Saturday, January 28, 2023

I'm not addicted to either/or

MNA reports, "Turkish fighter jets launched airstrikes against a village in the Amadiya District of Duhok Governorate in the Kurdistan Region, Iraqi sources reported."  It continue on and on.  


Kind of like the disappointment that Margaret Kimberley provides -- highlighting a homophobe?


Really, Margaret?  


He always manages to bring up LGBTQ+ rights . . . whenever he wants to insult them and explain how unimportant the rights of LGBTQ+ people are.




You do realize he is seen as a homophobe.  I'm not saying anything that's not already by educated people.  He's been spitting on gay rights forever. 

For those not familiar with Bhakal, whenver the US government does something he doesn't like, he's in a tizzy and telling the world that the focus on LGBTQ rights is not important.  That's it not important here in the US or around the world.  So when Moqtada al-Sadr calls for the deaths of gays in Iraq, it's not important.  So this story from BBC -- in 2019 -- it's not important:


Brunei is introducing strict new Islamic laws that make anal sex and adultery offences punishable by stoning to death.
The new measures, that come into force on Wednesday, also cover a range of other crimes including punishment for theft by amputation.
The move has sparked international condemnation.
Brunei's gay community has expressed shock and fear at the "medieval punishments".


And in 2021, Amnesty International shouldn't have issued this according to Bhakal:


Content warning: details of the murder of a non-binary gay man.

Earlier this month Alireza Fazeli Monfared, who self-identified as a non-binary gay man, was brutally murdered in his hometown in Iran. His killers are yet to face justice – and under Iran’s justice system, are unlikely to.

Alireza was murdered on 4 May in Ahvaz, Khuzestan province. Friends of the twenty-year-old have informed Amnesty International that this murder took place after Alireza was abducted by several male relatives, and driven to an unknown location.

The relatives called Alireza Fazeli Monfared’s mother the following day, informing her that they had killed her son and dumped his body under a tree. Authorities have since recovered Alireza’s body, but are yet to make any arrests.

It is crucial to unpack the homophobic and transphobic motivations behind Alireza’s murder, and the Iranian laws that work to legitimate such motivations in criminal courts. The horrifying murder of Alireza is a wake-up call for the urgency of protecting LGBTQIA+ rights.

Risk factors connected to gender expression and sexual orientation

As a self-identified non-binary gay man, Alireza has been subject to repeated homophobic and transphobic harrassment and death threats from several of his male relatives in recent years. Testimonies from his partner and a close friend confirm several occasions of attempted physical violence, in addition to at least one instance of arbitrary arrest and detainment connected with Alireza’s Instagram account.

Several voicemails received by his partner outline Alireza’s plan to leave Iran after being repeatedly denied the freedom to express himself by both Iranian authorities and family members. He was due to leave the country only a few days after he was murdered.

Human rights violations against LGBTI people

Iran’s legal framework continues to criminalise consensual same-sex relations and forms of gender expression that do not conform to strict binary gender norms, even as these laws function to legitimise and incite violence against LGBTI+ individuals.

Iran’s 2013 Islamic Penal Code prescribes abhorrent corporal punishments, such as flogging and the death penalty, for the “crime” of same-sex relations. Sexual activity as minimal as “kissing or lustful touching” can be met with between 31 and 74 lashes, while anything beyond, if a repeated offence, can attract the death penalty.

Individuals who do not conform to stereotypical norms of “femininity” and “masculinity” are similarly penalised under Iranian criminal law. These penalties can include imprisonment and/or flogging under articles condemning conduct that is “religiously forbidden” (haram) or “offensive to public decency.” Any gender presentation outside of what is expected from an individual’s biological sex at birth must be accompanied by a legal sex change, or else be considered a criminal offence. This mandates gender reassignment surgery, sterilisation, and a complex documentation process for all gender non-conforming individuals, and threatens all who do not comply with criminal prosecution.

So-called ‘conversion practices aimed at eliminating homosexuality and gender non-conformity has also endured in Iran, including such abusive practices as electric shocks, hormones, and strong psychoactive medications.

Alireza received a military exemption card two days before his murder, exempting him from compulsory military service due to “perversions that are contrary to social and military values (including sexual perversions and homosexuality)”. Despite its degrading and discriminatory nature, this clause is commonly used by LGBTQIA+ people in Iran as a strategy to avoid the homophobic and transphobic abuse prevalent in military settings. The card clearly states this, thus disclosing to anyone with access to the card that his exemption was on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

This policy is a breach of the right to privacy, and puts gay, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in Iran at risk of violence and discrimination. On a phone call with his partner, Alireza is said to have voiced concern that the envelope holding his card had been opened and resealed, leading some Iranian LGBTI+ human rights activists to suspect the exemption card’s indication of sexual orientation as a factor triggering or aggravating the risks that led to his murder.

Laws facilitating so-called “honour” killings

“Honour” killings remain widespread in Iran – approximately 375 to 450 “honour” killings occur annually in Iran – but are dramatically underreported. A robust framework of legislation exonerates perpetrators or reduces punishment for murders related to the defence of “honour,” which therefore works to justify and normalise violence against women, girls, and LGBTI+ individuals.

One element of this legislation dictates that murderers are exempt from being charged with the death penalty if their victim committed a hadd crime, which is a crime with fixed punishments under Shari’a law and is considered one against God. Consensual same-sex relations fits the definition of a hadd crime. While the death penalty is abhorrent under all circumstances, reducing sentences for murder on the basis of whether it targeted an LGBTQIA+ individual encourages an atmosphere of impunity and places members of the community at considerable risk.

People like Alireza Fazeli Monfared should be guaranteed the right to life, non-discrimination, privacy, and freedom of expresssion. These rights being violated speak to a wider failure to protect the LGBTI+ community in Iran.




Idiots like Bhakal read that missive from Amnesty with horror -- not because a young man was murdered but because Iran got criticized.  Oh, boo, hoo.  Oh, how awful.


I'll save my tears for people, not governments.


"Some" -- not "all" -- on the next two sentences so read carefully and any expanding from "some" that you do is your doing, not mine.  It's amazing to me that some of those who experienced the Holocaust could go on to create an apartheid state (Israel).  Just as it amazes me that some who decry slavery (Margaret) are more than happy to dimiss the plight of the LGBTQ+ community as unimportant.  You know, I am sure that in the 1830s, there were some Americans who justified slavery and its continuation based on the 'small' number of people impacted.  That's the thing about being a minority -- you're always a smaller number than the dominant group.  And if rights only matter if they are the rights of a majority population, don't pass that off as equality or freedom because it's not.


Slavery never should have existed -- before the US, after the US.  But in the US, it could have ended a lot sooner if we had agreed that all people are created equal.  There's always going to be those who try to press the brakes on progress.  They'll use some excuse or pretense.


I don't think you can repeatedly fall for it and still claim to be of the left.


I can criticize Russia and still be opposed the proxy war the US government is executing via Ukraine.  To claim that it's either/or -- either I shut my mouth about attacks on LGBTQ+ members or I am endorsing imperialism -- is not a free speech concept nor the ethics of a thinking person.  

A minority group that is being threatened will always be told that they need to wait, that there are other issues at play, blah blah blah.  Are the Palestinians going to have wait 100 years for their salvation?  When is the time?

If we let people like Maitreya Bhakal define that answer, it will never be the right time.  There will always be some other issue that he decides is pressing.  That he decides.


He's not the ruler of the world.  And his bitchy little Tweets today that Margaret found so amusing are not amusing.  They're disgusting.  


The US government tried to lie that the Aghanistan War was about women's rights.  It wasn't.  It never was.  And that's why the plight of the women currently under the Taliban is not going to restart that war.  But women's rights?  They are attacked.  They're attacked in the US -- DOBBS was an attack on women's rights -- and they're attacked right now in Afghanistan.


And attacks need to be called out.  I'm not interested in how your world view of the world order necessitates silence on this or that topic because I long ago grapsed that no man was the decider for my life.  And shortly after, I grasped that no woman was either.  

No one has to wait until its conveinient to someone else.  In his bitchy Tweets supposedly against imperialism, Bhakal reveals himself to be an imperialist when it comes to both thought and action.  He also reveals himself as either deeply stupid or deeply dishonest (most likely, a combo of the two) because it's not that you either oppose US empire building or call out attacks on minority commuities.  In the real world, grown ups can do both. 



Now to Julian Assange.  Two Fridays ago, people gathered in DC for a tribunal.   




We noted it repeatedly before it took place, we noted it when it was taking place (I posted a live video) and we've quoted many articles since about it.  

Dominic Gustavo (WSWS) was not impressed:

On January 20, the Belmarsh Tribunal—named after the maximum security prison in the United Kingdom where WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange has languished for three years—convened in Washington D.C. to demand that US President Joe Biden drop charges against Assange, who currently faces extradition to the US and a 175-year prison sentence. 

While the tribunal heard important testimony from whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg and principled journalists and civil rights activists such as attorney Margaret Kunstler, it was marred by the bankrupt orientation of the “Progressive International”—which hosted the event—whose entire outlook consists of an appeal to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.

Assange, 51, has been charged under the 1917 Espionage Act for WikiLeaks’ exposure of war crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010, WikiLeaks published the now infamous Collateral Murder footage of US Apache helicopters massacring as many as 18 unarmed civilians and journalists in Baghdad. The subsequently published Iraq War Logs, made up of US Army field reports, detailed systematic war crimes committed against the civilian population of Iraq. 

[. . .]

Testimony was provided by civil rights attorney Margaret Kunstler, who defended Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, securing his release. While her principled stance is to be applauded, in her remarks she further laid the political groundwork for an appeal to the Democratic Party when she rooted the beginning of the persecution of Assange in 2017, when Donald Trump assumed the presidency. The implication being that Biden and the Democrats can be persuaded to reverse course and drop charges. In fact, it was the Obama administration that spearheaded the initial assault on Assange.

The appearance of Jeremy Corbyn at the panel, who was introduced as the “pure opposite” of Labour Party leader Keir Starmer, was a shameful display of hypocrisy. In his demagogic address, Corbyn lamented the complicity of elected officials in the US and elsewhere in the persecution of Assange, saying, “Your silence makes it worse for democracy as a whole.” He ended with a bland appeal to US officials to “Speak up!”


We'll probably note that in a snapshot next week as well.  I wasn't watching the time -- I wasn't planning on writing about Bhakal -- so right after this goes up, I'm going to post Isaiah's latest comie.



The following sites updated:




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