LGBT Activists Should Know Friends From Foes

[oberliner]

Excerpt:

Instead, anti-Israel groups such as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and Siege Busters are busy trying to corner the market on how the Jewish state is perceived in the LGBT community. Anti-Israel gays and lesbians support the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign and invoke the term “pink-washing” to deride Israel’s efforts to promote gay tourism.

But the real whitewashing taking place is of the true nature of radical Islamic movements. One of America’s leading gender theorists, Judith Butler — a Jewish lesbian academic at the University of California, Berkeley — has gone so far as to describe Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left.” One wonders if she would feel this way if she lived in Gaza or under the rule of the Iranian regime that supports these vehemently anti-gay movements.

Gay and lesbian history has shown the dangers of ignoring the threat posed by radical Islam. Take the example of the late gay poet Allen Ginsberg, who came to feel that he had been naïve in some of his activism. “I shouldn’t have been marching against the Shah of Iran because the mullahs have turned out to be a lot worse,” he confessed. His statement should not be seen as an embrace of the deposed Shah’s regime but rather an acknowledgement of the horrors inflicted by the Islamic Revolution on LGBT Iranians and many others as well.

As we watch the current turmoil in the Arab world, with great uncertainty over what kind of societies will emerge from this period of revolutionary upheaval, it is worth recalling the legacy of gay African-American trade unionist Bayard Rustin, one of the principal architects of the Civil Rights movement and a close adviser to Martin Luther King. Rustin marched for gay rights in New York in the 1980s, and in an essay titled “From Montgomery to Stonewall” he wrote that the treatment of the gay community had become the “barometer of where one is on human rights questions.” We should be applying Rustin’s formula to the Middle East.

http://www.forward.com/articles/136643/#ixzz1IOzX6Y8s

[bluestateguy]

1. Radical Islamists are virulently homophobic, and that's a fact

They are for theocracy, male supremacy, violent persecution of homosexuals and anti-semitism.

Nobody on the left should make excuses for that.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. LGBT opinion on this topic reflects that of the larger US community.

Near as I can tell, anyway.

Also, the following is misleading:

>>>>Gay and lesbian history has shown the dangers of ignoring the threat posed by radical Islam. Take the example of the late gay poet Allen Ginsberg, who came to feel that he had been naïve in some of his activism. “I shouldn’t have been marching against the Shah of Iran because the mullahs have turned out to be a lot worse,” he confessed. His statement should not be seen as an embrace of the deposed Shah’s regime but rather an acknowledgement of the horrors inflicted by the Islamic Revolution on LGBT Iranians and many others as well.>>>


Much of the resistance to the shah came from the secular Iranian left. Many if not most of the SAVAK, prisoners, torture victims and shooting victims were secular leftists and democrats. No one in the west who was involved in activism against the shah ( that I can remember, anyway) predicted an Islamic theocracy as the alternative to the shah. Certainly no one was *advocating* it.

The obvious paradigm in the 1970s was restoration of the elected center-left government that was overthrown in 1954 by ....... guess who?

A silly premise to build an entire article around.

[GodlessBiker]

3. Fundamentalists of all religions are all bad for us.

[King_David]

4. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid

Succeed in delivering to Gay Pride parades the largest contingent of Jewish marchers in the history of such parades'