The Death Of Gaddafi: The Rape Of A Nation Starts Here

BBC News - like other British media - has finally got round to covering the story that just before he died Colonel Gaddafi was "subjected to a violent sexual assault".
Which fairly makes the mind boggle.
The Guardian online claimed; "One of the fighters who captured Gaddafi tried to sodomise him after he was captured alive".
Blimey! Really?
Both were referring to graphic video footage on Global Post who made the allegation of sexual assault two days ago.
As you can see above, what actually happened was far less - or arguably worse - than the BBC's euphemism might have suggested.
It's hard to make out exactly what is going on.
An unknown object being thrust up his bum.
Of course, it's only a "sexual assault" if you believe that the anus is a sexual organ, but that's another argument.
Global Post claim he was "sodomized with a knife".
The Guardian's print version like others thought it was "a stick or metal rod" - but their guess is as good as yours, quite frankly.
Watching Gaddafi being kicked, beaten and shot by a bloodthirsty mob, it may have been the least of his problems.
Unless, of course, you think a man having his arsehole violated is the greater crime and the ultimate humiliation.
Human Rights Watch say Gaddafi's treatment after capture and execution without trial is "a war crime that could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court."
That's if the ICC could be bothered to prosecute some US-backed victors for once.

Eurovision 2012: When Borat Met Brüno

It was a novel and enjoyable experience for Fagburn on Saturday night, watching Eurovision while following the queeny running commentary on Twitter.
One of my favourite quips came just after it was announced that Azerbaijan had won;
"And they'll be dancing in the streets of ...checks Wikipedia ...Baku tonight!"
This was soon followed by several tweets wondering if Azerbaijan was down with or down on The Gays.
How will this Muslim ex-Soviet satellite cope with the International Festival of Gayness?
It could be like Brüno trying to bum Borat - messy.
Only The Times seems to have picked up on this possible problemette*; 'Gays fear prejudice if Azerbaijan hosts the next Eurovision contest'
"Azerbaijan’s dubious record on gay rights could make it an unsuitable host country for next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, broadcasters and fans of the event fear.
"The Muslim nation’s victory on Saturday night entitles it to organise the competition in 2012 but widespread concern about potential intolerance was expressed at an after-show party.
“'So many Eurovision devotees are from the gay community — it’s known as the gay world cup,'” one broadcaster said. 'Azerbaijan could be far from welcoming and many fans may decide not to go. People at a high level are worried about this.'”
An anonymous source in the media told Fagburn; "If someone is quoted but not named in a slight story like this, the quote's probably been made up."
Helpfully, The Times couldn't find out.
After a quick Google the hack discovered; "Homosexual activity has been legal in Azerbaijan since 2001 but continues to be severely repressed, according to the International Lesbian and Gay Association."
But someone from ILGA is quoted as saying; "Baku was probably the most tolerant city in the Caucasus, and Azerbaijan relatively secular for a Muslim state."
So in conclusion; no idea.
But remember Eurovision has already been hosted several times without too much to-do in countries where homosexuality actually was still illegal; West Germany (1957), England (1960, 1963), Austria (1967), Spain (1969), Scotland (1972), Israel (1979) and Ireland (1971, 1981, 1988).
Europa - nul points.

• Human Rights Watch on Azerbaijan's piss-poor human rights record.

* Update: In classic style Pink News realised there was a story here at 3.43pm, Pink Paper soon after.
Both essentially cut-and-pasted an email Peter Tatchell sent at 2.55pm.
There is no news, only press releases...

Update 2: The Daily Star regurgitated this story Tuesday - headline 'A Bum Note' (Sadly not used online).

Egypt & Iran: Gay Rights & The Gay Right

Everyone's pleased about the fall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, right?
Wrong.
Adocate columnist, porn "entrepreneur" and gay NeoCon, Michael Lucas, is gonna be really pissed off.
In his latest column, Democracy In Egypt A Myth?, Lucas writes;
"Hope, freedom, and democracy — these are three words that have little or nothing to do with what’s happening in Egypt at the moment. Yet utterly ignorant newscasters and liberal bloggers seem to equate the situation there to Tiananmen Square — where protesters two decades ago risked life and limb in a face-off with China’s authoritarian leaders. Of course, in China they lost.
"The frightening thing is that the protesters in Egypt are looking more and more likely to topple Egypt’s regime and replace it with something far worse. We, as gay people and Americans, shouldn’t be surprised by the horrors likely to come. We shouldn’t buy into the false and ignorant hopes of those on the left who falsely frame the events unfolding in Cairo and other cities in Egypt as a fight for human rights."
Something that no informed analyst of the situation in Egypt thinks, but there you go.
Indeed Khalid Zaid, a gay Egyptian man who's been granted asylum in the US, has written in reply on Gay.com;
"In 2001, after many years in Egypt I was granted asylum by the US following an arrest for suspicion of being gay. In Egypt, there simply are no human rights. Whoever thinks that there are such freedoms should actually move there rather than remotely label the aspirations of protesters as false or ignorant hopes! There is nothing frightening about an awakening that is long overdue.
"It will not be easy to predict the upcoming leadership in Egypt. Due to the complexity of the situation, it is presumptuous to assume that it will fall into the hands of radical Islamists...
"It's true that the first thing they [The Muslim Brotherhood] have promised to do is hold a referendum on Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Regardless of what anyone tells you, they are not part of a master plan to impose Sharia law on the entire Arab world."
"Inciting baseless panic about the creation of an Islamic, anti-gay, anti-Western regime is a reckless act stemming from fears over Israel's security and stability."
Michael Lucas has form on this sort of far-right scaremongering - he bends over backwards to defend every Zionist crime and has baldly stated;
"I hate Muslims... They have not contributed to civilization in any way, in any field — political thought, science, music, architecture, nothing for century after century. What do they produce? Carpets."
The gay right's championing of gay rights in the Middle East is a sadly familiar saw these days - seemingly unaware that right-wing politicians have always been the most vociferous opponents of gay rights in any country in the world.
The flipside are all those gushing "Don't mention the occupation" travel features about Israel in the gay media - Pinkwash, about trips paid for by the Israeli government.
In January New York's Gay City News ran a bizarre feature; 'Sanctions Must Respond to Iran’s Anti-Gay Genocide' by one Benjamin Weinthal.
(Gay City News regularly publishes nutty rants about Iran by Doug Ireland - who Weinthal quotes approvingly. He also joins in Ireland's attacks on Human Rights Watch - who he believes “continues to be driven by an anti-Israel bias").
Weinthal is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, known as "The Neo-Con Bible", and a fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think tank.
Their policy on Iran? "Pursuit of even “tougher” sanctions, including measures intended to terminate non-U.S. purchases of Iranian oil. And, when that doesn’t work, we’ll give war another chance."
Presumably cause the last two have worked out so well.
It's shameful that the gay press regularly publishes such crude far Right propaganda.

Iran: Human Rights Watch Report

We Are a Buried Generation Discrimination and Violence against Sexual Minorities in Iran
Based on testimony from more than 100 Iranians, this report documents discrimination and violence against LGBT people and others whose sexual practices and gender expression do not conform to government-endorsed socio-religious norms. Human Rights Watch analyzed these abuses within the context of the government's violations against its general population, including arbitrary arrests and detentions, invasions of privacy, mistreatment and torture of detainees, and the lack of due-process protections and fair-trial guarantees.

Read the Press Release - Read the Report

To paraphrase the late, great Palestinian scholar and activist Edward W Said, what people in the West know about homosexuality in Iran is a stupid cliche.
Human Rights Watch have bothered to try to find out what life is really like there.
Brian Whitaker, an editor at The Guardian's Comment Is Free and author of Unspeakable Love: Gay & Lesbian Life in the Middle East, has written a fairly neutral piece on the publication of this report.
Whitaker notes correctly;
"Unfortunately, the LGBT issue – epitomised by the notorious photograph of two male teenagers being hanged – has also been embraced unscrupulously by some, in the hope of bolstering support for a military attack which has entirely different goals and motives. This, in turn, leads to accusations from the other side that anyone who complains about the treatment of LGBT people is simply picking on Iran and trying to start a war.
"Regardless of motives, though, it's a fact that Iran's treatment of sexual minorities is bad and, by international standards, somewhere near the bottom of the league. It is one of only seven countries worldwide that retains the death penalty for consensual same-sex acts (the others are Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan and some parts of Somalia and Nigeria).
"But disappointingly for those who like to keep things ultra-simple, the picture is not uniformly black. Small numbers of Iranians (mainly in the middle and upper classes) identify themselves as gay or lesbian, and some are surprisingly open about it. There are also embryonic LGBT communities in major cities, such as Tehran, Esfahan, and Shiraz, with well-known cafes, restaurants and parks that serve as meeting places..."
Of course for many - even enlightened Guardian readers - this is all unsayable, unthinkable.
Just read the hysterical comments beneath it.
George Orwell must be spinning in his urn.
For them, Iran is our enemy and so of course they kill gay men.
But there simply is no evidence Iran executes gay men "simply for being gay".
True, we can't be prove that they don't, in secret, just as Bertrand Russell would argue that you can't ultimately prove that there is no God, or that there isn't a tiny teapot, invisible to the human eye, endlessly circling around the Sun.

Scott Long: Thank You

Sad to hear Scott Long is leaving Human Rights Watch due to illness.
A great man, a tireless campaigner, a genuine radical and seeker of truth.
Hardly surprising then that some chose to try and smear his good name - shame on them.
Fagburn wishes Scott well, and looks forward to reading the book he is writing.
Here is Scott Long's wonderful statement in full:

As some of you know, in mid-July I suffered a pulmonary embolism of a fairly unpleasant sort. While running to catch a bus on a New York street, I saw a blinding effusion of white light, amid which several spangled and bell-bottomed figures vaguely resembling ABBA beckoned me to an eternal disco complete with spinning ball. Yanked back from their blandishments by a superior fashion sense, I spent a couple of weeks in intensive care. I had plenty of time lying in a bendable bed with an IV dripping, to compose, like Woody Allen, lists of the things that make life worth living: the last movement of Bruckner’s Third Symphony; “Sit Down, I Think I Love You” as covered by the Staccatos, with that harpsichord and those violins; the closing pages of “Lolita”; W. H. Auden as sung by Cleo Laine. Somewhere in the middle of the lists, I realized that working for Human Rights Watch wasn’t on them.
I am resigning as director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights program at Human Rights Watch. I feel great pride at what this program has accomplished in the almost eight years I have worked at HRW. I’ve had the privilege of partnering with the best, smartest, most creative and committed staff in the world: Juliana Cano Nieto, Boris Dittrich, Rasha Moumneh, Dipika Nath, Jessica Ognian, and, in the past, Jessica Stern and Iwona Zielinska. I am also especially proud of the deep and cooperative relationships we have built with activists and social movements around the world. I remember our long engagement in Egypt, where with a coalition of courageous human rights groups we produced evidence and performed advocacy to terminate a state crackdown that had marred hundreds of lives. I remember our work in Jamaica, where we were present at the creation of a similar activist coalition that generated passionate debate about the island’s colonial sexual legislation for the first time—and provided vital legal and social support to people under attack or arrest. I remember our efforts in Iran, where our accurate research dispelled misconceptions and deceptions about the state of sexual rights, and where we furnished life-saving assistance both to activists inside the country and to asylees without. I remember our emergency work in Iraq, where we documented for the first time ever who was behind the killings of non-conforming men, and began the slow work of putting the issue on a paralyzed state’s and still-stunned society’s human rights agenda. And I remember our work in the United States, where we showed the intersections between homophobia and anti-immigrant agitation, and the invisible corrosions both insinuate into people’s struggles for common lives.
The LGBT Rights Program was, and to some extent remains, an experiment: the first program of its kind at a so-called “mainstream” human rights organization. Undeniably there have been frustrations. One of the most basic splits in contemporary human rights work—sometimes mapped onto a division between “global South” and “global North,” though not quite reducible to it—is between rights as a set of legal norms, and rights as a complex of human dreams and political aspirations. The split has to do, as well, with the difference between institutions and movements, the former ones formal and developing their own standards and needs, the latter fluid and chaotic and responsible to individuals’ and communities’ desires and drives. The LGBT Rights Program worked balanced on the knife’s edge between these divisions.
It was never easy. Things need to change. For its efforts in this sphere to succeed in future, Human Rights Watch—and other international organizations like it—needs a far deeper understanding of what social movements are, why they are important, how they turn human rights into living values rather than legal abstractions. It also needs a far clearer comprehension of the political contexts in which it works every day; the impotence of artificial categories to explain the experiences of suffering or joy; the intersections that are the real geography of LGBT people’s, and everybody’s, lives.
Racism, neocolonialism, Islamophobia, patriarchy, anti-Semitism, and sectarian hatred, to name only a few, are as real as homophobia for LGBT people. They are real facts within LGBT movements as well. A “mainstream” intervention that willfully elides this complexity is doomed to make almost everything worse.
Likewise, though, our movements need to compare their histories more closely and examine their actions more exactingly. They must reject the temptation to be parochial, simply because others are. They must be alert for the foreshadowings of real rather than simply rhetorical universals that glimmer through the challenges they have overcome. Every intersection is a meeting place, as well as a divergence. To forget that is to be crucified on the differences, and divided into irrelevance.
And that’s it. One of the glorious Nina Simone’s recordings—it’s her version of “I Shall Be Released”– starts off with her stopping the band: “Don’t push it,” she tells them. “Don’t put nothin’ into it unless you feel it.” That’s my mantra as I move ahead. I intend to rest a bit, most likely with a fellowship at Harvard University over the next year, and write a book: based on my own experience, about what’s moral and what’s immoral about “international solidarity,” and what’s worked and what hasn’t in campaigns for sexual rights. I’ll keep on being a loud voice for the things I do value—“Lolita,” liberation, and more; and with the book behind me, I’ll be back to activism. In much the same form, probably, only different.

Scott Long

Iran: Who's Sorry Now?

Doug Ireland has just written an article for Gay City News; An Overdue Apology.
"Human Rights Watch (HRW), the world’s largest and most prestigious human rights organization, has made a stunning public apology to Britain’s iconic gay and human rights activist, Peter Tatchell, for attacks heaped on him by HRW’s Scott Long, who directs the organization’s LGBT program."
But Human Rights Watch apology to Tatchell is far less "stunning" than the above line by Ireland might lead you to believe.
"Human Rights Watch (HRW) apologizes to Peter Tatchell for a number of inappropriate and disparaging comments made about him in recent years by Scott Long, director of HRW's LGBT program. We recognise that personal attacks have no place in the human rights movement."
Scott Long has said; "Although we have our different viewpoints, I respect Peter Tatchell's contribution to human rights and apologize for any condemnatory and intemperate allegations made in haste and for any inaccurate statements made in my personal capacity."
In a statement released on June 30th (available here), Tatchell wrote; “Mr Long’s falsehoods and personal attacks were many and varied. They included a highly libellous and defamatory essay written by him, which appeared in the March 2009 issue of the journal Contemporary Politics, published by Routledge, which is part of the Taylor and Francis publishing group.
"This essay ['Unbearable Witness'] made inaccurate allegations. It grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defence of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism."
“I acted in good faith when I opposed the execution of Iranians accused of homosexuality and when I campaigned against fundamentalist Islam in Britain and worldwide."
Fair enough.
How good of Ireland to write such a nice piece in support of Tatchell.
Indeed the first half of his article is spent documenting Tatchell's campaigning work - you have to wait a while to find out what the apology was actually for.
Ireland's article is also headed by a photo of Tatchell's badly bruised face after he was beaten up by Neo-Nazis at a gay protest in Moscow in 2007.
It's a very emotive image.
As was that now infamous photo of the two Iranian boys, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, standing at a makeshift gallows about to be hanged.
Which is how this row started.
Both Doug Ireland and Peter Tatchell claimed that those two young men were hanged because they were gay.
Neither Ireland or Tatchell mention that their row with Long began after he pointed out there was no evidence for this.
Long has argued "Europe and the US have seen a public campaign in recent years to identify executions - often random ones - in Iran as killings of gay men. Pictures of the horrific public hanging in Mashhad in 2005 of Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari - they were "convicted, in all likelihood, of the rape of a 13-year-old boy while both were minors - spread virally round the world like a postmodern Pieta. Monstrous, yes: but there is no conclusive evidence that they were gay or that consensual homosexual acts had anything to do with their judicial killing."
But the earlier version of their story had been retold so often - by journalists who didn't take two minutes to check its veracity - that to point this out had become a heresy, and the hate campaign against Scott Long began.
Doug Ireland has written several articles denouncing Scott Long - check his website.
But it should have been no more controversial than pointing out there's no evidence that German soldiers bounced Belgian babies on their bayonets during the First World War.
It seems to me Scott Long has been rather hounded - and his only "crime" has been trying to find out the truth.
It's not his fault if some other people got angry as they thought it made them look like liars.
To his credit, Ireland's article does provide a link to an essay by Long critical of their position, The Issue Is Torture, but only it seems to express surprise that it remains on HRW's website.
And Ireland does put a "full disclosure" after his article pointing out that; "Long’s attacks have also focused on this newspaper and this reporter."
But neither Tatchell or Ireland have said what they now think Ayaz and Mahmoud's crimes actually were.
Have they changed their minds?
Do they now admit that they may have been wrong?
Both men have a long histories of courageous work for campaigning for socialism and lesbian and gay justice, but I believe this episode has demeaned them.
Maybe Doug Ireland and Peter Tatchell should apologise to Scott Long?