ISRAEL GRANTS SANCTUARY TO GAY PALESTINIAN

Gay Palestinian Seeks Sanctuary from Non-Gay Palestinians

(LGF)

When gay and lesbian Palestinians want to be safe, they know where to go: Gay Palestinian gets OK to live with Israeli lover.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has granted a Palestinian a rare residency permit after the man, who is gay, said his sexuality put his life in danger in the West Bank, a Defence Ministry official said on Tuesday.

The 33-year-old Palestinian from Jenin was issued a temporary permit to live with his Israeli partner in Tel Aviv after arguing he faced death threats from fellow Palestinians who disapproved of him being gay, the official said.

Israel’s Interior Ministry rarely issues permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who want to live with their partners in Israel, regardless of sexuality. Requesting such a permit can take years.

“In this case the man’s lawyer said his life was in danger because of his sexual preference,” said Peter Lerner, spokesman for Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, whose office comes under the defence ministry.

“On this basis we issued the temporary permit,” he said.

It wouldn’t be Reuters, of course, if they didn’t find some way to: 1) excuse the medieval mentality that systemically targets gays for murder, and 2) blame it on Israel.

But while homosexuality is largely taboo in conservative and majority Muslim West Bank cities, one rights groups working with Palestinian gays said there had been few reports of physical violence in recent years.

However Palestinians are wary of collaborators and Rauda Morcos, director of Aswat support group for Palestinian lesbians, said this suspicion was directed at gay men and women.

Morcos said Palestinian gays were sometimes targeted by the Israeli secret service and told they must collaborate or face being outed.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PROF: GAY RIGHTS AN ANTI-MUSLIM CONSPIRACY

Mideast gay-dar
Joseph Massad, the Mideast studies professor at Columbia whom Jewish students accused of bias three years ago, believes the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an anti-Muslim scheme hatched by Western activists. (The New Republic)

TAUDRY ALLEGATIONS INDEED

WELL, AS LONG AS THEY OBSERVE RAMADAN...

Fatah-Hamas mired in tawdry accusations (JPost)
The Hamas-Fatah power struggle has descended into the gutter over the past few days, with both parties trading allegations about the involvement of their members in homosexual relations and adultery.

The alleged "sex scandals" are said to have occurred in the Gaza Strip, which fell into Hamas's hands in June.

Shortly after the Islamist movement wrested control of the Strip, Hamas officials began talking about "embarrassing" and "damning" documents and films that were seized inside Palestinian Authority security headquarters formerly controlled by Fatah.

According to the officials, the Fatah men had been spying on several senior PA officials, some of whom were caught on tape having homosexual intercourse.

A DVD distributed among a limited number of Hamas representatives features a former PA official having sex with another man. The disc, according to a Palestinian journalist in Gaza City, is being sold on the black market for NIS 20.

Hamas says the PA's Preventive Security Force played a major role in collecting the evidence against the senior PA officials. In some cases, Hamas said, the documents and tapes were used to extort large sums of money from the PA officials.

Two documents that were allegedly seized inside Preventative Security Force headquarters provide insight into the method used to collect information about the sexual conduct of the top officials.

According to one document, entitled "A Large Number of Homosexuals," a number of wealthy and influential figures in the Gaza Strip had formed a "gang" for practicing homosexual intercourse.

"Some of them were summoned for questioning and they admitted to having sexual intercourse with boys and adult males," the document, dated May 12, 2005, stated.

"Some of them had individual sex, while others preferred group sex. Some of them paid money for sex, while others performed sexual intercourse with males in front of their wives."

The sex allegedly took place in hotels, clinics and private homes - in some cases with a picture of Yasser Arafat hanging overhead.

The document described the homosexuals as a "very dangerous group" and warned that the phenomenon might spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip, adding that rival political factions could exploit the case to defame Fatah and "create chaos and confusion."

The second document is a follow-up to the first.

Entitled "Results of Questioning," it names four homosexuals who allegedly had sexual relations with senior Fatah officials in the Strip.

The four supposedly blackmailed the officials after filming them during sexual intercourse. "Since we are talking about top Fatah figures, there is a need to summon them and talk to them," the document, dated May 19, 2005, concluded.

A Hamas official in the Gaza Strip said the documents were the "tip of the iceberg" and that his movement was planning to reveal more evidence about Fatah's "moral corruption."

The official said Hamas had already posted a short video on the YouTube Web site showing used condoms that were found inside the offices of senior Fatah security commanders and political figures.

Another Hamas official said his men had uncovered three brothels that had been frequented by top Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip.

Fatah officials in Ramallah refused to comment on the latest allegations. However, they stressed that it was not hard to forge such documents since Hamas was now in control of the security headquarters and of all the archives and files inside the buildings.

But a respected Palestinian journalist in Gaza City who examined the two documents said there was no reason to doubt their authenticity.

In a bid to counter the Hamas campaign, Fatah members have published details about "sex scandals" involving Hamas activists.

According to Fatah, a Hamas imam was recently caught having sex with a male minor in a mosque basement.

In another incident, according to Fatah, a senior member of Hamas's armed wing, Izaddin Kassam, was expelled from his refugee camp after he was caught having sex with a male colleague in a vehicle. And according to a report on a Fatah-controlled Web site, a Hamas man was caught naked together with his neighbor's wife in her bedroom.

"These Hamas people are very immoral and corrupt," said a senior Fatah official. "They use Islam as a cover-up for their crimes. But our people know very well who they are dealing with. We have a lot of information about the moral corruption of many Hamas officials and we will make them public at the right time."

MORE ON AHMADINEJAD'S VISIT TO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Columbia's Priorities (WSJ-BOTW)
Next week Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's Holocaust-denying president, who has said that "Israel must be wiped off the map," will be in New York for the U.N. General Assembly session. As the titular leader of a U.N. member state, Ahmadinejad is entitled to visit the city for this reason. But he is not entitled to something else he received, namely an appearance to speak at Columbia University, where he will be introduced by none other than Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president.

Yesterday Bollinger put out a statement defending his decision to authorize the event, and it was filled with high-minded rhetoric:

Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas--to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

But there is one little problem here. As Bill Kristol points out:

As Columbia welcomes Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia students who want to serve their country cannot enroll in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at Columbia. Columbia students who want to enroll in ROTC must travel to other universities to fulfill their obligations. ROTC has been banned from the Columbia campus since 1969. In 2003, a majority of polled Columbia students supported reinstating ROTC on campus. But in 2005, when the Columbia faculty senate debated the issue, President Bollinger joined the opponents in defeating the effort to invite ROTC back on campus.

The original decision to kick ROTC off campus was the product of 1960s anti-Americanism, but the ostensible reason the policy continues is objection to the law, signed by President Clinton, that prohibits open homosexuals from serving in the military. Apparently some ideas are so odious that they are unworthy of answering "through the powers of dialogue and reason."

So, what is Ahmadinejad's regime's policy on homosexuals in the military? We don't know, but according to Human Rights Watch, Iran is not a terribly friendly place for gay civilians:

On Sunday, November 13, the semi-official Tehran daily Kayhan reported that the Iranian government publicly hung [sic] two men, Mokhtar N. (24 years old) and Ali A. (25 years old), in the Shahid Bahonar Square of the northern town of Gorgan.

The government reportedly executed the two men for the crime of "lavat." Iran's shari'a-based penal code defines lavat as penetrative and non-penetrative sexual acts between men. Iranian law punishes all penetrative sexual acts between adult men with the death penalty. Non-penetrative sexual acts between men are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are punished with death. Sexual acts between women, which are defined differently, are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are also punished with death.

If the U.S. military executed homosexuals instead of merely discharging them, perhaps Bollinger would welcome ROTC back to Columbia.

Roll On, Columbia. Roll on. (Roger Simon)
As most readers know, those worldly "progressives" [sic] at Columbia University are hosting a speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the Iranian president addresses the thugocrats and parking violators in the General Assembly. Freedom of speech, doncha know? At Columbia it evidently extends to Holocaust deniers and adherents of the belief that global chaos will bring on the Mahdi (Shiite messiah).

I have a question for the Columbia crowd, since Holocaust deniers are welcome, would you allow a speaker in favor of a return to black slavery? I hope not. Well, that's how I feel about Holocaust deniers.

What are the speaker rules at Columbia? Does anybody know? How far can you go? Please leave the info here, if you have it.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL "REFORMED."

Gay Rabbi Complains Bloomberg Skipped Church (NYSun)
The two grand marshals of the city's annual gay pride parade are criticizing Mayor Bloomberg for joining the march below St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has said he favors same-sex marriage, joined yesterday's parade down Fifth Avenue at 48th Street, two blocks south of the cathedral.

Mr. Bloomberg has started walking in the parade below the cathedral every year, continuing the precedent established by Mayors Koch and Giuliani before him. Yesterday, he marched alongside the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, the first openly gay leader of the council. Ms. Quinn started the parade at the beginning of the route on 52nd Street.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum and the Reverend Troy Perry, the parade's two grand marshals, criticized Mr. Bloomberg for not walking past the cathedral, which has during past parades been the site of protests of the Catholic church's position on homosexuality and of counterprotests directed at the parade.

"Shame on you, Mr. Bloomberg," Ms. Kleinbaum said at a news conference when asked about the mayor's decision to start the march below the church. "We expect you to be at the head of this march."

QUEERS FOR PALESTINE

Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism at Victoria's Secret (LGF)
One of the weirdest leftist aberrations is the group called “Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism,” based in ... San Francisco. They hate Israel/Jews so much, they’re completely blind to the fact that in their beloved “Palestine,” guys with hairy arms wearing brassieres don’t just get funny looks from the passersby. They end up in ditches, riddled with Hamas or Islamic Jihad bullets, or stabbed to death by a brother or cousin.

While in Israel, they hold an annual gay pride parade....

Here’s a [web]page ... where they’ve posted the story of their latest exploit, a high-quality street theater piece performed in front of a Victoria’s Secret store in Union Square: I Dreamed I Went to Gaza In My Secret Armor Bra...

Also see zombietime: Queers for Palestine.

ARAB LESBIANS HOLD CONFERENCE IN HAIFA

HOW IRONIC THAT THE POOR OPPRESSED ARABS FEEL SAFER AMONG THE ISRAELIS THEY ACCUSE OF RACISM, FASCISM AND YOU NAME IT ISM THAN THEY DO AMONG THEIR OWN PEOPLE.

Arab lesbians hold conference in Haifa (JPost)
Arab lesbians gathered Wednesday in Haifa at a rare public event, quietly defying protests from Islamists and a taboo in their own society.

So strong is the antipathy toward homosexuality in their communities that only few of the Arab women in the crowd of about 250 were gay - a sign of how much Arab women feared being identified as lesbians, said Samira, 31, a conference organizer, who came with her Jewish Israeli girlfriend.

"We'd like all women to come out of the closet - that's our role. We work for them," said Samira, who battled her own family when they found out she was a lesbian.

Among Israel's Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of the country's population, homosexuality is taboo to most. Homosexuality is strictly forbidden by Islam, and a statement issued by a large Muslim group in Israel described it as a "cancer" in the Arab community.

Driven deep underground for the most part, only 10 to 20 Arab lesbians attended the conference, organizers said, and most blended in with their Israeli counterparts and Arab backers without making their presence known.

Poetry readings, music and Arab women rappers entertained the conference, called "Home and Exile in Queer Experience," organized by Aswat, an organization for Arab lesbians, with members in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ....

Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population. "This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it's our country ... but it's not being held in Nazareth or Umm el-Fahm (two large Israeli Arab towns)," said Yussef Abu Warda, a playwright.