. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection notes a new medical therapy originating in Israel. At the end of his post, he writes:You don’t see Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the Mullahs in Iran using all their medical breakthroughs for propaganda purposes.I believe that his point is that closed societies aren't generally known for medical breakthroughs that benefit all of mankind. (Apartheid era South Africa is the obvious exception because of heart transplants.)
This brings me to a great story I saw last week. I know that this a press release and not officially "news" (though sometimes the difference is hard to tell these days.) Israel's Save a Child's Heart writes about the Ethiopian orphan saved by SACH now saves children:A [27] year old man, Yared Worde, arrived in Israel on Sunday November 20th for a very special visit; this is Yared’s first visit to Israel since his life was saved in 1999 by Save a Child’s Heart at the Wolfson Medical Center.By the way, when you look at the results, can you guess where the largest share of children saved by this organization come from?
Born in 1984, Yared was an orphan who lived on the streets of Addis Abba scrounging for food and basic existence. When he was twelve, he was diagnosed as having rheumatic heart disease. Yared’s doctor referred him to the Save a Child’s Heart program and he was brought to Israel where he underwent life saving heart surgery.
Today Yared is the Director of “Saint Yared School” in Addis Abba, a school that fights poverty through education and provides education to the city’s poorest and unprivileged children.
Labels: Egyptian Revolution, Fogel family massacre, gay Palestinians, Middle East Media Sampler, Peace Now, Save a Child's Heart, Soccer Dad
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:38 AM
0 comments
An op-ed in the New York Times from BDS'er Sarah Schulman attacks Israel for - get this - trying to use gays to prove that it is more tolerant. This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”Ms. Schulman glosses over the reality of 'Palestinian' gays and pretends that 'Palestine' does not and would not persecute them. The following was originally published here and is still available here.
The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”
Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, the director of Al Qaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”
What makes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies so susceptible to pinkwashing — and its corollary, the tendency among some white gay people to privilege their racial and religious identity, a phenomenon the theorist Jasbir K. Puar has called “homonationalism” — is the emotional legacy of homophobia. Most gay people have experienced oppression in profound ways — in the family; in distorted representations in popular culture; in systematic legal inequality that has only just begun to relent. Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality.
In Israel, gay soldiers and the relative openness of Tel Aviv are incomplete indicators of human rights — just as in America, the expansion of gay rights in some states does not offset human rights violations like mass incarceration. The long-sought realization of some rights for some gays should not blind us to the struggles against racism in Europe and the United States, or to the Palestinians’ insistence on a land to call home.
Refugee StatusSchulman tries to equate what Klein-Halevi described above to the treatment of gays by "fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews," but while those groups may regard gays as sinners, none of them attempt to torture or murder them. None of them treat gays like Schulman's 'Palestinian' heroes treat them. 'Palestinian' gays know better. They would rather be in Israel. Ask Tayseer and Samir.
by Yossi Klein Halevi
Post date 08.20.02 | Issue date 08.19.02
Tayseer, as we'll call him, a 21-year-old Gazan whose constant smile tries to conceal watchfulness, learned early on that to be gay in Palestine is to be a criminal. Three years ago his older brother caught him in bed with a boyfriend. He was beaten by his family, then warned by his father that he'd strangle Tayseer if it ever happened again.
It happened again a few months later. Word gets around a refugee camp, and a young man he didn't know invited Tayseer into an orange grove. The next day he received a police summons. At the station Tayseer was told that his sex partner was in fact a police agent whose job is to ferret out homosexuals. If Tayseer wanted to avoid prison, he too would have to become an undercover sex agent, luring gays into orchards and turning them over to the police.
Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn't know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback. Tayseer fled Gaza to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was forced 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 and other creatures he could feel but not see. ("You slap one part of your body, and then you have to slap another," he recounts.) During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Through the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for being a homosexual.
When he was released a few months later, Tayseer crossed into Israel. He now lives illegally in an Arab Israeli village and works in a restaurant. His dream is to move to Tel Aviv. "No one there cares if you're gay," he says. These days, though, he knows that an illegal Gazan in Tel Aviv risks being deported and that he's safest staying where he is.
And if he were sent back to Gaza? "The police will kill me," he says. "Unless my father gets to me first."
With bombs once again exploding all over Israel, and the Palestinian territories under seemingly permanent curfew, the woes of Palestinian homosexuals haven't exactly grabbed international attention. But after spending two days with gay Palestinian refugees in Israel, I began to wonder why the liberal world has never taken interest in their plight.
Perhaps it's because that might mean acknowledging that the pathology of the nascent Palestinian polity extends well beyond Yasir Arafat and won't be uprooted by one free election. Indeed, the torment of gays is very nearly official Palestinian policy. "The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] doesn't just come from the families or the Islamic groups but from the P.A. itself," says Shaul Ganon of the Tel Aviv-based Agudah-Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender in Israel. "The P.A.'s usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them collaborators--though I know of two cases in the last three years where people were tried explicitly for being homosexuals." Since the intifada, Ganon tells me, Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic law: "It's now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A."
A gardener we'll call Samir, who has fled the territories for Israel, told me of a gay friend who was a member of the Palestinian police and ran away to Tel Aviv: "After a while he returned to Nablus, where he was arrested by the Palestinian police and accused of being a collaborator. They put him in a pit. It was the fast of Ramadan, and they decided to make him fast the whole month but without any break at night. They denied him food and water until he died in that hole."
International human rights monitors have all but ignored gay Palestinians' plight. The U.S. State Department's recently released human rights report for 2001, for instance, blandly notes, "In the Palestinian territories homosexuals generally are socially marginalized, and occasionally receive physical threats." As Ganon explains it, "The Palestinian human rights groups are afraid to deal with the problem. One Palestinian activist told me that Israelis need to raise the issue because they'll be shut down if they try to. Amnesty Israel is sympathetic but their mandate is limited to Israeli human rights violations. And the international human rights groups say they've got a long list of pressing issues. When Israeli police harass Arab Israeli homosexuals, I send out reports, and then--oh, you should see how quickly the human rights organizations get in touch with me to investigate. The hypocrisy is unbelievable."
Because the world hasn't forced the P.A. to tolerate gays, Palestinian homosexuals are increasingly seeking refuge in the only regional territory that does: Israel. In the last few years hundreds of gay Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have slipped into Israel. Most live illegally in Tel Aviv, the center of Israel's gay community; many are desperately poor and work as prostitutes. But at least they're beyond the reach of their families and the P.A.
Still, for these refugees life in Israel means subsisting on the margins. Ganon, my guide to the community, heads the Association's outreach to Palestinian gays. He is a big man with a goatee who spends his nights on the Tel Aviv streets where Palestinian gay prostitutes gather, providing food and clothes and trying to keep them off drugs and out of jail. Over the last four years Ganon has waged essentially a one-man campaign to try to interest human rights groups in Israel and elsewhere in their plight. He's helped about 300 Palestinian gays in Israel and estimates that probably twice that many currently live here illegally without access to legal employment or health care and under constant threat of deportation. "No one here cares about us," says Samir, the gardener, who lives with his Israeli boyfriend. "I've written to all the government ministries, to all the newspapers, asking for my status to be recognized. No one even bothers answering."
According to Ganon, during the last year police have generally stopped arresting and deporting Palestinian gays because of his efforts. He has even worked out a quiet arrangement with Tel Aviv police, providing them a list of Palestinian gays under his sponsorship and providing those gays with Association membership cards to show their affiliation. The goal is to reassure local police, who are primarily on the lookout for Palestinian terrorists, that these Palestinians pose no threat. (The exceptions to this arrangement are Palestinian gays with security records and those from Gaza, whom the Israelis see as inherent security risks because of Hamas's popularity there.) Some Palestinian gays, though, say they see no recent change in police policy and still feel hunted.
An American we'll call William finds himself in the Palestinian gays' no-man's-land. Last year he and his Palestinian boyfriend, whom we'll call Ahmad, moved into Ahmad's West Bank village--a move that in retrospect seems mad. "We told the people in the village that we were friends, and for a while it worked," says William. "But then one day we 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."
Now they live in hiding--mostly from Ahmad's brothers, who have searched for the couple in Tel Aviv and threatened to kill Ahmad. Though William has appealed to human rights groups around the world, and to the U.S. Embassy for an American visa for Ahmad, he's gotten little response. One American gay-advocacy group offered to help Ahmad get asylum after he arrives in the United States. But getting him there is precisely the problem, and William refuses to leave without Ahmad. And so here they are, an American Christian and a Palestinian Muslim stranded in the Jewish state, with no money and no work, living off the charity of friends, dreading the reappearance of Ahmad's brothers, and waiting for help they know will almost certainly not come.
On a recent humid Tel Aviv night, in an area of shabby cafes for foreign workers and neon-lit sex shops, a half-dozen Palestinian teenage boys with gelled hair and sleeveless shirts sit on a railing, waiting for pickups. Ganon is here, as he is most nights, checking on "my children." "Does anyone need condoms?" he asks. "How about clothes? Who hasn't eaten today, sweethearts?"
A police car slows down, and the boys call out, "Identity cards!" and laugh. The police ignore them and drive away.
The teenage prostitutes, refugees from the West Bank, live in an abandoned building. They tell me that sometimes a client will offer them a meal and a shower instead of payment; sometimes a client will simply refuse to pay in any form, taunting them to complain to police. And sometimes police will beat them before releasing them back to the streets.
A 17-year-old refugee from Nablus named Salah (a pseudonym), who spent months in a P.A. prison where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds, tells Ganon that he has been stopped by Israeli police no fewer than four times that day. He recites the names of the different police units who stopped him by their acronyms. "Try not to do anything stupid," Ganon says.
"I've tried to kill myself six times already," says Salah. "Each time the ambulance came too quickly. But now I think I know how to do it. Next time, with God's help, it will work before the ambulance comes."
Labels: gay Palestinians
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:31 PM
0 comments
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Wednesday, November 23. 1) Looking for reasons
Somewhere there's a Middle East as described by the New York Times where the Palestinian Authority encourages coexistence with Israel. As Isabel Kershner reported in Abbas Condemns Killing of Jewish Family:The new focus on incitement against Israel, together with Israeli dissatisfaction over the Palestinian response to the brutal attack, seemed to pose a question about the Israeli government’s readiness to deal with Mr. Abbas as a serious peace partner — even though Mr. Abbas and Mr. Fayyad are widely considered moderates who have repeatedly said they would never resort to violence.Of course contrary to what Kershner reported, the Israeli focus on incitement isn't new but ongoing. In the real world, the regular incitement by the official Palestinian media is documented on an ongoing basis.
Mr. Abbas rejected the claims about incitement in mosques, telling Israel Radio that the Palestinian Authority mosques have adopted a unified text for sermons, written by the minister of religious affairs. He called for a joint Israeli-Palestinian-American working committee to investigate claims that Palestinian Authority school textbooks incited violence.
Mr. Fayyad was the first Palestinian official on Saturday to condemn the deaths in Itamar, saying, “We utterly reject violence, and nothing justifies it.”
Undoubtedly, it is inconvenient to acknowledge this - if true, Israeli hesitation to concede more is rational and cannot be dismissed as ideological posturing - so it is necessary to maintain the fiction of a PA committed to and promoting coexistence.
And in the Middle East of the New York Times Israel has never made a sufficient effort to get Mahmoud Abbas back to negotiations. As explained in Obama and Abbas: From Speed Dial to Not Talking:Mr. Obama named a high-profile special envoy to the region, George J. Mitchell Jr. He also spoke empathetically about the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza after an Israeli military campaign against Hamas there. And the president’s demand of Israel that it freeze settlement construction cheered the Palestinians, who believed that would remove a stubborn hurdle to a peace deal.According to this telling, the fault is not Abbas's. But Netanyahu's for not extending a building freeze. And Obama's for encouraging Abbas to demand a freeze.
"We hoped a lot that in his administration, there would be real progress,” said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. “But later on, disappointment set in,” Mr. Shaath said in a telephone interview from Ramallah on the West Bank. “He really could not deliver what he promised in terms of a cessation of settlement activity.”
When Mr. Netanyahu refused to extend a moratorium on construction, Mr. Abbas felt let down. And he blamed Mr. Obama for leading him on. In an interview with Newsweek in April, Mr. Abbas said: “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said O.K., I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump.”
In the real world Netanyahu has regularly tried to meet Obama halfway only to get no reciprocal moderation from Abbas.
So when you have a narrative that needs to be told - that Israeli intransigence is primarily responsible for the lack of progress in the peace process - and no real objective data to support it, what do you do? You make stuff up. Or get others to do it for you.
This brings us to an op-ed today, by Sarah Schulman, Israel and pinkwashing.This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”Oh gee, sodomy's been decriminalized in the West Bank. And what is its current status in Gaza, where Hamas rules and has been known to kill women for the sin of being seen in public with a man who's not her husband? And what would happen to a gay man living openly in Gaza?
The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”
Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations: Aswat, Al Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; as Haneen Maikay, the director of Al Qaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”
Whether or not one agrees with Israel, Israel is a liberal democracy. As such its citizens are free to choose the lifestyle they want. When there is finally a state of Palestine will its citizens similarly be free to choose? People who ignore the freedoms allowed by Israel and pretend that the refusal of the Palestinians to establish an independent state through negotiation somehow makes Israel illegitimate are motivated not out of concern for Palestinians, or support for individual freedom but out of hatred for Israel.
The New York Times' campaign against Israel continues unabated.
Honest Reporting has more.
2) Unenlightened self-interest
A Washington Post editorial from yesterday, As Egyptians protest anew, the Obama administration again enables the generals:The United States supplies a large part of the Egyptian military budget, and the Obama administration has defined a democratic transition as a top foreign policy priority. Yet faced with the escalating violence in Cairo, the administration is repeating the mistake it made in January, when it hesitated to push for the removal of President Hosni Mubarak. Rather than using its considerable leverage, the administration is deferring to the military council. White House spokesman Jay Carney weakly called Monday for “restraint” from “all sides”; when asked whether the generals should specify the date for a presidential election, he replied, “I don’t want to dictate specifics to Egypt.” Administration officials have resisted congressional proposals that military aid be explicitly linked to a democratic transition.An op-ed in the International Herald Tribune, Egypt's doomed election:
As during the Mubarak era, some administration officials appear to believe that U.S. interests, including Egypt’s peace accord with Israel, preclude using aid to pressure the military for political change. It is past time to abandon that wrongheaded doctrine. The United States should make clear that further military aid will depend on the establishment of a firm and expeditious timetable for a democratic transition.As protesters fill Tahrir Square once again and violence spreads throughout Cairo, the military government’s legitimacy is becoming even more tenuous. The announcement Tuesday of a “National Salvation Government” may stem the violence for now, but the coming vote will not lead to a stable democracy.A news story in the New York Times, The Old Order Stifles the Birth of a New Egypt:
The election is likely to fail, not because of vote-stealing or violence, but because the rules cobbled together by Egypt’s military leaders virtually guarantee that the Parliament elected will not reflect the votes of the Egyptian people.
While advising civil society groups and political parties on election issues earlier this year in Cairo, I found that the voices of Egyptians who were at the forefront of the revolution were stifled during the secretive election-planning process.Egypt’s version of an autocrat’s legacy was on display Tuesday, as a military accustomed to decades of privilege refused to surrender real power, for now, and a political class cowed by years of authoritarianism — the Muslim Brotherhood being the most prominent example — seemed opportunistic, defensive or unimaginative.The mainstream media's consensus appears to be that no good can come of continued control by Egypt's military; the only way forward is to listen to the people and allow a vote.
To many in the square, politicians were either putting their parochial interests first or proving unable to deliver a vision that could stem the worst crisis facing Egypt since Mr. Mubarak was toppled on Feb. 11. The anger was so great that a Brotherhood politician was driven from a square by a crowd that, as in January, feels determined but leaderless.
“What we’re still dealing with is the system of Mubarak,” said Mustafa Tobgi, a 56-year-old government employee. “They’re all graduates of Mubarak’s school.”
But is it? Barry Rubin dissents:The junta’s position is a combination of greed and its self-image as guardian of Egypt’s national interest. Officers enrich themselves by large-scale business enterprises.Professor Rubin then lists other countries faced with similar dilemmas. The choices aren't good. But unless someone is absolutely convinced of the benevolent and benign intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian army, motivated by its own unenlightened self-interest, presents the only obstacle to preventing a disastrous Islamist future for Egypt.
At the same time, they are no doubt aware of the likelihood that an Islamist regime would eventually purge the army and arrest officers—as is happening in Turkey, the explicit model for the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy—and replace them with its ideological followers. They also might take into account that the Brotherhood is likely to get Egypt into a losing war with Israel and take steps that would cost the military hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Now this clash in itself has added still another dimension. It is said that if you wound an elephant you have to kill it as otherwise the enraged leviathan will trample you. The Brotherhood now sees the military as an enemy and if it comes to power would have all the more incentive to crush that rival.
3) Define 'against'
An article in Bloomberg News, Arab world's former 'Club of Tyrants' turns against Syria comments:The Arab Spring uprisings have unnerved and threatened regimes throughout the region, shaking up status quo institutions such as the Arab League. The league’s suspension of a founding member, Syria, was the boldest action by the 21- nation club since its condemnation of Muammar Qaddafi’s crackdown paved the way for the United Nations resolution in March authorizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign.But The Weekly Standard noted that the Israeli paper, Ma'ariv, reported that "the UNESCO committee on human rights had accepted Syria as a member." (via Daily Alert)
“It’s a measure of the extent to which things have gone wrong,” Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, said in an interview. “These guys were friends. I think they are extremely disappointed, and at some point there was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Images of government attacks on unarmed protesters and of torture-scarred bodies in cities like Homs, Syria’s third largest, are being viewed in homes across the region. Whether motivated by outrage, by concern for self preservation or by both, Arab kings and prime ministers aren’t turning a blind eye, as had been the case in the past.
Arnold Roth e-mailed UNESCO's director of media relations and received this response (via e-mail):"Syria was elected to the NGO Committee and the Committee on Conventions and Recommendations last 11 November. The Members of these Committees are elected by UNESCO’s Executive Board consisting of 58 Member States. The Director-General and the Secretariat of the Organization are not involved in the decisions taken by the Member States. These committees have a certain number of seats reserved for each region. The Arab States collectively decided to give Syria a seat on the two committees mentioned above. Their recommendation was adopted by a consensus of the entire Executive Board. The United Nations and other UN agencies use the same approach to choose their committee members when there is an agreement about candidates within regional groups. The Committees themselves cannot expel or suspend members: only the Executive Board can “undo” one of its decisions if Member States decide so. The Director-General and Secretariat are bound by the decisions of the Member States and are not supposed to comment on them. Yet given the developments in Syria, the Director-General does not see how this country can contribute to the work of the Committees. I hope this clarifies the situation for you."So even as Syria was massacring thousands of its citizens, the Arab League, which has since suspended Syria from its ranks, still thought enough of Assad to appoint him a UNESCO committee - one on human rights, no less. That would suggest that the suspension was largely done for the sake of appearances. It appears unclear that the Arab League has turned convincingly against Syria.
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Bashar al-Assad, Egyptian elections, Egyptian Revolution, gay Palestinians, Middle East Media Sampler, New York Times, Soccer Dad, UNESCO, US foreign aid
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:30 PM
0 comments
Labels: gay Palestinians, liberalism, Muslim treatment of women, Palestine
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:35 AM
11 comments
An anti-Israel group has walked away from the gay pride parade in Toronto rather than jeopardize the entire parade's funding. A simmering conflict between the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, and a hardcore anti-Israeli group, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, has ended with the gay group pulling the plug on its participation at the annual Toronto Gay Pride Parade, slated for June.Are these people real? Do they have any idea how gays are treated by the 'Palestinians' as compared with how they are treated by Israel? Maybe they ought to talk to some gay 'Palestinians' hiding out in Tel Aviv and find out.
According to an April QuAIA statement, “Instead of marching as a contingent in the parade this year, QuAIA will focus its Pride Week activities on hosting a community event to raise awareness of Israeli apartheid, and how LGBTQ communities can pressure the Israeli government to comply with international law through the campaign for boycotts, divestments and sanctions.”
Ford announced in March that his administration plans to slash more than $100,000 in city funds for Toronto Gay Pride Week events because of the involvement of QuAIA.
“Taxpayers dollars should not go toward funding hate speech,” Ford said last month.
...
The Canadian daily National Post reported that Toronto provides $128,000 in public monies for Pride, and roughly $250,000 for municipal services, like police and garbage removal.
Labels: gay Palestinians, gay pride, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, Toronto
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:36 PM
0 comments
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
Like what you see? Please hit my tip box below!
Jerusalem |
 |
 |
