Category Archives: Human Rights

Resources for the unbelievers, on aid conditionality and LGBT rights

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Aid received per capita across the global South, 2007: From wphr.org

I’ve been working desultorily (a beautiful word: say it slowly: it seems to capture being lazy but just alive enough to claim you’re still doing something) on an article on aid conditionality and LGBT rights.

This all comes, of course, from the controversy launched last fall by David Cameron’s declaring his government would cut development assistance to governments that committed violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity. This statement was idiotic in the pure, Greek sense: Cameron was, in essence, talking to himself. It came without any prior consulting with activists in the countries in question, and was an ill-planned effort to get domestic voices in the UK to shut up and stop pressuring the PM.(They did, obediently.) The ensuing backlash, across Africa and elsewhere, proved exceedingly discouraging about the idea. However, Hillary Clinton’s announcement that LGBT rights were a new US global priority gave new life to the project, and US advocates have urged the Obama administration to enlist American foreign aid money in the cause.

Northern governments have ben conditioning development aid on other issues for a while, especially in the last 30 years– usually affixing economic strings (hire our consultants! buy our goods! privatize your hospitals, if you want our aid!), less often political or rights-related ones.  I’ll raise specific questions in my article about whether something around sexuality- and gender-related abuses makes them peculiarly resistant to being stopped by such linkages. There are also legitimate concerns, though, about whether such linkages ever work the way they’re meant to, or are ever justified. I’m skeptical they do, or are. I’d like to get some discussion going as I finish the article, and so I’ll share some resources here for others who are skeptical, or in favor, or undecided, in hopes you’ll argue or respond. Respond! Use the comments section, or write me directly.

1) First off: here’s an interview with Radhika Balakrishnan, of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, that lays out some of the concerns with conditionality clearly.

2) The October 2011 statement by dozens of African activists opposing aid conditionality in the LGBT rights sphere is here. Hakima Abbas’s “Aid, Resistance, and Queer Power” expands on its points; her essay can be found in this booklet from Sexuality Policy Watch (pp. 16-19) along with “Aid conditionality and respect for LGBT people’s rights” by Luis Abolafia Anguita (pp. 9-15).

3) An especially important paper you should examine is this report by AWID (the Association of Women in Development), succinctly called Conditionalities Undermine the Right to Development. It sets out a wide range of facts and arguments on the issue. Because it’s 128 pages long, I’ll try in the following points to summarize some of the background with which it deals.

4) A lot of people (including many of those pushing for aid conditionality) don’t know about the political negotiations in the last 10 years over the issue of how aid works, or doesn’t. By “political” I mean: Northern and Southern governments have actually discussed the subject, sometimes with each other! In 2005, a major ministerial-level meeting produced the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, responding to a wide perception that aid wasn’t being … well, effective. Over 100 countries joined to affirm five pillars of meaningful assistance: Ownership, Harmonisation, Alignment, Results and Mutual Accountability. (OHARMA?)  OK, enough buzzwords. The key commitment under “Ownership” was that conditions on aid, if any, should be jointly owned. Donors should

draw conditions, whenever possible, from a partner’s national development strategy … Other conditions would be included only when a sound justification exists and would be undertaken transparently and in close consultation with other donors and stake holders.

Pragmatically, this recognized that conditions imposed from outside simply weren’t being met. Three years later, another high-level forum in Ghana produced the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA, a way better acronym). This proclaimed, “We will continue to change the nature of conditionality to support ownership” by developing countries. It mandated donors to “work with developing countries to agree on a limited set of mutually agreed conditions based on national development strategies,” and to “document and disseminate good practices on conditionality.”

Both these documents can be found here, and straightforward summaries are here and here. It’s important to see that the emphasis on joint commitments, as opposed to taking aid hostage, severely limits how far donor governments should use aid to enforce rights goals that aren’t fully shared (or aren’t integrated into development strategies). Do we want LGBT rights to be the basis for backtracking on these principles?

Anti-Debt Coalition activists protest an Asian Development Bank (ADB) meeting, Jakarta, 2009 (Reuters)

5) Civil societies and social movements engaged intensely in the lead-up to the Paris and Accra meetings, as well as a further gathering in Busan, Korea, in 2011. And while you might suppose that women’s movements, for example, would want aid more conditioned on rights policies — since they were urging women’s rights and gender equality as core components of development planning – almost exclusively they called for less conditionality. Part of their reasoning involved the possible devastating effect of slashes in aid. They also saw that conditions foreign governments imposed actually prevented civil society in developing countries from being part of the rights discussion: everything turned into an argument between the donor and recipient governments, with domestic voices ignored. A broad coalition of feminist and gender-equality groups in 2011, for instance, called on donors to

[m]ove away from policy conditionalities towards consistent application of concepts of multiple responsibility, accountability and transparency among both donor and developing countries. This could be advanced, for example, by supporting democratic scrutiny of development goals, policies and results. Policy conditionalities can have negative impacts on people, particularly on women and girls. They undermine the principle of ownership and contradict the right to development and self-determination.

Similar criticisms can be found here.

6) The Paris and Accra documents have come under considerable fire for not going far enough. This (briefer) briefing paper from AWID summarizes some of the critiques. And this analysis by the UK-based Overseas Development Institute looks at the debate over aid effectiveness “through the recipient lens,” by talking to officials in governments that get aid. One criticism is that the Paris-based language doesn’t put sufficient stress on “predictability” of aid — states and societies need to know that money isn’t going to go away when the givers shift their whims. Conditionality is a prime generator of unpredictability in aid. The fact that many Northern donor governments don’t have a cross-party consensus on LGBT rights worsens the prospects in this particular sphere. What happens if Obama imposes conditions on development aid based on getting rid of sodomy laws; then Romney defeats him, and suddenly sodomy laws are OK; then Hillary Clinton gets elected in four years, and abruptly the conditions are back on again? Manic roller-coaster swoops and swerves in the terms of assistance don’t just leave governments confused; they mean that anti-poverty, health or infrastructural programs in country after country can’t plan on future funding, or their own existence. That’s a heavy responsibility for LGBT rights to bear.

7) When advocates talk about “conditionality,” often they mean the set of economic — or combined economic and political — strings that donor governments started attaching to aid in the 1980s and 1990s. International lenders, the World Bank and IMF, were even more radical and reviled movers in this. But surely human rights conditions are a different, friendlier thing altogether?

never in history have so many owed so much to so little money from so few

No. What’s happened for 30 years is that donors tie human rights into a bundle with something called “economic freedom,” or maybe “good governance,” conceived as governing the economy with a particular set of virtues that will make particular classes rich. After all, they’re all “freedoms,” right? Rights thus get bound up with the infamous “Washington Consensus”: Privatize everything!  Shrink the state! Down with protection, up with free trade! Deregulate!  This neoliberal “reform” brings wealth to people who are plugged into global flows of capital. It impoverishes pretty much everyone else — women, minorities, unpopular groups even more than others. When human rights get wrapped up with its strictures, they lose their popularity as well. LGBT rights are already seen, in many places, as imports from the insidious Outside. If wedded to imposed neoliberal policies, their street cred likely shrinks to zero.

A fine example is a United States concoction called the “Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)” This strange being, set up by the Bush presidency in 2004, reveals how fake-friendly you can make aid conditionality appear, with the right rhetoric. It’s a foreign aid agency with a ton of US money, and a mandate to give it out only based on supposedly clear standards and criteria. If LGBT rights are going to be integrated into US giving, the MCC is one place it will start — and advocates are already targeting it to establish LGBT benchmarks for giving.

The MCC grades developing countries on 17 indicators; they must exceed a median score on a number of them to be eligible to apply for money. One set of indicators is called “Ruling Justly,” and includes “civil liberties” and “political liberties.”  This is the human-rightsy side. Another is called “Economic Freedom,” and includes “trade policy,” “inflation rate,” and “fiscal policy.”  This is the telling part. The “trade policy” benchmarks, for instance, come directly, explicitly, from the Heritage Foundation: a right-wing Washington think tank whose mission – self-described – “is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”

MCC is all about eliminating trade barriers and denuding countries of defenses against foreign purchase and foreign sales. This means ending protective, import-substitution policies for building strong domestic industries: policies that have been the main means, in the last hundred years, for poor countries to develop. It means prying markets open to invasions of US goods, while eviscerating local producers. (The US government’s cabinet-level Trade Representative, statutorily responsible for doing the prying, sits on the MCC’s board.)  It’s striking, too, that one of the absolute rather than relative indicators the MCC demands is “inflation rate,” where it insists on a strict maximum of 15%. This restricts countries’ power to devalue their currencies and stimulate their economies. It locks the receipients of MCC aid into the same austerity trap that Eurozone nations are writhing against today.

A: Because of all the gay cruise ships that will visit

Even the most humane of the MCC’s indicators — the “Investing in People” silo, evaluating public spending on things like health and education — tends toward the lowest standards (and doesn’t pay even lip service to the concept of economic and social rights). The MCC is mainly a brass-knuckle enforcer of neoliberalism, with some salving concessions to human rights in the form of “Ruling Justly” (a bizarre phrase in itself).   Despite its cheerful visage, it’s a sinister strategy. Some serious caution is called for before letting LGBT rights be part of its package. To tie them to a project likely to inflict penury on subject populations could well be disastrous.

I’m not the only one who says this. For some detailed critiques of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, check out the three articles — by Maurizio Carbone, Emma Mawdsley, and Susanne Soederberg – here. (Because these texts are Rapunzelled in behind academic firewalls, I’ve uploaded them and let down their hair so you can read them. If the authors object, fine, but then they’re bad leftists.) And if you want to find out about your own country’s relations with the MCC, that information (the agency is at least transparent!) is here. My advice: Watch out.

But the difficulty transcends the MCC.  The donors most likely to give a friendly hearing to LGBT-rights conditionality are donors already practicing conditionality based on “economic liberalization or “open markets”: conditions that, steeped in neoliberalism, are abhorrent to most peoples of the global South. 

“Symptoms of Neoliberalism”: Cartoon from Mexico, by El Fisgón

8) My real problem with the arguments for aid conditionality goes deeper. It’s that the advocates stay confined within a tightly limited and lopped version of human rights, very different from the one most people in the world believe in.

Proponents speak as if, on one side, there were human rights lined up neatly: free expression, freedom from torture, freedom from sodomy laws, and so on. Then on the other, there’s development money. The only relation between the two sides is that, if a country respects the rights, it should get its development money. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t get any. Or not as much.

You would never imagine, hearing these folks promote this vision, that development is itself a human right. The UN General Assembly adopted its “Declaration on the Right to Development” in 1986, stating:

The right to development is an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.

The Declaration and Programme of Action of the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights also dealt with the issue extensively: “Democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are interdependent and mutually reinforcing,” it affirmed. And:

States should cooperate with each other in ensuring development and eliminating obstacles to development. The international community should promote an effective international cooperation for the realization of the right to development and the elimination of obstacles to development.

Imagining that human rights are largely unconnected to development, except to legitimate restricting it, fits with a certain Anglo-American perspective in which economic and social rights don’t exist. But if you do believe development is a right, then to endorse conditionality as part of the standard human rights toolkit is, needlessly and destructively, to pit human rights against each other.

The “Quezon City Declaration on AID” — a 2007 manifesto by a coalition of Asian movements and NGOs — states that

The kind of aid we want must be premised primarily on a recognition of the history of colonization of countries across Asia, a history that persists in the continued exploitation by the North of the South, particularly the peoples of Asia and the region’s biodiversity. From this lens, aid becomes a matter of global redistributive justice, a just righting of historical wrongs.

In this light — and from the perspective of development as a human right —  it’s notable that, in 1970, donor countries pledged to devote 0.7% of their GDP to overseas development assistance. Almost none of them do so. In 2010 only five OECD countries met that mark; the US stood mired at less than a third. Surely the first priority of US and European advocates, including LGBT rights advocates, should be to increase their countries’ overall giving to meet their human rights commitments. They shouldn’t use LGBT rights as an excuse for governments to fail their pledges and give less.

It’s only by understanding development as a right that you can see how the Quezon City statement can both call on states to reject conditionalities, and

enjoin both donors and national governments to adopt a rights-based approach to aid giving, which means ensuring that human rights standards and social development principles guide all development cooperation and programming in all sectors and in all phases of the programming process. Right-holders and their supporters such as human right NGOs should be included in decision-making processes relating to aid money and allocation. Attention must especially be given to those whose voices are at risk of being silenced or marginalized vis-à-vis aid: women, children, and adolescents, or non-citizens such as in/formal migrant workers, indigenous peoples, small farmers and fishers, etc.

A “rights-based approach to aid giving” means not using rights to justify cutbacks, but using aid actively and creatively to promote rights, including funding decision-making and participation by the most marginalized communities. The mounting calls for aid conditionality in the LGBT sphere suggest a failure of imagination, an unwillingness to think through creative ways that aid can further rights, not curtail development. We can do better than that.

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The rape of the jock: A-jad, manhood, and “Iran 180″

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At Electronic Intifada, Benjamin Doherty excellently investigated the megaweird San Francisco Pride crèche of Ahmadinejad being sodomized by a nuclear warhead. To summarize what he’s found: something called Iran 180 sponsored the float. It’s a “movement of  people and organizations who have come together as a unified voice to demand a 180 by the Iranian government on their pursuit of nuclear weapons and the treatment of their citizens.” As you would expect from that, it’s not a movement at all: discouraged that anti-Iran rallies outside the UN “attract fewer attendees and even less press, the New York Jewish Community Relations Council decided to act and formed a new coalition called Iran 180.” They found the language of human rights instrumental to their cause:

A petition on basic human rights for women, minorities, unions, media, journalists, political opposition, juveniles, and more, helped generate interest from some non-traditional allies such as the NAACP and 100 Hispanic Women.

Not to mention the Korean American Community Empowerment Council and the United Haitian American Society.  Most of the groups undoubtedly signed on with no particular idea what they were endorsing, except that it all sounding like a Good Idea.  As Ben notes, it’s a fine case of “astroturfing” — “advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a ‘grassroots‘ movement” (merci Wikipedia). Two PR firms spearheaded the 2010 launch, one of them a division of Burson-Marsteller, notorious for refurbishing the images of evil dictators and other miscreants.

That scowing, hook-nosed Ahmadinejad puppet is the staple of Iran 180′s street theater. One of the lead groups writes, “The popularity and presence of this puppet made it a useful tool for Iran 180 … The press had a catchy photograph and Iran 180 had a hook” — the latter a Freudian slip, no doubt. Ben found additional photos of the SF Pride float. On the left, Mahmoud drops his pants to let the warhead in; on the right, he fellates it:

They’re obsessed with the Ahmedinejad-is-a-fag theme. Here’s a UN demo with A-jad in red heels (it’s Human Rights Day, December 10, which I never knew also celebrated the fashion-challenged):

And here they’re staging a gay wedding between A-jad and Bashar Assad, under a chuppa, with Qaddafi as witness:

What the hell is the point of all this iconography? Any residual irony is wasted in the case of Assad, who is known for many awful things but not especially for homophobia. Is this supposed to change the minds of gays somehow? I find it hard to imagine any homo stumbling on this touching scene and feeling the urge to blast away those Persian centrifuges, or rain destruction on Damascus.

Surely, instead, he’d think he’d wandered into the long-postponed wedding of Frankenberry and Count Chocula.

The whole bizarre display seems torn from the discredited writings of Raphael Patai, the Israeli-American Orientalist whose dissection of “The Arab Mind” (and, by extension, Middle Eastern masculinity in general) became an ur-text underpinning Abu Ghraib. As Seymour Hersh wrote:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. … [Patai's] book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. …  The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

Putative insults directed at the sexualities of US enemies in the region are legion. There was, and is, for instance, a longstanding rumor that Yasser Arafat was gay and died of AIDS, spread by neoconservatives with glee. Unlike most rumors, it’s possible to pinpoint this one’s source with some precision. Ion Pacepa, chief of foreign intelligence in Ceauşescu’s Romania, defected to the US in 1978, and later composed his memoir, Red Horizons, while under CIA protection. In it, he claimed that secret microphones caught Arafat making love to his male bodyguard while visiting Bucharest.  The book is full of wild stories, and this particular propaganda gem had a two-birds usefulness for the US: it impugned not only Arafat for screwing a man, but Ceauşescu (notoriously puritanical) for tolerating it. The CIA called his book ”an important and unique contribution to the United States,” and it should be read as such, along with other important and unique fabrications such as the histories of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

As I’ve written here about “outing,” deploying anxieties about homosexuality to defame or shame people simply means manipulating — and endorsing — homophobia. This is true whether the object is Ahmadinejad, Assad, or Rick Perry.

On looking at this stuff, though, I have to note what bad propaganda it is. Is Burson- Marsteller (“the world’s biggest PR company,” apparently) any good at what it does? Ben quotes the Guardian on its mind-molding feats: the firm

was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family.

Its corporate clients have included the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979, Union Carbide after the Bhopal gas leak killed up to 15,000 people in India …

Hmm.  Nobody much doubts anymore that Nigeria’s, Argentina’s, and Indonesia’s dictators were guilty of murder; while if I remember my 1989 rightly, Ceauşescu and his brand went the way of the Edsel and New Coke.  Three Mile Island pretty much ended the nuclear industry in the US — and so on. If I were Ahmadinejad, I would take comfort from this record of ineptitude and sip my Coke Classic in peace of mind.

Nicolae on trial: I demand to speak to the Grand National Assembly and Burson-Marsteller right now

The Ahmadinejad puppet clearly derives from old anti-Semitic imagery. But the point of Nazi propaganda was to frighten people. (Jeffrey Herf’s study of wartime anti-semitic posters is a thoroughly disturbing guide.) The Jew appeared as monstrous threat, individuality always dissolving in collective, conspiratorial menace:

"The Jew: Inciter of the War, Prolonger of the War." 1943 Nazi poster, from Jeffrey Herf, "The Jewish Enemy"

“The Jew: Inciter of the War, Prolonger of the War.” 1943 Nazi poster, from Jeffrey Herf, “The Jewish Enemy”

It’s horrific, but it worked, a gross demonology that actually did incite and prolong the war. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to depict the Jew as schlemiel. This Ahmadinejad — sexually passive, his pants down, generally pathetic — has nothing threatening about him. There is no great propaganda value in portraying the dictator of Iran as Woody Allen. Even when he tries to scare, the effect is unconvincing:

Such is the dreaded Mad Bomber, the feared Hitler of the Gulf, and the worst he can do is wave one of Dorothy’s ruby slippers at you? Even in the unmanly corridors of the Arab Mind (how many times have we been told in the last decade that “Showing the sole of your shoe has long been an insult in Arab culture”?) this guy is considerably less alarming than Imelda Marcos.

This failure points, I think, to a larger and partly disabling ideological contradiction in our world of post-colonial wars. It’s a point often made that the Nazis brought back colonial methods  – of disenfranchisment, dispossession, and murder — to the European homeland. Yet in order to do so, in order to overcome the moral and material barriers to such a slaughter on nearby soil, they needed to conjure a threat more comprehensive and capable than the colonial Other, generally shown as impotent, backward, and helpless minus the mission civilisatrice. They needed the tropes of far-reaching conspiratorial power, the Enemy within, that came from anti-Semitic paranoia. Only that kind of fearsome, concocted foe could gin up a comfort-fattened populace to the hardships of total war — not to mention the horrors of mass murder.

That ’70s Paranoia: Big Mullah, Little White Man

In the interminable battles with brown people that constitute American foreign policy at the start of the millenium, though, these tropes aren’t functional. Brown people, after all, are born schlemiels and born bottoms; so intrinsic to the West is the contempt for their competence and capacities that it’s hard to impute the requisite menace to them.  The late 20th century saw various attempts to elevate the Arab or the Ayatollah to the power and dignity of World Enemy, based mainly on the conspiratorial connection with oil; these sinister plotters kept hatching destructive cabals in clandestine secret hideouts, like Tora Bora, OPEC, or the UN.   But those enemies, like Ahmadeinejad, kept lapsing back into their appointed role in the Western imagination, as buffoon.  The propaganda around the last Gulf War was illustrative of the contradiction. On the one hand, Colin Powell and Tony Blair and the rest assured us that Saddam Hussein was a universal monster who put everybody in jeopardy, with poised weapons forty minutes’ flight from Paddington. On the other, keeping up support for the war meant promising this would be an easy kill; the poor joker couldn’t possibly hold out in his bunker for more than a week, and we’d be welcomed with flowers while opponents withered like kudzu in the desert. Memorably, neither was true.

It’s quite telling that, although there’s a bomb on the Ahmadeinejad float, the droopy A-jad isn’t the one wielding it. Instead, he’s the one raped by it. Iran, in the imagery, is the party getting nuked.

How strange … or is it? Could this be a last Freudian slip in Iran 180′s unconscious repertory? After all: the one universally known but unspeakable secret in the current furor over Iran’s nuclear program is: there’s already one nuclear power in the region. Günter Grass presumed to mention this fact in a recent poem, and got hit by the intellectual equivalent of Desert Storm for his presumption (though the controversy did contribute to investigations of how Germany furnishes Israel with submarines to carry its nuclear arsenal).

After Ben published his piece, Iran 180 posted, miraculously, an apology on its Facebook page.

In June 2011, Iran180 participated in the San Francisco Pride Parade … The performance mocked the Iranian regime’s homophobia and was intended to raise awareness of the continued persecution of the LGBTQ community in Iran. As our followers know, drawing attention to the plight of Iran’s LGBTQ community is a priority for us. While the float was largely well received by onlookers, there were elements of the performance that unfortunately crossed the line and were clearly inappropriate. For that we sincerely apologize and have taken steps to ensure that this will not happen again.

But what line, exactly, did they cross? Is this an unlikely acknowledgement that rape and racism are bad? Or are they recognizing that, inadvertently, they gave too much away?

Why I am not proud

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This comes to me by way of Maya Mikdashi and the folks at Jadaliyya:

It’s a float from 2011′s San Francisco Pride. It shows a dungeonmaster dominating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There’s a whip involved, but mainly he’s fucking the Iranian with a nuclear bomb.

Jadaliyya headlines this “No Comment,” and probably it’s healthier for what’s left of my gay identity, and ungay sanity, not to dwell on it.  I feel like I’ve been putting up with other people’s overspill of testosterone for several days now, from the guy downstairs whose pit bull seems to be killing a giant squid at great length, to the baltageyya an ocean away who assaulted a women’s march in Cairo. But as I wrote rather inarticulately yesterday, you can only address the operations of power by first thinking them through — you know, trying to unpack a bit what’s at work there. So shoulder to the wheel; let’s try to extract some useable lessons from this very American, very gay piece of imperial performance art.

1) Rape is funny, depending on who you’re raping. Not funny-strange or funny-abnormal, but funny-ha-ha.  So, for that matter, is nuclear war!   Why give head in front when you can give warhead from behind?

What’s funny about it, though? Freud argued (in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious) that humor is a safety-valve for thoughts society inhibits; jokes play much the same role for the collective imagination that dreams do for the individual’s. But they release the repressed temporarily only to restore the social order in the end. Comedy is conservative. It puts the bounder, the miscreant, the climber or the rebel in his (or her) place, by saying, finally: this is who you are.

Rape is funny, then, when it reminds the raped (and the onlookers) of what’s inescapable, the self he can’t get away from. Inferiority is always a matter of interiority, the inner — penetrable — person placed, defined, exposed. Now, look at Ahmadinejad again. Who is he, really? Isn’t he a bit … familiar?

Cartoon from Der Stürmer, for another annual celebration: “The Year is Over. The Battle Goes On.”

Really, these hook-nosed Eastern types need some big blond leathery Meister to whack, or fuck, the presumption out of them 24/7.  (The Iranians have this notion that they’re Aryan somehow, and such arrogance especially calls out for the whip.) This is a fascinating instance of how grossly anti-Semitic imagery is so ingrained in Western modernity — the Jew as synonym for weakness, effeminacy, corruption — that it’s a floating, limpetlike defilement. It doesn’t even require actual Semites to glom onto. (I say nothing here about what you can assume are the pro-Israel, and particularly pro-Netanyahu, implications of the display. I suppose if you read Joseph Massad you might argue that Israeli discourse is also capable of exploiting anti-Semitism on its own terms. But then, I would never read Joseph Massad, would I?)

no comment

Of course, what’s more satisfying than insulting Ahmadinejad by alleging he’s not really a proper male, just one of those squirmy little degenerates? It’s a feel-good thing for two reasons: it disses the the odious Mahmoud, while it affirms Manhood in general, including yours and mine. Ideologically, men are so damn easy to please.

Brown people are born to bottom. This is a fundamental fact, as it were: one in which politics has clearly seized the steering wheel away from desire. Plenty of white gay men, in the Bay Area as well as other precincts, undoubtedly harbor fantasies of being topped by some darker, muscled Other in a sweaty, hairy abnegation of one’s personal power, one’s private nuclear arsenal: an arms treaty for the ages. But these dreams are luxuries to be sacrificed for the national good, for the sanctified collective purpose, the way Americans submitted to gas rationing to beat the Nazis, or gave up — remind me, what did we give up? — to win the Iraq war. Politically, brown people are perpetually being screwed, and it’s only natural that sex (which in essence is politics without the voting, like the rest of politics these days) should reflect that. Sex is also an excellent way of reminding them of the fact.

You can see what I mean by comparing the Pride photo to an image that must have been clanking around somewhere in the back of the floatmasters’ minds, one of the most celebrated stills from any American film:

yee haw

Of course, that’s Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to oblivion and Armageddon at the terminus of Dr. Strangelove. He’s in pretty much the same position as the megaton-wielding Master on the float, with the Russians (honorary brown people for Cold War purposes) positioned where the Iranians now stand in our diminished day. Although this is an anti-war film, notoriously subversive of the military verities, there’s no suggestion anywhere that any proper American is going to have his buttcheeks opened to insert weaponry. That would be, one supposes, too subversive — one turn of the screw too many, a fuck too far. (Instead the movie presents American soldiery as obsessed by Purity of Essence, keeping the holy jism bottled up and restrained for the Big Moment when its outburst is required. Or think Deliverance or Pulp Fiction, where the key to national masculinity is maintaining a clenched anus, despite all the menacing forces — from Vietnamese captors to Appalachian S&M freaks — trying to pry it open.)

2) It also depends on who’s doing the raping. Not just anybody can accomplish the curative and conservative function. The question is: who’s got the power?

(Re)consider, please, the following two photographs — I discussed them yesterday. Both accompanied Mona Eltahawy’s article on Middle Eastern women, in Foreign Policy magazine this spring. This is the one FP chose for the article itself — a famous shot of an Egyptian demonstrator abused and stripped by police:

This really had to go with Eltahawy’s essay — it was too well known to leave out. But they wouldn’t and didn’t put it on the cover, to draw a Western reader in. Why not? Well, it wouldn’t seduce, it wouldn’t draw. The people doing the dominating there aren’t Us (to borrow Eltahawy’s terms): they’re Them, those Arabs, and the problem with them is they have too much power. No purchaser of FP in DC is going to be turned on by the politically suspect sight of them exerting it. Many viewers, in fact, saw the photo as especially disturbing because the bra made the woman seem like Us, prone at Their mercy — a commodity like underclothing is notoriously a more accurate indicator of a woman’s identity than voice or face. Who can stand to see a Westernized woman subdued by Their violence? Thus Sally Quinn wrote:

Aside from the sheer brutality, I think what got to me was that she was wearing this gorgeous, sexy bright blue bra. … This person covered from head to toe demonstrated her beliefs through her choice of underwear. The blue bra said what I imagine her to be feeling: “I may be oppressed. I may not have rights. I may have to cover up my body and face. But you cannot destroy my womanhood. You can’t rob me of my femininity. You can’t take away my power.”  That blue bra, to me, was the ultimate symbol of women’s power.

Me, I am no bio woman, just a poor aging drag queen on a Saturday night. But please, please, I want me a talking bra.

The cover photo FP chose instead, of course, was this:

Now, that woman has taken off her clothes not for Them, but for Us (not to mention how she’s painted on that fetching, Ayisha-meets-Al-Jolson blackface niqab). Look at her! She’s looking right at Us, acknowledging that she’s at our command!  Of course, it’s a voluntary stripping she’s undertaken. It isn’t rape per se. But you don’t need to be an acolyte of Catherine MacKinnon (I’m not, believe me) to realize that the fantasy of women’s willing submission is intrinsic to the pornographic imagination. (It’s one reason it’s hard to argue that porn actually incites violence against women: most porn doesn’t need it.) This photo, unlike the aggressive-Arabs one, shows the right kind of Sex at Issue here. Like ha-ha rape, it puts Them in their place, while pumping up Ours.

And now I see why, as part of the endless wars over “gay executions” in Iran, so many Western activists laugh — ha, ha! — at the idea that Iranian men might rape other men. That’s impossible. It’s allotting Them too much power. Iranian men (remember those small penises!) probably aren’t able to rape Iranian men: bottoms bomb, rather literally, when they try to top. Even if They can rape, We won’t allow Them to. As the Pride photo shows: that’s Our job.

A correction

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A correction to yesterday’s post about Razan Ghazzawi. In a photo caption, I included Bassam Al-Ahmad among the staffers and associates of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM) who are still held in incommunicado detention by Air Force security. In fact, he was freed on May 12, but will stand trial along with Razan on June 25. Here (from Razan’s blog) is a picture of him at a small party celebrating his release (the three younger men L-R are Joan Farso, Bassam Al-Ahmad and Ayham Ghazzoul, all freed that day).

A May 30 statement from eight international and regional human rights organizations has more information, calling “for the immediate release of Mazen Darwish, Hussein Ghareer, Abdelrahman Hamada, Mansour Al-Omari and Hani Zetani – the five people who remain in incommunicado detention in the Air Force Intelligence (AFI) detention centre without any charges,” as well as dropping charges against “Bassam Al-Ahmad, Joan Farso, Ayham Ghazzoul, Yara Bader, Razan Ghazzawi, Mayadah Al-Khaleel, Sana Zetani and Hanadi Zahlout, who will stand on trial on June 25, 2012.”

My apologies for the error.

Meanwhile, Razan has also posted on her blog the statement read on her behalf as she received the Front Line Defenders award. I take the liberty of reposting it here.

Thank you all for the kind words, but the award goes to Syria!

Below is my statement that my colleague at the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, Dlshad Othman, read at the ceremony yesterday:

Dear friends, colleagues and comrades,

Last night, there were many explosions heard in the city of Damascus, gun shots heard in my neighborhood, it has become the norm to fall asleep when hearing clashes in my neighborhood. We spent the night watching footage of a new massacre in Qubair, Hama, that followed Houla massacre couple of weeks ago.

I am writing this to tell you that it’s not easy to write a simple speech for such a kind and humbling event when all this is happening in your day. Then I figured, writing what prevents you from writing, paves the way for you to write.

Beautiful friend, Bassel Shehada, martyred by a mortar grenade in Homs on 28-5-2012. In this photo he was training activists in Homs on how to use the camera to cover regime violations of human rights. Bassel Left Fulbright scholarship to study film-making in the US and chose to be in Syria at this “historical moment,” as he once told me.

Dear friends, colleagues and comrades, I find myself honored to be the person chosen for such appreciation, and to tell you the truth, I believe I don’t deserve such honor, I see the award as an award for Bassel Shehada, for Mazhar Tayyara, for Ghiath Matar, for Bassel Al-Sayed and for all the citizen journalists who died trying to tell the world what’s happening in Syria, when the traditional media have failed to do so. The traditional media that focuses on people’s misery not on their undefeated will to resist. Syrian citizen journalists and filmmakers tell the revolution in all its colors, through the good times and the bad times. And many have died doing so.

Martyr Ammar Moussa Hassan, he’s friends with two of my friends. I never met or heard of him before. Ammar Mousa Hassan, college student, from Nabek (Damascus Suburbs) and was residing in Damascus, was detained for 15 days. Tortured to death.

I wasn’t tortured to death like activist Ammar Mousa Hassan or photojournalist Ferzat Jarbran, I wasn’t hit by a sniper on my way to field hospital to donate blood like citizen Abdalla Hussein Hoswah, I am here in my home behind my screen writing these words to you. This award is for the beautiful people of Syria, for the unprivileged revolutionary, for the unknown activist, for the thousands of families of martyrs, injured and detainees, and for Mazen Darwich, Hussein Ghrer, Abdel Rahman Hmada, Hani Zetani and Mansour Al-Omari, my colleagues at the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, who are still detained at Air Force Intelligence and The Fourth Band since 16-2-2012.

I wish I was with you all to share this moment of appreciation to the brave people of Syria, who are going through a lot, for demanding dignity and freedom. I have learned so much and still learning, on how to be a better person, a better advocate for basic human rights, because of them.

Here’s to people power!

Thank you Front Line Defenders for awarding Syria this year.

Razan Ghazzawi

Razan Ghazzawi receives award; Egyptian women attacked in Tahrir Square

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Video on Razan’s work, from Front Line Defenders

Razan Ghazzawi, whom I’m proud to call my friend, received the Front Line Defenders 2012 award Thursday, from the Irish group dedicated to the security of human rights activists at risk. Naturally, she didn’t go to Dublin to receive the prize. She’s too busy on the front lines in Syria.

I adore and admire Razan for a number of reasons. Three good ones are that she is fiercely feminist, anarchist, and queer. Another is that she studied English literature at the University of Damascus, offering evidence that lit majors are not fated to permanent irrelevance in the universe. More encompassingly, she’s been a beacon of bravery to her fellow Syrian activists, in her uncompromising resistance to a regime that is determined to murder as many of its own people as it can — not even pour encourager les autres anymore, but with a kind of perverse and pointless aesthetic pleasure: murder for its own sake.

Razan is one of the few Syrian dissident bloggers to write under her own name. She also works for the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, supporting other bloggers and activists fighting for free speech and basic rights against the dictatorship. She has been arrested twice. In December 2011, she spent two weeks in prison after authorities detained her on her way to a conference in Amman on media freedom. On February 16, the security branch of the Syrian Air Force raided the SCM office and seized her and several colleagues. They released Razan and five other women three days later; “those three nights,” she wrote on her blog, “were the longest of my life.” Mahmoud Darwish, head of the Centre, is still jailed incommunicado along with eight other activists; Razan and others fear that all are being tortured. Razan herself faces trial before a military court on charges of  “possessing prohibited materials with the intent to disseminate them.”

Among the SCM employees still detained: (L-R) Mazen Darwish, Bassam al-Ahmad, Hussein Ghrer, Abdel Rahman Hmada

I got to know Razan last summer in Cairo, where she spent a few weeks in solidarity with the revolutionaries in Tahrir. Not for a second did she lose touch with what was happening on the ground back in Syria; I would see her almost every evening in some cafe, hunched over her laptop as though it were a campfire on a freezing night, e-mailing or blogging away. One day, she and a friend cooked an immense Syrian meal (no country with so good a cuisine deserves so bad a government) for me and an Egyptian sexuality activist. Somewhere between the courses she began offering a critique of the nascent Cairo attempts at organizing around sexual rights, one so cogent that I simply got out my own computer and took notes. Here are some of them — reproduced without her permission:

There is a problem with people socializing and connecting only around sexual orientation and sexuality.   You have a gay community that only talks about gay issues, not any other issues. …

I am not trying to tell gay people they should be active politically. That is a very patronizing position coming from above. The question is: how do we ask gay people to come to Tahrir, to oppose SCAF, to push for change in the current system? Since gay people experience oppression and repression, they should understand other forms of repression, but they don’t …

In a strange sort of way here in Egypt I am much more comfortable with people who are straight, who know what is going on in the wide world. It is their privilege—as heterosexuals, their thinking doesn’t have to be limited by their own oppression. That is power. I recognize that. But I want us, as gays, to think politically as well. So that after the revolution people will recognize that they, that we were here.

Razan thinks constantly about the connections, meaning that her concept of the Syrian revolution embraces and tests itself against the Egyptian revolution, the Occupy movements, the Palestinian cause, women’s rights, Sunni Islamists, secularists, lesbians and gays. In addition to boundless courage and energy, she has something every revolutionary needs, but that often gets left out of the package: a restless mind, too busy with reality to let itself ossify into ideology. In the months since I’ve come back from Cairo, I’ve often found myself thinking how much I miss her.

Mona Seif, Tahrir Square

Another finalist for the Front Line award was Mona Seif, the Egyptian activist and founder of the No Military Trials for Civilians movement. I equally admire Mona; scion of a family of leftist militants, she’s done more than anyone in Egypt to call attention to the 12,000 or more victims of military detention since the Revolution, along with the tortures the generals have retained in the State’s punitive repertory. In addition to being a courageous and strategic organizer, she’s one of the least pretentious rights activists I’ve met. Her complete immunity from the vagaries of ego is like a genetic quirk, so uncommon is it in the profession; it’s like meeting someone who never caught the common cold. Now, I immediately have to stop myself, and wonder: Would I be saying that about her if she were a man? I don’t think I’ve fallen prey to some insidious essentialism about femininity. But there used to be an idea about feminist practice — that it was going to open the way to a different kind of politics: in blunt terms, one where not everybody had to be a jerk. Historically, revolutions have been heavily testosterone-inducing affairs. The cult of radical heroism is like Rogaine for the chest hair; “It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph,” as W. H. Auden wrote about another venture in history-making.  It’s true, you’ve got your odd Olympe de Gouges or two partly redeeming revolutionary history, but for every one of them there’s a dozen Robespierres or Stalins or Hazem Abu Ismails grunting and showing off their balls.  Mona Seif and Razan Ghazzawi are, among other things, both reminders of how central women have been to the shifting seasons of the Arab Spring. They signal how the Spring proffered a different kind of revolutionary potential, still unfulfilled, but still there.

HarassMap: a web initiative to collect reports of sexual harassment from around Egypt. (For more information in Arabic, see harassmap.org)

It’s good to remember this, today of all days. This evening in Cairo, a few dozen women tried to hold a rally against sexual harassment, as part of a larger protest in Midan Tahrir over the Presidential candidacy of neo-Mubarakite Ahmed Shafiq.  The day before, a coalition of rights groups had condemned what they called a calculated and growing campaign of sexual assaults on women protesters. Earlier in the week, for instance, a crowd of almost 200 men had assaulted a women in Tahrir, harassing and abusing her till she lost consciousness. The groups claimed

that the amount of sexual harassment and violence against female demonstrators in Tahrir Square and the surrounding streets has been “worryingly” increasing since the outbreak of the recent wave of protests following the verdict issued against former President Hosni Mubarak and senior Interior Ministry officials on 2 June. …

The organizations stressed that the attacks suffered by female demonstrators, which violate the sanctity of their bodies and their physical safety, represent a barrier limiting the participation of women in the public sphere and disabling them from shaping the present and future of the country.

Nice try. The Associated Press describes what happened today:

A mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an end to sexual harassment Friday, with the attackers overwhelming the male guardians and groping and molesting several of the female marchers in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. …

Friday’s march was called to demand an end to sexual assaults. Around 50 women participated, surrounded by a larger group of male supporters who joined to hands to form a protective ring around them. The protesters carried posters saying, “The people want to cut the hand of the sexual harasser,” and chanted, “The Egyptian girl says it loudly, harassment is barbaric.”

After the marchers entered a crowded corner of the square, a group of men waded into the women, heckling them and groping them. The male supporters tried to fend them off, and it turned into a melee involving a mob of hundreds.

The marchers tried to flee while the attackers chased them and male supporters tried to protect them. But the attackers persisted, cornering several women against a metal sidewalk railing, including an Associated Press reporter, shoving their hands down their clothes and trying to grab their bags. The male supporters fought back, swinging belts and fists and throwing water.

Eventually, the women were able to reach refuge in a nearby building with the mob still outside until they finally got out to safety.

Here’s video from Al Masry Al Youm, featuring interviews with women marchers (I recognize and salute some of my friends), and, at the end, scenes of the attacks:

The male supporters were there because this wasn’t the first time this happened. In 2011, less than a month after Mubarak’s fall, men assaulted a march celebrating International Women’s Day, March 8. Those attacks were more spontaneous: they seemed to be an instinctive way of drawing a line around the Revolution, saying “This far and no farther.”  Dalia Abd Elhameed, an activist who was there, told me, “The men said, ‘We are not ready to hear about women’s rights: You can take your demands to the street, but not as women.’”

We started to march from the press syndicate to Tahrir, and the moment we reached Tahrir, people started to humiliate us: “Women’s rights, what are you talking about?  You want to be  president,” and so on. “Women can’t be president, because the man is the ruler of the house.”

After a while the hostility began to increase. They started shouting at us.  They chose a women in niqab, pointed at her, and said, “This is the mother of the martyrs, this is the example of the Egyptian woman, not you, you are prostitutes, you have to go home, no one wants you in the streets.”  I left by 5 pm. I know that half an hour later they began the sexual harassment, physical harassment, running after protesters, grabbing them by their clothes, describing the men who took part in the protest as khalawalat [faggots], not real men because you are supporting women’s rights.

Two male colleagues of mine also in that march blogged about it, here and here:

They were dealing with us like we are a group of prostitutes and pimps that want to deprive them of their religion … They accused us of working for the former first lady’s interests. Others accused us of being westernized or working for some foreign agendas. What was really provoking for them is that men were holding the banners too. Some of them pointed at me and described me as a fag who should wear a scarf over his head like women because he is a disgrace to the man kind .

And a film about the 2011 violence, with interviews with activists and attackers, is here.

Manifold anxieties and antinomies converged in the assaults. These fights are always mythic for the fighters: poverty pitted against privilege, the indigenous against the foreign, the virtuous against the corrupted. Today’s violence undoubtedly draws on the same fears, but seems dominated by a simple SCAF strategy to halve protests by scaring women away.

It’s horrifying. One’s mind turns inevitably to Mona Eltahawy’s controversial (to put it mildly) article for Foreign Policy‘s “Sex Issue” this spring: “Why Do They Hate Us?” ”The real war on women is in the Middle East,” Eltahawy warned. And Mona herself, one should note, was sexually assaulted by security forces when arrested near Midan Tahrir last November.

Versions of Foreign Policy’s cover photo: Paint it black

Now, that piece produced an uproar. Friends and colleagues of mine roundly denounced it as a superficial blandishment to imperialism (you can read some of the disputations here, here, and here, and there are many more). To a large degree, the outrage was inseparable from the article’s visuals and venue. Foreign Policy, which markets itself to the younger and cooler breed of US diplomats and wonks, packaged Eltahawy’s contribution under a cover showing an otherwise-divested woman in black painted-on niqab. (When you download the photo from their website, you find its title, tellingly if inadvertently, is “120418_Sex_Centerfold_193.jpeg”.)  ”Cover” — and its opposite — are the operative words. If the “Sex Issue” in general –focusing heavily on Iran and the Arab world and presenting them as chock full of erotic peculiarities — sent the message that sex means the Middle East, the shot itself conveyed Get your Middle Eastern women, here, uncovered! You couldn’t miss the imperial implication that a US magazine had the power to display the Middle Eastern woman and her secrets, all stripped and splayed for perusal. The “Sex Issue” sold itself neither as fact nor fiction, but as pure fetish.

The Blue Bra: Photo accompanying Eltahawy’s article

Eltahawy’s article tried to argue about abuses rooted in power relations in the region, but inevitably the mind kept swinging back to the cover image, seemingly telling you where power really lay: saying that gender in the Middle East had been rendered a tool for US policy, as incarnate in Foreign Policy. Inside, the article came decorated with one of the more celebrated and frightening Egyptian images of the last year — a female protester in the hands of Cairene riot police, her black jilbab ripped open to show her blue bra.  But even that iconic photograph couldn’t override the shock-value strip-tease on the cover. The violent denuding had already been done. Woman with a capital “W” had already been stripped by the American gaze, even before you got to Eltahawy’s page.

I stayed out of the arguments Eltahawy’s article provoked, partly because I am not, as a general rule, a Middle Eastern woman. But the symbolic issue on which many of the attacks centered – who is being revealed or unveiled, for whose eye? – seemed less significant to me than a different issue of representation that other commentators took up. Eltahawy’s piece revolved around two categories, two pronouns, which seemed monolithic, unmodulated and uninflected. “They” hate “us.”

I thought about that in reading about the Cairo assaults today. i thought about it because those are the terms in which the oppressed are prone to think. Oppression elides fine distinctions. You don’t look for the delicate shades of difference among the oppressors, number the stripes on the truncheon that is beating you. Oppression presents itself as a huge and unanimous weight, crushing the breath out of you. Its exhaustive solidity prohibits breaking it down into agents, acts, and motives. From the vantage of those being crushed, it is a bulk that extinguishes tactility and a shadow that exterminates vision.

Oppression: The left sand knoweth not what the right sand doeth

And similarly, oppression makes the oppressed lose their sense of distinction from one another. Individuality, privacy, identity are the first things to go when freedom does. You experience an involuntary solidarity with the anonymous rest of the unfree, without alternative or option, the common interest of those who have no interests left. The massive burden of power pressing down grinds everybody into the mass. Who oppresses you? “Them.” Who are the oppressed? “Us.”

I’m pretty sure the women and men reeling from the attacks in Midan Tahrir felt like that today, as night set in. The problem is that you can’t act, you can’t resist, that way, trapped in the apprehension of monolithic forces. You can only fight back if you can analyze power, think your way past its apparent invincibility, see though its bland carapace into its separate interests and components. There is no single “them” hating women, in the Middle East or elsewhere. Patriarchy does many things, but it has never succeeded in uniting men (or societies) into a single undivided phalanx. There are different motives, different classes, different constituencies with different investments in different forms of women’s oppression. It’s not as though you can always play divide and conquer with them, but you have to know them and name them and recognize their partialities before you can resist.

Moreover, the solidarity that oppression imposes on the oppressed is ultimately a fake one. It won’t last. Real solidarities start with recognizing that you’re free to differ, not feeling the raw force that reduces you to the same. If you keep imagining there’s a solid “us” united permanently by the experience of somebody hating you, you’ll never get around to the hard work of politics: figuring out what else you share and what understandings can ally you.

Razan, I think, is particularly good at all this work, which is why her contributions to the revolutions of the Arab Spring will likely be lasting ones. The same is true of Mona Seif, who has engaged with a range of intersecting and cross-fertilizing issues as an activist. Moving the imagination a little beyond the vivid but paralyzing world of “them” and “us” is incremental and painful. But only that movement moves forward.

Irresponsibility, ignorance, and self-declared “experts” on Iran

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This way, please: Rumor leading the chariot of War (Vincenzo Cartari, 1582)

Go ahead: Google “Stop Iran from Executing Four Homosexual Citizens.”  You’ll get well over a thousand hits. They link to petitions that accuse four Iranian men in the small town of Charam of being gay — a capital crime. The insane activist misbehavior over Iran goes on unstoppably. And those responsible for it take no responsibility at all.

When I last wrote about this, none of the petitions were yet directly addressed to Ahmadinejad and the Iranian authorities. That didn’t take long to change. This one, on CNN’s website, now has 5000 signatures; but beyond that, it comes with helpful e-mail addresses and links so that you can contact Iran’s authorities yourself.

SEND THIS LETTER TO SUPREME LEADER OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN ALI KHAMENEI BY COPYING AND PASTING HERE  … ALSO, SEND THIS LETTER TO VARIOUS OFFICIALS OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC REGIME AS WELL AS THEIR EMBASSIES AROUND THE WORLD BY USING THIS LINK. 

The suggested missive not only affirms the men’s gayness, and hence guilt, but makes a weird link to Iran’s nuclear program. With the Flame virus spreading like, well, wildfire, it’s hard to imagine what could be more incendiary; the drafters might as well just brand the four men Israeli spies:

Your Excellency, This is a petition to bring to your attention to [sic] case of four gay men in Iran who are sentenced to be hanged for “sodomy…

If this execution goes forward, it will constitute a crime against humanity in the eyes of the international community, as well as a profound affront to the international standards of justice and norms of modern cilivization [sic] as codified in human rights treaties and conventions to which Iran is a signatory state.

Unavoidably, the question arises: if the Islamic Republic cannot be trusted to honor its human rights obligations under international treaties and covenants, how can it be trusted to honor its commitments in other areas of pressing urgency such as nonproliferation? [emphasis in the original]

In fact, the last paragraph is really the most revealing. Whoever dreamed up this language, it’s clear, isn’t thinking about whether the men live or die. He or she is thinking about Iran’s nuclear program; the men’s fates are a propaganda tool. None of this is doing any good for the men. Nearly all of it is poised to do them harm.

tweet them out

Now, it’s worth repeating: we still have zero information suggesting that the men are “gay.” But none of these petitionmongers cares much about facts. On one page, I see, comments from a Morocco resident who raised doubts about the story have simply been deleted.

What, in truth, do we know now?  One human rights activist in Iran reported to the Iranian Queer Organization (IRQO) that “The four individuals are related and come from the same tribe. They’re among the thugs in the area. About two and half years ago, they have ‘cornered’ a young man of 18-19 and raped him.” He added that HRANA (the Human Rights Activists News Agency), the Farsi-language source of the original story “received th[is] original version too, but intentionally altered it to create media uproar.”

There is recurrent mistrust of HRANA’s reliability among sexual-rights activists and some other human rights campaigners in Iran. Still, after this circulated, on May 17 (28 Ordibehesht 1391), HRANA published an elaboration, based on an alleged interview with a relative of one of the four. This article states that the actual charge was “lavat beh onf,” or rape. The interviewee told HRANA that  ”the families of all four” believed that the victim actually had consensual sex with the men, but had turned this into a rape claim, enlisting two other sexual partners as witnesses against them.

Makwan Mouloudzadeh

What we have, then, is characteristic confusion caused by a dearth of information. An editor at JOOPEA, an Iranian sexual-rights platform, wrote me, “5 adults are involved [presumably including the alleged victim]. We don’t know this was a rape, normal sex, a game or something.” It’s an article of faith among the Peter Tatchells and Doug Irelands of the world that male-male rape never takes place in Iran, and that all alleged incidents are “really” consensual homosexual acts. In promoting this version of the famous 2005 case where two youths were hanged for the rape of a 13-year-old, Peter’s then organization OutRage! both belittled the violence and defamed the victim, accusing him of wanting the sex and then lying about it. Of course, while mounting these allegations, they knew nothing about the victim, not even his name — and very little about Iran; nonetheless, Gay City News, Doug’s employer, intoned back in 2006 that “rape of men by men is comparatively rare” worldwide, an astonishingly ignorant generalization. (Underreporting, mainly due to stigma, means that almost no country has statistics on male rape that can be considered reliable. One Australian psychologist estimates that only one out of eleven cases there is reported.) In fact, in several years of interviewing Iranian LGBT people, I talked to dozens of men who had been sexually assaulted or sexually abused by other men — in jails, in schools, or in families. Children were particularly at risk; and “effeminacy,” looking or acting somehow unmasculine, made them vulnerable.

It’s certainly possible that the four men in Charam are “gay” or hamjensgara, and have been framed. It’s certainly also possible that they raped an “effeminate” victim, and that he is the one who suffered for sexual dissidence. Quite possibly, in fact, that’s the pattern underlying these stories of rape. In other words, conceivably Tatchell, Ireland, and their cohorts have spent all these years speechifying and pontificating in support not of “gays,” but of their persecutors. The point is: We don’t know. All this is speculation. And the only responsible way to defend any of these people from the death penalty is not to make imperial, destructive, and unsupported claims about their sexualities, but to oppose the death penalty itself.

That, however, is not an issue to motivate Western queers.

Down, boy: Sir Calidore and the Blatant Beast

Meanwhile: No one who launched the story has bothered to follow up the facts. Dan Littauer and one of his editors are both on the listserve where the IRQO’s account, and the HRANA elaboration, appeared. You’d think that this might stimulate a further article. You know: New allegations on both sides have been forthcoming, and so on. Naturally, though, there’s been nothing of the sort. The MO of the rumorists is like that of Spenser’s untameable Blatant Beast: Never apologize, never explain.

True, the publicity hounds at Italy’s Everyone Group — who organized similar petitions incriminating Makwan Mouloudzadeh before his execution back in 2008 — did at least respond to me on their website. They title their answer “Gay Persecution under Sharia: the Silence of the West.” The phrase “Silence of the West” endlessly fascinates me. It’s used almost invariably in relation to subjects about which the West will not shut up. What it means is not that the West is neglecting something, but that one discordant voice unsettles the harmony and unanimity. It’s an odd sort of aural hallucination: while the whole Mormon Tabernacle Choir is bellowing out the “Hallelujah Chorus,” a single person whistling “Hava Nagila” softly to herself is enough to drown out lungs and pipe organ alike.

Since Everyone Group did me the favor of a reply, though, I’ll reply to them here in turn. They write:

We are very familiar with Islamic law (Sharia).

No, you aren’t.

An accused person can be sentenced exclusively on the EYE WITNESS accounts of at least FOUR PEOPLE OF ISLAMIC FAITH. The Islamic judges do not consider as evidence the statements given by “infidels”.

Nonsense. As is well known, in Ja’fari shari’a legal interpretation, there are two additional bases for convicting people of liwat/lavat:  a confession repeated four times, or the judge’s personal knowledge of the acts (in Arabic, ‘ilm al-hakim).  The former arguably gives considerable scope to torture to extract confessions; In Iran, the latter has turned into broad leeway for circumstantial evidence to decide cases.

Death kitsch: “Makwan, a Letter from Paradise” by Everyone Group

Anyhow, in this situation we are not discussing first-instance verdicts. The question is how to persuade Iranian authorities to show mercy and suspend an already-decided sentence of death. Everyone Group clings to the unaccountable delusion that telling Ahmadeinjad et. al. the convicts are gay is actually a means to this end.

Then we get into Everyone Group’s favorite bugaboo: the idea that they have an absolute right to use anyone’s name — an asylum-seeker, a refugee, an Iranian facing the death penalty — in any way they want to, without the person’s consent. God forbid you disagree:

Unfortunately, some governments and associations connected to public funding and not to human rights, often seek to prevent (as occured during the National Socialism period) the names of the condemned being published. The real purpose of these policies is to obtain silence on refugees and the persecuted …

It’s true; we’re all Nazis!  Everyone Group has been saying this for years. Back in 2009 they had the same refrain: blanking out the name of an asylum-seeker in a campaign “mean[s] denying, as in Apartheid and slavery, a fundamental right. In this way, a person becomes isolated, he becomes an anonymous figure, a common Mister X or a number and is cancelled out, as happened in the Nazi concentration camps and in the present day jails of fundamentalist Islamic countries.” (Their emphasis.) Of course, you might imagine a person has a “fundamental right” to decide how their identity is represented and their name is used: a right not to have their safety endangered for publicity’s sake. Look at yourself! You think that because you are a racist, an ayatollah, and Heinrich Himmler.

Finally, as far as the Makwan Mouloudzadeh case goes, Everyone Group indulges in a bold rewriting of reality:

As for Makwan, it is not true that the accusers retracted the allegations: the identities of the five accusers have never been revealed, but we do know that they were police officers. The charge of “lavat” against Makwan was never retracted!

I puzzled over this wildness for some while, since the facts of Makwan’s legal situation at least are no secret. In September 2006, three men in the town of Paveh told police that Mouloudzadeh had raped them seven years earlier. During the subsequent trial, they retracted their accusations. Mouloudzadeh was convicted nonetheless, based on a confession he claimed was coerced under torture.

no knowledge, but a lot of expertise

I can only assume that Everyone Group’s error here derives from an attempt to confuse “accusers” with “arresters.”  Yes, the police arrested Makwan, and were responsible, as in most systems, for charging him before the law. But the accusation of rape that came from the three alleged victims was certainly retracted — by the alleged victims themselves. A guilty conscience perhaps informs Everyone Group’s uncertainties about what happened in the Makwan case, but it’s no excuse for confusing matters further.

Finally, it’s inevitable where publicity and Iran are concerned that Peter Tatchell should rear his head. He gets cited in the petitions. And I notice (see to the right!) he is now giving himself a new title: “expert on Iran.” It’s astonishing you can become an expert on a country where you’ve never been, and don’t even speak the language. How do you manage? Perhaps some geek on the Mother Ship transfers the expertise direct from a jump drive into your brain, like in The Matrix. “Can you fly that helicopter?” “Not yet.” “Can you comment on that country?” “Wait, I’m downloading.”


How to become an expert on Iran: One theory

Of course, there are other means. The London Review of Books this week carries a very useful article by Owen Bennett-Jones on the Mujahedin e Khalq or People’s Mujahedin (MEK), a cultlike and exceptionally repressive Iranian resistance group that’s campaigned for years to get itself removed from the terrorist lists of the US and other countries. I recommend the piece to everybody.

The People’s Mujahedin used to be a pet cause of Peter Tatchell. He’s dismissed charges of terrorist violence as a “smear”; he said of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), MEK’s political wing, that “it has played a heroic role in resisting the clerical fascist regime in Iran and campaigning for democracy and human rights.” He compared it to “the African National Congress in South Africa or the anti-Nazi resistance in occupied Europe during World War Two.” He told The Nation it was ”a key liberation movement inside Iran that deserves international support.”

The MEK’s generous funding has long been a mystery, though nobody was much surprised by Seymour Hersh’s revelation this year that, despite the “terrorist” designation, the US has been channeling not just money but arms to the group — as well as training them in Nevada. What they do with their CIA-and-other largesse is perhaps even more interesting. In addition to full-time lobbyists, they pay a stable of prominent personalities not just to defend their record, but to lend them mute luster by their mere proximity. Bennett-Jones notes,

Three dozen former high-ranking American officials regularly speak at MEK-friendly events. They include Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Obama’s former national security adviser General James Jones and the former congressman Lee Hamilton. The rate for a speech is between $20,000 and $40,000 for ten minutes. Subject matter is not a concern: some speakers deliver speeches that barely mention the MEK. … The Treasury is investigating whether speakers have been receiving funds from a designated terrorist organisation. … Most of those who back the group do so because they will back anything that seeks to upset the regime in Tehran. They seem unaware that the organisation has been called a cult and have not heard the complaints of former members. A number of the most prominent MEK lobbyists say they agreed to speak because they were reassured by the respectability of those who were already doing so.

Tatchell’s own funding is, of course, also a mystery of long standing. For example, his latest venture, the “Peter Tatchell Foundation,” is not a UK registered charity, and offers no reports on where it gets its monies or how it spends them. Given the MEK’s avidity to recruit celebrities major and minor to flack for it, and Tatchell’s own diehard defenses of the group, one does rather wonder what exactly exchanged hands between them. Expertise, very possibly (perhaps on how to run a cult, perhaps even on Iran). But were there more material aspects to the Vulcan mind-meld?

How to become an expert on Iran: Another theory

Of course, this is pure and simple speculation. But it’s no more speculative than the stuff Tatchell and Ireland have disseminated on Iran in the past. And it has one advantage they don’t. It doesn’t endanger lives.

Then there were elections, and the fun started: Egypt’s vote

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Beard vs. bullets: the Brotherhood’s Morsi and the army’s Shafiq

There’s no such thing as “freedom.” There are only freedoms of various sorts, and nearly all of them are freedoms to.  Freedom to speak; freedom to be silent. Freedom to put a placard in the window; freedom to refrain. Freedom to worship; freedom to say “There is no god.”  There is also a neglected one, but extremely important: the freedom to be stupid. This is indispensable, basic, if only because the second and most frequent excuse that police, politicians, philosopher kings and priests will come up with to prohibit any act (after the first and only valid one, “you’ll hurt somebody with that”) is: “That’s a really stupid thing to do.”  Power always wants to think for you, and the general way is to brand your own untrammeled thoughts as stupid. But you have a right to be stupid. Cherish that!  The freedom to be stupid is so fundamental to the autonomous self, so intrinsic to our independence, that when practiced by the individual we don’t even have a name for it. When practiced by a group, it’s called “democracy.”

This is a refreshing reflection after the Egyptian elections. The results were certified today, and, from a liberal or leftist intellectual’s perspective, 48.44% of the ballots displayed people being stupid. This is the combined result for the two top votegetters, and while it’s not quite a majority, it was enough to put Mohammed Morsi (the candidate of the Freedom and Justice Party, or the Muslim Brotherhood) and Ahmed Shafiq (former general, Mubarak’s last prime minister, the candidate of the military and the old regime) into a runoff for President. It’s Armageddon, the Islamists versus the army, the two establishments battling head-to-head, with the values that animated most vocal revolutionaries squeezed out from the middle without a smidgen left behind. Boy, is everybody else pissed.

Midan Tahrir, May 28, from @OccupiedCairo: “This time we’re serious”

There was a demo in Midan Tahrir tonight, thousands of people shouting in fury, mainly at Shafiq’s presence in the runoff, the discredited relic of dictatorship. Me, I’m following all this on Twitter, the stay-at-home revolutionary’s best friend. @JamalalJazeera quotes one protester:  “The generation that ruined us with their silence for 30 years has now ruined us with their votes for Shafiq.”

Meanwhile, across the river in Dokki, somebody attacked and ransacked and set fire to Shafiq’s campaign headquarters. One report on Twitter suggested that as many as eight of Shafiq’s HQs around the country were attacked at the same time; but I haven’t heard more about that. Is this revolutionaries’ rage, or provocateurs? My friend Liam Stack of the New York Times reports people in the burned building “say they ‘got a warning’ to leave Shafiq campaign HQ an hour before the fire started at 10 pm.” From whom? @Khufo lends a note of caution: “don’t you think it’s common sense since ppl have been calling to march towards the hq this afternoon?”  But there’s something fishy, if only in the Shafiqists’ attempt to pin blame. At first, according to @Sherifkouddous, people on the scene were inclined to curse the Muslim Brotherhood for the attacks. But pretty soon they seemed to get different instructions: Youm TV had a Shafiq spokesman saying Alaa Abd el-Fattah was responsible. Alaa, hero of the Revolution, is the military junta’s favorite bogeyman; they blame him for everything, murders at Maspero, dust storms, 30 Rock being cancelled. The account of his incendiary acts is ridiculous, but in less than an hour it took on the dignity of mention in al-Ahram. The state-run paper proclaimed a little while ago that Egypt’s prosecutor general himself had dispatched a team of aides to investigate the incident, and that

a number of witnesses in their testimony to detectives charged political activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah and his sister [Mona Seif, founder of the No Military Trials campaign and hence particularly unpopular with the generals] with involvement in the attack on the headquarters of the Ahmed Shafiq campaign; witnesses said they saw Alaa and his sister asleep in a car near the office minutes before the storming and burning of the headquarters.

Alaa says: “Thinking of installing a GPS tracker and live update my location publicly. Maybe this would stop the false accusations.”

Here’s film of the fire:

Shafiq has run as the law-and-order candidate, the man to restore security and the halcyon quiet of Mubarak times. The violence, whoever caused it, seems predestined to prove his point. Lauren Bohn, a journalist on the scene, says:  ”Shafiq campaigners are reading raiding the HQ … as [handing him] his presidency on a silver platter.”

Even now, Shafiq’s candidacy is under a pall of doubt for a number of reasons. One is that the Brotherhood-dominated Parliament in April passed a law barring any senior Mubarak official from running. Shafiq, senior Mubarak official par excellence, challenged this before the Electoral Commission, which is staffed by Mubarak holdovers; they ruled he could run after all, pending a decision by the Constitutional Court. Rumors today suggested the court will hand down a ruling on June 11, five days before the runoff. Kicking Shafiq off the ballot at the last minute would be regular business in this highly irregular election. Neither of the two apparent finalists was the first choice for their respective sides. The Electoral Commission earlier disqualified the Brotherhood’s favored candidate, Khairat el-Shater, for a previous court conviction. It also booted the military’s number-one flack, Omar Suleiman, because too many of his signatures were forged. (Suleiman was Mubarak’s top spy, chief torturer, and chosen successor; I noted here eight months ago that the junta was keeping him in reserve as a possible Presidential candidate.) The two sides fell back on the uncharismatic Morsi and the dully bureaucratic Shafiq with some resignation. In the process, the Commission also kicked out Hazem Abu Ismail, candidate of the far-right Salafists, because his late mother had acquired an American passport. The era when any Egyptian can grow up to run for President is still not here.

El-Shater, Abu Ismail, and Suleiman: See no evil, hear no evil, and I will attach electric wires to your genitals if you do not tell me everything you know that’s evil right now

There are some signs of irregularities in the first-round voting, though Jimmy Carter found it generally fair. A reformist judge today demanded an explanation for the appearance of 5 million new voters on the registration rolls in the last year. Despite a ban on security personnel voting, an officer has filed a complaint saying that 900,000 were issued IDs to cast ballots for Shafiq. (Wael Eskandar has a rundown on these allegations here.) That’s more than the 700,000 votes that separated Shafiq from the third-place runner up, the Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi.

But back off a moment. Even if the military illegally manipulated Shafiq’s showing, the fact is that the old reprobate got a lot of votes nonetheless. The three top finalists (Morsi, Shafiq, and the edged-out Sabahi) won close to 70% of the ballots between them in a packed field. Perhaps, while the ashes settle in Cairo, one can consider, in that pundity way, what this means: what are the Lessons of it all.

Money and organization. Morsi and (however doubtfully he used it) Shafiq had it. The Brotherhood, in addition to its alleged funding from Qatar (possibly supplemented by Saudi cash after Riyadh’s favored Salafists were disqualified), has its core constituency among the professional classes; these too help keep it in the black. Both cash and commitment have aided it in building the most formidable grass-roots machine in Egyptian politics. True, its vote fell off substantially since last year’s Parliamentary elections — from  more than 40% to less than 25%, reflecting wide anger at the legislature’s ineptitude. But it still mobilized the votes it had. Shafiq, meanwhile, certainly enjoyed the military’s money behind him, if not those 900,000 ID cards. It’s interesting that he didn’t start taking off in the polls until Obama, after some hestitations, renewed the $1 billion-plus in military aid the US ladles on Cairo; perhaps the prudent junta was holding off until it knew for certain the piggy bank (a haram receptacle, but a hefty one) was full.

Ideological certainty. The two candidates whom pundits and polls had earlier anointed both failed miserably. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the liberal former Brotherhood member who tried to built a rainbow movement stretching from secularists to Salafists, got 17% of the votes. Amr Moussa, charismatic former Foreign Minister and Arab League head, got 11%. Most voters, I would guess, disdained their vagueness — the elisions of coalition politics in Aboul Foutouh’s case, and of slippery sloganeering in Moussa’s. They voted for clarity instead. Sabahi, the Nasserist, ran as an unreconstructed leftist, talking of social and economic justice. Even without much cash on hand, a clear populist message propelled him nearly to the top. And even if  Morsi and Shafiq hedged about exact plans and programs, the Brotherhood and the Mubarakites are so familiar that you’d have to be a fool not to know what you’re getting. After the confusions of a revolutionary year, a lot of people wanted straightforward beliefs.

Sabahi: The nation needs my chest hair

Nostagia and nationalism. The siren singing of the successful candidates had, to an outsider’s ear, something of a retro tonality, like a bad cover of a previous year’s hit. The Nasserites, since the Great Gamal died, have had little appeal but memory: recollections of a day when Egypt was independent of the US, adored by the Arab masses, feared by the Arab kings, and at perpetual war with Israel and others.( It’s to Sabbahi’s credit that he broadened this by talking about present-day economics.) Shafiq, meanwhile, based his campaign on an end to the current crime wave and a return to enforced national unity and omnipresent police. And the Brotherhood, while not exactly nationalist in their blandishments — Islam of course is transnational — invoked a solidarity transcending temporary political divisions, the ummah, irrefragable except for those pesky Copts. If you worry about society’s friability in the face of democratic disagreement, or about a loss of national dignity with the retreat of economy and state, these are the guys for you.

What the left revolutionaries didn’t do. If I’m right about the above, then the votes for Morsi and Shafiq seem not stupid, but the pursuit of a rationality different from the leftist and liberal intellectuals’. But a vote for the unequivocal was made easier by the left revolutionaries’ own equivocations about a program. Beyond overthrowing the dictator and establishing democracy, they never developed one. Even on those two points, of course, much is undone — the junta still rules, civilians suffer in military courts, torture continues; but the negatives amount to a call for dismantling the existing system, not guidelines for what a new one will be, or do. I am reluctant to speak of “failure,” but two aspects seem like failures to me. First, the middle-class revolutionaries never engaged much with the workers or peasants who also manned, and womaned, the revolution. They had enormous trouble, indeed, integrating economic justice into their own demands: over the summer, negotiations on a revolutionary program never got much farther into economics than an anodyne provision on the minimum wage. Second —  growing from the first — they failed to follow their own left principles consistently. Almost all the youth activists had some touch of anarchism, for instance. But they did little work on micropolitics, to build local structures of decision-making and alliance within the larger society, structures that might have given the ecstatic but ephemeral experience of Tahrir some permanence. Still less did they follow their syndicalist ancestors in working with the trade unions (for instance) to imagine different models of self-government. These are missed opportunities.

As a result, most of the young revolutionaries wound up politically homeless. In the first Presidential round, most of their votes probably went to  Sabahi, the secular leftist — deserting Khaled Ali, a human rights activist just barely old enough to run, who incarnated many of their values and had no chance and wound up with .5% of the votes. But before that, many had a weird flirtation with Naguib Sawiris, a fantastically rich mobile-phone entrepreneur who founded the Free Egyptians Party, and was one of the more inept politicians among the many incompetents to whom the Revolution opened public life. A Revolution that marries a billionaire is making a bad match.

But certainly this doesn’t mean the Revolution failed. For better or for worse, the Revolution was always a postmodernish one, limited in its objectives, rejecting the Leninist model of seizing state power. The chance to seize state power was there; on the last day before Mubarak fell, as protesters surrounded the government broadcasting center, they seemed for a moment to be following a script as old as the First International. But they rejected it. Historians will probably debate the wisdom of this for decades, but the fact is: the lack of a positive program was built into the way the revolutionaries behaved. They scrupulously abjured either arrogating government authority to themselves, or replicating it by building a new model. That wasn’t the idea. Their highest goal was to open society up and create the space for democracy, and it was part of their dignity and modesty that they didn’t claim some preempting nsight into what that democracy should do.

And now? The leaderless liberals have launched a “united front,” predictably disunited, to demand that whoever becomes president set up an inclusive constitution-drafting process. Shafiq and Morsi will go ahead and campaign, though Shafiq might be disqualified at the last minute. Each will spend the time trying to scare the hell out of everybody about the other. After that, whoever wins will have a thoroughly divided country on his hands. That might not be a bad thing, give the regressive politics either one would represent: neither exactly deserves carte blanche to govern. And if Shafiq is shucked off the ballot? Does Sabahi enter the runoff with five days to go? Is there a new election? The whole thing has been so bungled so far that nobody can guess.

Issandr el-Amrani calls, basically, for a new Revolution aiming at a new transition:

The question is not really anymore whether there was massive fraud, or only minor violations as the PEC [the Electoral Commission] stated today. Its ruling is not appealable, it has a past record of dubious decisions, and it behaved suspiciously by distributing last minute supplementary voter lists and blocking access to observers to counting rooms. The PEC had no credibility even before the vote was cast for many people who are unhappy with the results.

The real question is to what extent will the political leaders that supposedly represent the protestors will push the delegitimization of the elections, and how the Muslim Brotherhood (which has alleged fraud but not filed any complaints, perhaps afraid to lose its spot on the runoff) will position itself between the protest movement and the state.

The revolutionaries were right that no constitution should be written, and no election held, under the rule of generals who served Hosni Mubarak. They didn’t care about the current interim constitution because it itself has little legitimacy, and the transition has been so mangled as to barely make sense anymore. … The politicians were afraid to alienate the good part of the population that doesn’t want to take that risk of confronting the state head on, as well as jeopardize their own position in the emerging order. I don’t know whether they’ll change their minds now, but one would think the moment is ripe  — even if this leads to no concrete gain and probably much pain, the seeds of delegitimization of the future regime will have been laid. …

[S]omeone needs to rise to the occasion here and reject this electoral process outright (Aboul Fotouh and Khaled Ali have). If you’re going to lose, you might as well drag others down with you — in this case, the PEC, the SCAF [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces], and the (officially) winning candidates. It’s just good politics.

I’m not sure. SCAF needs to be dragged down, but can that be done from the streets anymore? Shafiq won’t do it, but could Morsi? These are things people will be asking. Giving either side command of the state closes off certain possibilities. But it potentially opens a different project: building society, something the revolutionaries (as opposed to the Brotherhood) have neglected so far. Yet that the society is already open enough for people to be, by the revolutionaries’ lights, collectively stupid without fearing the apocalypse — that’s a kind of victory. A country presented with a couple of unacceptably stupid choices is exercising the giddy freedom of idiocy, where other freedoms begin. That’s society, starting to flex itself and act. It’s worked. How much more can the revolutionaries ask?

Zillions of scorched and scattered Shafiq flyers carpeted the ground outside his smoldering headquarters tonight, sodden from the runoff from the fire hoses. Sarah Carr writes, “The wind is making all the Shafiq pictures on the ground fly up in the air like a lovely American Beauty moment felool style.” There’s nothing so creepy it can’t be beautiful from the right angle. Now back to business.

Litter and liberty: from @Sarahcarr

Obama, marriage, race, rights

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I had brunch today with the kids who changed the President’s mind. If you’ll remember, when Barack Obama ten days ago declared his support for same-sex marriage, he cited “members of my own staff who are incredibly committed, in monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together.” There was one member of the White House staff during the presidential term who was both queer and a parent — she even took the bairns to meet the Leader of the Free World and get their pictures snapped — and this shining Sunday, she and her partner entertained. The twins in question are extremely self-possessed toddlers, who could probably persuade me of anything given the chance. I hope no one informs them of their role in history for some time yet. To have succeeded at so much at so young an age could drain them of the ambition to get through kindergarten.

Everything has already been said about what Obama said. Consider this:

President Barack Obama’s May 9 announcement that he favors same sex marriage led to a huge spike on YouTube … YouTube is owned by the online search giant Google, which [also] saw a 458 percent increase in national searches for “Obama” and “gay marriage” between 10 am and 6pm the day Obama disclosed his views …

Matthew Nisbit, a professor of communications at American University who studies the intersection of politics and social media, said online videos and an interest in gay rights were a natural pairing. ”The heaviest users of video are people under the age of 25, and gay rights is one of the few political issues young people feel passionate about,” Nisbit said. “And the gay community was an early adopter of social networking—the technology was a good fit for people of minority status looking for like-minded others.”

Following Obama’s announcement, more videos with the key words “gay marriage” were uploaded on YouTube than ever before, drawing more than 3 million views and 100,000 comments.

Am I the only person who finds that terrifying?

Anyway, I can add nothing but point to a couple of interesting consistencies in all those images and words.

What am I pointing at? Huck and Jim on the raft, by Thomas Hart Benton

You might call one of them the Persistent Sexiness of Race, or Raciness of Sex. Put simply: sex and race are the two authentic American obsessions. But so close are they to every American’s pulsing heart that proximity induces blindness, and natives of these territories have considerable difficulty telling them apart, or deciphering where, when, or how they interrelate or -twine. On one day, your average white American will go from believing that sex was invented by non-white people — carried to this shore to sap the moral rigor of austere Puritans who reproduced by spores — to supposing that non-white people are fierce enemies of sex in general, paralyzed by their primitive inability to appreciate orgasms, orifices, or online porn. When it comes to homosexuality, there are thus two versions. Either black people are responsible for it, because they got the gender roles all wrong (“Come back to the raft ag’in, Huck honey!” cries Jim in the one true, classic narrative of the American Dream, and surely the white boy’s comparative health is figured in the fact that his name rhymes with “Fuck” as any proper man’s should); or black people are going, by their weird and regressive goetic magic at the ballot box, to forbid loving white people from enjoying the rightful dignity of gay marriages in jurisdictions from Palo Alto to High Point.

It’s inevitable, then, that the first African-American president’s support for LGBT people should be read through these antinomies. Even before Obama took the plunge, the Washington Post warned him:

African Americans, one of the main pillars of the President’s political coalition, remain decidedly skeptical about gay marriage. In the last year’s worth of Post-ABC [polling] data, just 42 percent said they support legalization while 55 percent oppose it. … Coming out in support of gay marriage … would clearly thrill a portion of his base (gays and lesbians) but it could alienate — at least in parts — another portion of his base (African Americans) that he desperately needs to win reelection this fall.

Now, there is plenty of counter-evidence of sympathy and support in black communities. Just yesterday the executive board of the N.A.A.C.P. — the country’s “most prominent civil rights group,” as the New York Times notes — overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring that “We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” The legendary African-American activist Julian Bond told the Times that the vote “proves that conventional wisdom” about black opposition to marriage equality “is not true.”

Still, where there are divisions, as many people have pointed out, the tenor of white LGBT activists’ advocacy bears a substantial share of the blame. Last week Andrew Sullivan (who wept when his “father figure” affirmed his marital authenticity) wrote a piece for Newsweek, speculatively borrowing Obama’s racial identity in service to Sullivan’s own gay one:

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family.

It’s not the same, you want to scream. Experience is not to be expropriated like that. Assimilating race to sexuality, as though both were purely defined by internal awareness and “discovered” the same way, is likely to put off plenty of non-gay African-Americans, and possibly some gay ones. Moreover, Sullivan has an unerring instinct for finding ways to be more alienating.  It’s an article of his faith that he invented the campaign for gay marriage, and that it’s a right-wing idea. (How Sullivan continues to call himself conservative, when he dissents from the right on every issue from Obamacare to Israel, is one of the present era’s greater mysteries. The only leftists he appears to dislike are the gay ones, perhaps more from sour memories than ideology.) “Marriage equality started out as a conservative revolt within the gay community,” he wrote: “Gay conservatives and Republicans helped pioneer gay marriage as an issue.” And in a rather pissy-sounding email to Gay City News (capable of making anyone pissy, to be sure), he added:

[I]t was a struggle to be heard above those on the left arguing for employment protection, hate crimes, and economic ‘justice’ as core priorities… Without the emergence of the gay right, I don’t think we would have come as far as we have.

Those quotes taloning “justice” are the giveaway. They show how little a perspective informed by Sullivan would make sense to many African-Americans, for whom material inequality and economic reality are the urgent facts of politics.

It’s true that “civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law,” as the N.A.A.C.P’s president said; and as one former N.A.A.C.P. official informed the TImes, the resolution entailed “coming to a very civil rights understanding of marriage equality versus a theological understanding of marriage.” Does that make marriage “the new civil rights movement,” though? Does that make Obama’s embrace the equivalent (as Jonathan Rauch suggests) of LBJ adopting MLK’s language and intoning, “We shall overcome”? Uh, no. Marriage is a civil right, but not a political right. Being deprived of it marks out “impaired citizenship,” in Gayle Rubin’s phrase; but it doesn’t mark you as deprived of entry, respect, resources, or decision-making throughout the entire public realm.  The laws and prejudices that did isolate LGBT people in that way have, in the US, largely receded over forty or fifty years, thanks to the long labors of people living and dead; it’s only possible to talk about marriage because those more terrible impediments have eased.  Imagine living your lifetime without the right to marry, and then imagine living it without the right to vote. You’ll understand what I mean, and maybe see why the uncritical comparison to the civil rights movement is, for some African-Americans, annoying.

Huey P. Newton, 1942-1989

That said, African-American history has confronted the denial of both rights — slave marriages, of course, had no status in law, and African slaves were unable to make a legal contract. There are several things to draw from this, but one is that the “outreach” model — where white gay activists troop out to teach African-American communities why the marriage battle is important — is crazy. Too much experience and wisdom about having your rights curtailed lie on the other side. Listening and learning are a better stance for marriage activists than presumptuously leaping to the parallels. And a deep African-American engagement with the issues we would now call “sexual rights” goes back centuries –certainly way farther back than the movement activist Bayard Rustin, a true civil rights hero who seems, all the same, to be the only black gay man some people can name these days. (Obama has now put a tribute to him on his campaign website.) In my perverse way, I prefer to cite  Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, who on August 15, 1970 gave a speech on “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements”:

Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say “whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.

We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. … Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it.

Now, that’s honest.

The second consistent note of the Obama commentaries is what I would call the Politics of Premature Ejaculation. It consists of announcing, midway through any controversy,  that it’s over, all over — even though the fat lady has neither sung, nor shivered, nor even opened her mouth. Liberals, acolytes of Enlightenment and its pre-ordained triumphs, are particularly prone to this. Thus the American Prospect proclaimed the war over marriage equality “is over,” the opposition a “lost cause.” “Support for marriage equality has crossed the halfway point, and no one in their right mind could think there will be some reversal in that trend.” Yet conservative David Link also contended, “As a national matter, today we can envision as a reality the last days of government discrimination.”

This contention is a bit weird, since national polls don’t decide the issue. In 31 states, it’s already decided. That’s the number that have added amendments to their constitutions banning recognition of same-sex marriages, all since the marriage wars began.  North Carolina passed the latest, the day before the President’s announcement. Unless a certain four justices of the US Supreme Court all perish of salmonella from eating Nino Scalia’s calamari, and Obama gets to replace them, most of these bans will take decades to reverse, either by votes or courts.

everything that rises must converge

Nonetheless, two successive Gallup soundings have now shown a thin majority in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, a far cry from the nearly two-thirds opposed a decade and a half ago. This is neither final victory nor the tidal inevitability of Progress, but it is no negligible fact, either. The commentariat is busy trying to explain the sea-change: is is the neighbors? is it the TV?

Did popular culture bring us here –  … Ellen Degeneres and popular sitcoms like ABC’s “Modern Family”? Or is our liberalized attitude just a cumulative effect of the straight community having more contact with “out” gay couples who, like them, just strive to form loving families and raise well-adjusted kids?

I have a different take. Opinions changed on marriage because marriage didn’t change anything.

the weather in Sodom: maybe we should move the wedding inside

For all the apocalypse predicted when Massachusetts went off the deep end into Gomorrah in 2004, the impact of eight states opening civil marriage to same-sex couples has been pretty much nonexistent. For the couples themselves — those who availed themselves of the opportunity — it’s been nice enough, primarily in terms of symbolic recognition (all at the local level; federal rights, which include immigration and income-tax benefits, of course are still debarred.) But nobody else has been inconvenienced in the slightest. Nobody else’s marriage was devalued or changed in any way. Most people didn’t even notice. Of course, Pat Robertson and preacherdom can fulminate that brimstone impends: “In history there’s never been a civilization ever in history [sic] that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived.”  But eight years after avenging fires should have crisped us, the polity continues as if nothing had happened at all.

If you believe, as many people now do, that marriage is the end point and goal of LGBT people’s liberation struggles, this is all remarkable. How many revolutions have succeeded by changing nothing? When in history has a people been granted rights long denied them, and left everybody else completely undisturbed? America is still grappling with the massive consequences and implications of African-Americans’ sixty year-old civil rights movement, even if it remained unfinished. Europe’s emancipation of the Jews in the nineteenth century still has echoes, heard alike in debates about the conduct of Israel and the identity of France. Most contemporary social movements — the ones the French call the révolution des sans – are defined by people wanting something others have. The sans papiers, the immigrants, want to break the borders; the sans emploi want jobs and benefits; the sans abri, housing. The enthusiasm and the resistance they rouse both reside in the struggle to wrest those things away from their accumulators, to redistribute possessions and prepositions, to turn “without” into a “with.” Is the movement of the sans épouses distinctive in that it doesn’t ask anybody to bother?

really a very simple request

You could argue that this means the gay movement’s inner meaning really is conservative, as Sullivan argues. If marriage is its core issue, then the movement has no positive demands to make on government, for benefits or protections. It just wants a little recognition; then leave it alone. It’s a very good movement, modest in its aspirations and quiet in its manner, leaving the peace unbreached and the indifferent untroubled. David Link writes, “However we get to marriage equality, I’m going to view that as the end of the line.  I don’t want the government discriminating against me, and once it doesn’t, my activist days will be over.” But he adds:

The left expects more of government.  In addition to not discriminating itself, the left believes government should also act to prohibit others from discriminating, and should do a lot more as well.

And beyond that, there was an old left dream of social transformation as well: an idea, often slipping toward the Utopian, that individual lives and their interconnections could be radically renewed. And should be. Changez la vie! Sous les pavés, la plage. And more.

I don’t think Link quite gets what the movement has really done.

My belief is: the sheer innocuousness of the success of marriage doesn’t mean the LGBT movement itself is innocuous. It means that the historic meaning, the larger impact, of the LGBT movement lies quite elsewhere. There is a radical change, partly accomplished and partly still to be fulfilled, that marriage misses. It’s not that marriage is an unimportant goal; but it is only achievable when the deeper, the more lasting and far-reaching challenges to reality as it was given us have been launched and felt. Some historian a century from now, I’d guess, would see the real effects of the movement not in wedding vows but in the widespread acceptance of a radical claim to everybody’s sexual freedom and bodily autonomy; the insistent assertion that customarily “private” acts have public and political relevance; the tectonic shifts in gender roles and the way they’re understood. When we — by we I meant the movement, or the movements — talk about marriage as our political terminus ad quem, we are a bit like Ulrich in The Man Without Qualities, contemplating courses that are perfectly plausible but somehow not quite authentic, not his life’s meaning, not himself. “But whatever destiny awaited him, he knew it must be something entirely different.”

N.B. For a collection of skeptical writings about same-sex marriage and US politics, see the resources here. 

Young in Iran, old in Burma: IDAHO

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Documentary made for the first-ever IDAHO event in Burma

Thursday was the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO, or perhaps, with the belatedly-added identities, IDAHOAT). I am generally a Scrooge when it comes to holidays, and if there were an IDAHO tree to deck, or IDAHO eggs to hide, I would bow out, bah-ing. This day, however, was made for people like me, those too jaundiced or depressive to appreciate the manic self-congratulation of Pride; it gives space to consider the obstacles LGBT rights movements still face, as well as those overcome. This probably accounts for the popularity it’s won in half a decade; there were events in 95 countries this year.

In Iran, activists staged discreet celebrations. Here’s one photo: more can be found here.

long may it wave

(As an Iranian friend of mine sniffed, “In north Teheran, you can do anything.”)  Even more significantly, Iranian Liberal Students and Graduates, an informal association founded early  in the Ahmadinejad years to discuss liberalism as politics and philosophy, issued a statement of support for IDAHO, defending “tolerance for homosexual, bisexual transsexual, and transvestite people”:

  • The consensus of experts is that homosexuality is not a physical or mental illness;
  • The consensus of experts is that sexual orientation is unchangeable;
  • There are numerous homosexual persons in all societies, and it is not a phenomenon unique to Western societies …
  • Homosexual attitudes and behavior have been observed in nearly 1500 species of other organisms, and are not unique to humans;
  • And the consensus of experts is that no evidence is available that of the psychological development of children in gay families is inferior to that of children in heterosexual families …
  • Criminalization of homosexual behavior and its punishment by brutal execution in Iranian law should be repealed;
  • And all legal discrimination based on the sexual orientation of individuals, at any level, should be removed from the laws in Iran.

It has taken years of patient work and persuasion by Iranian LGBT rights advocates to integrate their issues with dissident movements’ concerns, and achieve this kind of support. They should be congratulated on this.

Meanwhile, as a Southeast Asian Spring comes to Burma, the first-ever open LGBT event was held in Rangoon, partly organized by my colleage Aung Myo Min of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, which still largely operates in Thailand exile. A 106-year-old transgender woman spoke:

A local youth brought the centenarian transgender woman to the stage during a section called Paying Respect to Seniors.  ‘She was almost in tears,’ … Aung Myo Min  told Gay Star News. ‘She told the audience how pleased she is to see this event take place in Rangoon.’

In 1906, when she was born, Burma had been a British colony for 20 years. She was 14 when the first revolt against colonial rule — by university students  (Aung San Suu Kyi‘s father was one of them) – happened; 36 when the Japanese invaded; 42 at independence; 56 when the long nightmare of military rule started. I hope someone is recording her life story. I also hope that when I’m her age, no one expects me to have anything to say.

IDAHO event in Rangoon

Four “sodomy” sentences in Iran: On not learning from our mistakes

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Makwan Mouloudzadeh

Iranian authorities killed Makwan Mouloudzadeh on December 5, 2007.  Six months earlier, a court had convicted Mouloudzadeh —  a youth of Kurdish descent from near Kermanshah — of raping three other boys when he was 13.  However, his accusers retracted their claims; no evidence against him remained. In November, Iran’s chief justice had overturned the death sentence. Yet a panel of judges illegally defied him; they ordered the execution to go forward. Makwan was 21 years old.

“Hier ist kein warum,” an SS officer in Auschwitz told Primo Levi: “Here there’s no ‘why.” Try finding the “why” in Iran’s criminal justice system, riddled with corruption, incompetence and contradictions that unravel the basic rationality and syntax intended to constitute the law! If the mullahs behaved inscrutably, though, you have to grasp the matching weirdness in the deranged behavior of Western gay activists, who had mounted a massive campaign on Makwan’s behalf. Their goal wasn’t to persuade Iran’s authorities of Makwan’s evident innocence; it was to convince them he was guilty of a different crime. They accused him of consensual homosexual sex — which is also a capital offense.

But Boris’s is bigger: Anti-Iran protest, London Pride, 2008

They all wanted a “gay” victim, even if it meant his death. Peter Tatchell, the British activist, had been obsessed for years with proving that “gay” executions were a regular event in Iran. He seized on Makwan’s case as evidence, broadcasting that he was the “latest victim in Iran’s on-going homophobic campaign.”  He referred to the 13-year old, who had recanted any claim of rape or other sexual relations, as Makwan’s “partner”: and he urged letters to Iran’s government, calling for Makwan’s release while further incriminating him.  Meanwhile, EveryOne Group, a rogue Italian circle of publicity hounds, organized a petition to Ahmadeinejad for the “young homosexual Makvan,” and argued explicitly that he was “‘guilty’ of having loved a peer when he was 13 and having sexual intercourse with him.”  Not a shred of evidence underpinned these fantasies of erotic culpability. But God knows how many messages Everyone Group showered on Teheran, all telling the authorities, completely falsely, that Makwan had committed a capital crime. It’s impossible to suppose these didn’t play their part in the judges’ sudden reversal, and the execution. Makwan’s self-appointed “friends” had blood on their hands.

You know the cliches. Those who don’t remember the past …. And, of course, History repeats itself … “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” that was what Marx said, right? Except what if both times, it’s tragedy?  What if it’s just a grinding recurrence of the same mistakes? Not even laughing gas could let you find comedy in the senseless reiteration, the stupid waste.

Everything old is new again; and the same people are still looking for “gay” victims, and still indifferent to the consequences.

Here’s the story. On Saturday, May 12 (that’s 23 Ordibehesht, 1391, in the Persian calendar) the website of Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent Farsi source for rights news, published the following note:

The sentence of death against four citizens in the province of Kohgiluyeh on charges of “sodomy”  has been confirmed.

HRANA, a news organization for human rights activists in Iran, reports that  the execution of four people named Saadat Arafi, Vahid Akbari, Javid Akbar and Houshmand Akbari has been approved.

These four persons residing in the city of Charam in Kohgiluyeh province, are facing charges of sodomy punishable by death. The charge of sodomy  is an accusation often referring to sex with [persons of the] same sex.

This is very little information, and the last sentence indicates that HRANA itself didn’t know the substance of the charges — whether they involved consensual sex or rape, both of which can be included under lavat (sodomy) in Iranian law.  HRANA is the only source we have; no independent account seems to turn up in any other Iranian news organ, at least not online. It’s not on the local Kogiluyeh websites, here or here or here; it’s not even on the helpful page of the province’s religious police.

My little town: Charam

That doesn’t mean it isn’t true — but it does mean HRANA’s information is probably pretty fragmentary. Charam is a small city (population 12,000 in the 2006 census) in the out-of-the-way and mountainous Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province in Iran’s southeast. Even HRANA doesn’t seem to draw a whole lot of news from there, judging from their website.

So the first thing a human rights activist or a journalist would do is try to reach HRANA and get more information. The real human rights activists are trying this (and I too wrote to HRANA today). Unfortunately, there are also journalists who have learned in the Doug Ireland school that speculation is what makes a story.

The HRANA piece was posted to a listserve I’m on, that same Saturday. Dan Littauer, of the dubious website Gay Middle East, is on the same list. Within a few hours he’d written a lengthy article, which was up on three British gay news sites. (The alacrity with which these articles blossom on the Web suggests a certain sparsity of fact-checking.) The piece is an educational example; it reveals how to pad out the virtual absence of detail in the HRANA piece with other non-details, until it looks like you actually know something. Naturally, Littauer didn’t reach HRANA itself; but he quotes an unnamed gay activist in Iran, as well as Iranians in London and Austria, none of whom have any direct knowledge of the case. One says, “this is the most clear statement against same sex-acts in past months.” Another: “The rhetoric of announcement makes the link between same-sex sexual activity, or sodomy with corporal punishment very clear.” I don’t quite know what the last sentence means; but of course, we don’t have any official “announcement” or “statement” to judge from. We have only the blip from HRANA, in HRANA’s own words. It’s hard to read a new government stance into that.

Then, to fill space, Littauer indulges his own Orientalist speculation:

Iranian Human Rights activists constantly note the fact that the two genders are strictly segregated increases the tendency for same-sex acts among the youth, in a phenomena [sic] that is also similarly known in single gender prisons. Indeed this phenomenon happens throughout highly segregated societies in the Middle East and North Africa.

Now, I’ve never heard an Iranian human rights activist say anything of the sort. I have, however, heard plenty of white gay tourists, plumped up with their own fanciful sex scenarios about endlessly available Middle Eastern men, offer up just this account. What this has to do with the skeletal story from Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad is anybody’s guess. But rule one in the Doug Ireland school of journalism is, Remember, Westerners’ fantasies are your audience. And rule two is, Every added paragraph makes it seem more true.

the awful consequences of gender segregation

But the sad part is what happens then. Over the weekend, some other websites start carrying the tale. “Iran to Execute Four Gays by Hanging,” one right-wing page serves up, complete with ideological icing: ”It is very rare that liberal media cover Islamic hatred towards gays, or killing of gays.” Well, actually, they do.  Monday the wildly popular US-based Huffington Post  picks up the story, headlining it “Iranian Gay Men To Be Hanged For Sodomy: Report.” But: what? What, even in Littauer’s article, suggested the men were “gay”? Does HuffPo have any proof they were even guilty of sodomy, or any other form of sex? Do its editors repose such doelike trust in the Islamic Republic’s justice, such faith in its forensic uncovering of truth, that they can’t imagine the poor men’s innocence? That’s the liberal media for you.

Pretty soon it’s all over the web. The Advocate blares “Breaking News”: “Four Gay Men to Be Hanged in Iran for Sodomy.” (It’s listed under Crime, because after all, they’re guilty.) Philadelphia’s gay magazine muses on “Life, Death, and Being Gay in Iran”:  ”How do you save four men sentenced to hanging for sodomy?” Not by calling them “gay,” for starters.

None of this would matter much — the Iranian authorities probably aren’t fans of the Advocate, or even Arianna Huffington. But invisible capillaries carry information, words, fantasies across borders these days; and some of this language starts to bleed back into how the story is represented in Iran. By today, the story’s been picked up across the Farsi blogosphere. The HRANA article is, so far as I can see, the only source any of them have. But an inflection from the US articles starts creeping into the story: the headline changes. “Risk of imminent execution in Iran for four homosexuals [hamjensgara]“ one Farsi account reads, and others echo it.

Worse, the repeat-offending Italians at EveryOne Group get back into the act. They advertise an “Urgent Appeal” to — what? – ”save the lives of four gay men.”

EveryOne Group is asking the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, the European Union Commissioner for Human Rights, the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and civil society to support our call for the defence of the lives of these four young homosexual men and all those who suffer persecution because of their natural orientation.

The accompanying petition already has 4000 signatures.  (The one mercy is that Ahmadinejad is not yet among the addressees, but one imagines they’ll add him soon.) “The blood of four innocent gay men will be an indelible stain upon the conscience of the world community if this atrocity is allowed to proceed!” But don’t you see?  Marking them “gay” means they are not “innocent,” not in the Iranian judiciary’s eyes. You know nothing about these four men, nothing at all. But you’re still content to call them names that convict them. What gave you that right?

Everyone Group on Mouloudzadeh, 2007: Makwan lives on, so why feel guilty?

And of course Peter Tatchell, who’s always happy to exploit the living or the dead, rejoins the parade. He fires off a press release — “Four Iranian men to hang for sodomy” — not designed to help them, but to advertise a panel for the International Day against Homophobia that he’s cosponsoring.

I don’t know anything about these four men; none of us are likely to, until we hear from HRANA. I think I can predict, though, what will happen. The EveryOne Group’s campaign will go forward, the petition will accumulate its fungal signatures, all with the greatest good will; demonstrations and banners may cap off the news articles. And the men will die. Whether all these voices chanting that they’re “gay” will contribute to their deaths depends on how loud they grow, and whether the Iranian authorities are paying attention. But the ease with which we attach identities to people we’ve never seen and know nothing of — only because they’re there, not here, only because they are malleably foreign and employable to us, only because they’re in Iran and we need to affix a certain narrative to both violence and victims there — is overwhelmingly distressing. And so is the ease with which we neglect the threatened consequences. We’ve learned nothing from the miserable follies around Makwan. Blood cries out from the ground; we haven’t begun to listen.