This is why the U.S. should have beef with Iran.
If the United States wants to piss and moan about Iran being an evil state, it should do so because its government still forces its citizens to do things like this, not because it gets off on smack talking Israel and wants to develop a nuclear-energy policy.
Gay Iranian Wins UK Asylum Fight, from CNN.com:
LONDON, England — Britain has granted asylum to Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian student who faced deportation from the United Kingdom and feared execution in Iran for being homosexual, officials confirmed Tuesday. […]
Kazemi, 19, moved to London to study English in 2004 but later discovered that his boyfriend had been arrested by Iranian police, charged with sodomy and hanged.
Fearing the same fate, he applied for asylum in Britain but was denied in 2007.
The office of Simon Hughes, the member of parliament who took up Kazemi’s cause, said the Home Office has granted Kazemi leave for five years.
Why doesn’t President Bush, or any other politician regardless of party affiliation, stand up for this kind of injustice in Iran? Why is empty rhetorical bombast and nuclear energy a greater threat to the civilized world than a government that unapologetically hangs people because of their sexual orientations? It’s nice to know where our priorities lie.
Tags: asylum, gay student, iran, United Kingdom
May 20th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
The “Iran gay execution” story smells funny.
http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2007/09/iran-gays-execu.html
The Washington Blade’s report:
It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay originated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran…“It was not a gay case,” said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, taking issue with the Human Rights Campaign’s statement that was quick to condemn the execution as anti-gay.
Richard Kim’s investigation into the origin and distribution of the allegation about gays being executed in Iran, as published in the Nation magazine entitled Witness to an Execution:
But was the story accurate? And what steps did organizations take either to confirm its veracity or to gauge what effects their campaign might have in Iran? It appears that the answer to the second question is very little. . .As for the accuracy of the story itself, the Outrage! press release that incited this storm claims that neither the original ISNA story nor the first NCRI report on the incident mentions sexual assault. But it appears that Outrage! was working from a faulty translation.