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I have hesitated a long while before posting this [message #12484]

Tue, 15 July 2003 05:17

Steve

Really getting into it

Location: London, England
Registered: November 2006
Messages: 465

because I was not certain whether it would be of any real interest to most people on the MB. Timmy has encouraged me to post. You may recall that about a month ago three cities in Israel held separate Pride Parades (Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Haifa). The fall-out from these parades (particularly the one in Jerusalem) has been very positive. The media gave these parades (and their social meaning) great prominence; several ads have started appearing on TV that seem 'gay-orientated'; many people seem to be willing to talk publicly and positively about the 'lesbi-gay community'. It was announced on TV that a gay youth movement has been formed. One newspaper had a 15-page spread (!) devoted entirely to the 'coming out' of religious gays: they have formed a Message Board on the Internet and are challenging the religious establishment to find ways to accomodate them. I am certain that they are not going to go away...

However, my hesitation was in reproducing part of another newspaper article. You must bear in mind that, while it is very positive, the article was written for and Israeli readership. I found the section which deals with the treatment of gays within the Palestine Authority to be quite harrowing, and this is the main reason why I have reproduced the article here for you.

The first response to this posting is the article itself. Please do comment.

Here is the article [message #12485 is a reply to message #12484]

Tue, 15 July 2003 05:18

Steve

Really getting into it

Location: London, England
Registered: November 2006
Messages: 465

On June 20th gay and lesbian Israelis paraded through Jerusalem's streets, from City Hall to Independence Park. The march was supposed to have taken place a week earlier; it was postponed after one of its organizers, 47-year-old American immigrant, Alan Beer, was murdered by a Hamas suicide bomber aboard Bus 14a.

For those who devote a good amount of thought and breath defending Israel from various calumnies - particularly those coming from the hard left - the fact that this march is taking place at all is excellent news. So Israel is a theocratic state? Show me an equivalent march taking place in Iran or Saudi Arabia. So the Israeli army is an instrument of fascist oppression? Maybe, but gays and lesbians serve in the IDF's ranks without formal discrimination, more than can be said for the US armed forces.

Why, then, should those most opposed to that march be the same people, more or less, who are most ardently "pro-Israel"?

"This is a disgusting parade which has no place in a Jewish state," said Itamar Ben-Gvir, a spokesman for the outlawed ultranationalist Kach movement, who also confessed to taking down 30 rainbow-striped flags in downtown Jerusalem. "The gay and lesbian community is a marginal, fringe group, and they must not be given a public stage," added Knesset member Nissim Ze'ev of the ultra-religious Shas party.

I know at least a few people who'd argue that it is Ze'ev and Ben-Gvir, not Beer, who represent the "fringe". But put that argument aside. The question is, when we boast that israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East" (Turkey honorably excepted), what are we really saying? Exactly how does it distinguish us from our neighbours and enemies? And what obligations does it impose upon Israelis, gay and straight?

One way to get at these questions is to point to what we're not. For starters, we're not a country that treats homosexuals the way the Palestinian Authority does.

A few months ago, watching the news in the run-up to the Iraq war, I spotted a couple of demonstrators marching to a "Queers for Palestine" banner. Note the preposition. While most of the antiwar marchers were merely against the war (even if this meant keeping Saddam Hussein in power), these two were for Palestine. I spent the remainder of the evening trying to think of the nearest equivalent. Blacks for the Old South? Jews for the Ayatollah? "Recovered" homosexuals?

In fact, "recovered" is what Palestinian gays must be if they are to survive in "Palestine". As Yossi Klein Halevi wrote last August in The New Republic, Islamic law prescribes five separate forms of death for homosexuals. To these, the Palestinian Authority adds several of its own. In the West Bank city of Tulkarm, Halevi reports, a young Palestinian homosexual he calls Tayseer "was forced to stand in sewage 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. During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Throughout the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for being a homosexual."

Tayseer's story is one of hundreds. Halevi also tells the story of one Palestinian homosexual who was put in a pit in Nablus and starved to death over Ramadan; of another whose PA interrogators "cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds"; of a third who lives in fear of his life from his brothers.

"It's now impossible to be an open gay in the PA," says Shaul Ganon of Aguda - Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender in Israel.

All this is of a piece with the broader treatment of homosexuals throughout the Muslim world. The Taliban used to put homosexuals to death by collapsing a wall on them. In Malaysia, the maximum penalty for sodomy is 20 years in prison and "mandatory whipping". In Egypt, an increasingly severe crackdown on homosexuals is now entering into its third year. In April, Brazil put forward a gay-rights resolution at the UN Human Rights Commission; Muslim countries successfully filibustered it.

And so on. Of course, everybody knows this, though nobody talks about it much. And of course, everybody knows that Israel is a comparatively receptive place for gays and lesbians, though nobody talks about it much, either. Along with South Africa, France, Ireland, Canada and Spain, israel has been in the forefront of granting legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. So when we say, "We are the only democracy in the Middle East," we are not simply making a statement about social and cultural attitudes. We are a typical Western state. Nothing demonstrates it better that the gay Pride march...

Which brings me back to Beer. Cleveland-born, a software engineer, "Al" was also an observant Jew who came to Israel five years ago because "it gave him the opportunity to pray as he wanted and life the life that he wanted," according to Ze'ev Pertrucci, a former roommate. Interviewed by this newspaper in 1999, Beer said his homosexuality had presented no obstacles to joining an Orthodox synagogue.

"My understanding of being religious is that there is a long list of religious values to keep, which is what I do," he said.

Testifying in the Knesset the same year, Beer told a parliamentary committee that he was "proud of my many identities": Gay, Orthodox, Jerusalemite, Zionist. "People can be both free and holy," he said. Friends recall his "American swagger," his Hawaiian shirts, his passion for cinema, his "infectious laugh", his willingness to volunteer, easygoingness.

Beer was murdered after returning from a condolence call for a bereaved friend up north. Had he not been on that bus, he would have marched for gay pride. Would any of us not want him back? And would any of us, really, not have wanted him there?

Re: Here is the article [message #12488 is a reply to message #12485]

Tue, 15 July 2003 08:30

Guest

On fire!

Registered: March 2012
Messages: 2344

Thank you much for a very informative post..What I cannot understand is the magnitude of hatered towards gays by these Palestinians.Perhaps the world should isolate these foolish people.Please keep us posted on other developements...rob

Re: Here is the article [message #12490 is a reply to message #12488]

Tue, 15 July 2003 10:44

Guest

On fire!

Registered: March 2012
Messages: 2344

Discrimination of gays by religious bigots and fundamentalists is rampant in many places. What controls the actions of these hateful (and hate-filled) people in places like the US and Israel is the rule of law. Some fundamentalists in the US wuld love to be able to do these things to gays, but are prohibited by the rule of law from doing so.

What makes Israel different from its neighbors, and the entire point of the article I think, is that the rule of law permits diversity of belief and expression. Different countries have different interpretations of what the rule of law is.

In Thailand, the Courts are weak and corrupt. Luckily sexuality has never been a big issue here. But I would never try and own a house here, because somebody with some money could come along tomorrow and produce "proof" that they owned my house, and the Court would be bought off, unless I offered more money.

Yet Thailand has always been more "free" than other countries surrounding it. Burma, for example, is run by a milatary junta as bad as the Nazi's were in Hitler's time.

Rather than isolating the PA, I would think that inviting them to participate more fully in the modern world and assisting them to implement the rule of law in ways that are culturally appropriate is the way to go. If they are repeatedly invited and don't come, then isolation might be useful, as it was against South Africa's apartaid system. But it's too soon in the Palestinian Authority's life for that now.

There are gay Mulsim groups, I have read about them in the US. It would be interesting to see what they have to say about this.

In my opinion.

Thanks for sharing that, Steve. Good insightful international news is welcome.

Re: Here is the article [message #12494 is a reply to message #12488]

Tue, 15 July 2003 14:46

timmy

Has no life at all

Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796

I think the problem is the fundamentalist Islamic faith variant they espouse. But the faith itself preaches tolerance and understanding. But let us not get into a faith bashing competition.

Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School