Video: Gays continue to be targeted by Islamic death squads

At least under Saddam Hussein, CNN reports, gays could live relatively peaceful lives as subjects of ridicule as opposed to victims of rape and murder at the hands of extremists.

The United States' occupation of Iraq has created a hostile climate for gays and lesbians, but especially gay men, who are routinely kidnapped for ransom and murdered.

"It's no secret that armed militias have taken advantage of the power vacuum to enact their own anti-gay justice," noted LGBT rights campaigner and OutRage! founder Peter Tatchell in November 2006. (Warning: Graphic images at link.) Death squads on missions of "sexual cleansing" have taken over the streets, he went on, after a 2005 fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. As adults are hunted down, young boys are also blackmailed into gay prostitution after being photographed in compromising positions; even the implication of homosexuality can be a death sentence.

The United Nations released a report on January 16, 2007, confirming "violent campaigns" and "assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq."

"Attacks on homosexuals and intolerance of homosexual practices have long existed, yet they have escalated in the past year," the bi-monthly Human Rights Report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq read. "Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile towards homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them." Religious courts, the reports added, would try and convict "alleged homosexuals," with penalties ranging from lashings to death.

"I consider gays to be criminals and terrorists," one Iraqi told CNN. "We as an Islamic society, consider it to be against the law," another added, "so they should be punished by law."

"Kamal," one of two gay men that spoke with CNN, said that after he was kidnapped for $1,500 ransom at the age of 16, he was raped repeatedly over 15 days by his captors after they discovered he was gay. "I did not dare tell my family that I was raped by them," he said. "I could not say it, it's too much shame."

The accompanying CNN report, with additional reading, was posted on July 24, 2008.

http://pageoneq.com/news/2008/cnniraq072408.html

Click on the link above to see the video at the bottom of the page.

With the way our military has been taken over by the Talibangelicals, I am not at all surprised that the US is letting this happen.

is that you don't have to be gay to get murdered.

All it takes is a nameless, faceless accusation. I like to think that it used to be a couple hundred years ago you just accused your neighbor of being a witch if you wanted their property: same deal, can't prove you're not a witch, or gay, or Elvis, and all of a sudden you end up dead, oh and your new TV or car or goat disappears.

Personally, I think we need MORE gays in every military. Oddly, I think if more of us learned to fight there would be a lot less violence towards us in the world.