LENIN'S TOMB

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

EDL "founder member" among East End Gay Pride organisers posted by Richard Seymour

The LGBT Muslim group Imaan has done some background checks on the East End Gay Pride organisers. Turns out one of the organisers, Raymond Berry, is EDL:

We have now acquired evidence that Raymond Berry, the principal organiser of the event, faced a call for disciplinary measures (revocation of his membership) by officials of the RMT (Rail and Maritime Trades Union) because he was a public and vocal, leading member of the EDL (English Defence League) and promoted the EDL objectives and extremist politics.

In correspondence, in September 2010, with union officials, Mr. Berry claimed – in his own words – the following:

That he was a founder member of the English Defence League, but had decided to cease his involvement following disagreements over changes in the EDL leadership.
That in spite of this, he continued to hold firm beliefs with regard to Sharia law and the Islamification of Britain.
That he remained an active member “of such organisations as” S.I.O.E. (Stop the Islamification of Europe) and N.S.B. (No Sharia in Britain)
That he was working, with other disaffected members of the EDL to start new groups with similar objectives.

In October 2010, Mr Berry continued his correspondence with union officials making new assertions, some contradictory to his position in September:

That he would not voluntarily cancel his RMT membership on the grounds of his EDL membership
That he saw no reason why he should not hold membership of the RMT and of the EDL, in spite of his disagreement with some aspects of RMT politics – i.e. that he found the RMT to be more controversial than the EDL.

So we now understand that as of October 2010, Mr. Berry – a founder of the EDL – remained connected with the EDL and unrepentant. Indeed, he desires to start other groups with similar right-wing, anti-Muslim objectives as well as retaining active associations with existing right-wing, anti-Muslim groups (such as S.I.O.E.)

Update: Apparently the event has been cancelled. This is the statement from Rainbow Hamlets...

The organisers of the so-called East End Gay Pride event have today announced on their website that the event has been cancelled. They say that they have decided to do so because they have been subjected to personal attack by Rainbow Hamlets and OutEast.

While we reject any suggestions of a smear campaign on the part of Rainbow Hamlets and other organisations associated with us, we welcome the decision of the East End Gay Pride Team to cancel the event. We believe it was the correct decision in the face of the disclosure that Raymond Berry, who yesterday resigned from the EEGP team, was a founder member of the EDL and who, despite resigning from the EDL, still shared its ideals and values and was looking to organise other projects based on them.

That disclosure has completely undermined the credibility and integrity of the entire event. We maintain that if the event had taken place, no right thinking member of the LGBT community could have participated in it with pride because of the divisive and hate-filled agenda on which it was based. By its very nature it would have excluded approximately 40% of the community.

We look forward to announcing our own events programme in the near future and hope to be in a position to promote a Pride Event in which all members of the community can be proud to participate later in the year.

Thank you for your continued support.

Rebecca Shaw
Jack Gilbert
Co-chairs
Rainbow Hamlets

Labels: east end, east london, edl, gay pride, homophobia, islamophobia, lgbt rights, racism

Monday, March 14, 2011

A quick note on East End Gay Pride posted by Richard Seymour

You remember that amid my general critique of Johann Hari's sensationalist diatribe against British Muslims, I mentioned a worrying and potentially dangerous issue arising in the East End. This concerns the recent phenomenon of anti-gay stickers being put up in Tower Hamlets, Hackney, and elsewhere. In fact, as far as I know, these stickers have also appeared in other parts of the country, including Manchester. This was rightly condemned by local politicians, Muslims and LGBT groups, and There was initially some suggestion that the EDL may have been putting these stickers up to stir things up. The LGBT group Rainbow Hamlets expressed this fear publicly, and Al Jannah, the LGBT Muslim group, are also saying that it considers this an example of "massive EDL trolling". I now understand that this is unlikely to be the case, though it is still not known who is responsible. Whoever is behind it, it constitutes a threat to local LGBT people and it is right to confront it. Another pressing danger, however, was and is that EDL supporters were going to use this as a means of getting the boot boys into the East End by spuriously claiming to support gay rights.

When a group of hitherto unknown individuals unconnected with the East End organised something they called 'East End Gay Pride', with its activism based on a Facebook group, it transpired that among its supporters were English Defence League members. This might have been a trivial matter of accidental support, except that the chief organiser initially welcomed the support of the EDL. Then, after criticism of this position was aired, the group was closed down and replaced with a new invite-only Facebook group, to which open EDL members were invited. The group has consistently suggested that it is really apolitical. I would be willing to believe this, but several of them appear to be aligned with Islamophobic politics or have EDL friends. They have responded to criticism from LGBT activists by complaining about "gay apologists", and the "anti-fun brigade" and have dealt with the complaints about the EDL involvement by belatedly removing the EDL members who they had themselves invited into the group and stating that no political placards would be welcome at the rally. Their statement, which they reproduce on a daily basis, equates the anti-fascist group UAF with the EDL. And, as their critics have pointed out, they appear to have no objection whatever to EDL members joining in the protest as long as they don't draw attention to themselves with placards etc. Given that the EDL contains some of the most viciously homophobic forces in British politics, some of whom would usually be more at home beating up LGBT people than parading with them, this is an astonishing stance. And their response to queries about why the "hate-filled Daily Star" was backing the event - I have no idea if the Star is actually supporting it -was to insist that not everyone finds the Daily Star to be "hate-filled".

Concerns have been expressed by local gay rights groups. (Unfortunately, word has not yet got to the organisers of Pride London, a celebrity-supported group which is prominently supporting the event, but raising none of the questions that other LGBT groups have.) UEL LGBT, which initially supported the protest, have decided with withdraw their backing because of the continuing ambiguity over the EDL's involvement. Out East have sent an open letter to the organisers, expressing concern about the involvement of EDL supporters in the group, and the denunciation of UAF. It has been co-signed by the LGBT activist Denis Fernando of UAF and the Greater London Trade Unions Council. The open letter questions why the group gives the impression that the East End is actually in danger of becoming a 'gay free' zone, never mentioning that local politicians, Muslim groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain, LGBT groups and the East London Mosque have actually been working together to counter this problem. Prominent statements have included this, from the Association of British Muslims: “There is nothing in the Qur’an against LGBT people. Allah has honoured every son and daughter of Adam, so such a hateful message is not only morally and ethically wrong but actually unislamic.” The approach of Out East and Rainbow Hamlets in dealing with this issue has been welcomed by LGBT trade unionists.

Centrally, the letter from Out East takes issue with the approach which reduces homophobia to a simple issue of nasty ideas and prejudice, saying: "Out East believes that our response to homophobia must be political because homophobia is a system which is present everywhere and not only a hate feeling from particular groups or individuals. Homophobia is not caused only by one particular group but is part of broader society and has political roots. It is easy to portray other minorities (even unintentionally) as the cause of homophobia rather than, for example, questioning the lack of means to fight discrimination in a period of cuts in public services. Instead, we want to highlight the intersection between sexuality, gender, race and class oppression. Homophobia is fed by political practices and ideologies which in turn encourage individuals to commit discriminatory acts."

But the legitimate concerns of LGBT activists have unfortunately not been dealt with in any but a snide, condescending and arrogant fashion.

Labels: edl, english defence league, gay pride, homophobia, islam, islamophobia, lgbt rights, uaf, unite against fascism

Monday, February 28, 2011

Can we finally talk about Johann Hari's Muslim problem? posted by Richard Seymour

A cautionary note about polling and propaganda. In 2009, an independent poll was carried out in an area supposedly known as a 'no go' area for white people, to probe . It found, among other things, that 98% of Muslims in the area would accept their son or daughter if they came out as gay. The point of the poll was to underline just how much tabloid polling on Muslim social and political attitudes was designed to produce a response that could be used to demonise Muslims - and how a different set of questions asked in a different way would produce a very different picture. A typical scaremongering poll appeared in The Sunday Times in 2008. It dealt with Muslim students, and it alleged a series of nasty attitudes on their part. Among other things, it said: "Homophobia was rife, with 25% saying they had little or no respect for gays." What it meant to say, of course, was that acceptance of gays was rife, with 75% of Muslim students having some or much respect for gays. There was also a famously distorted study for the right-wing Policy Exchange in 2007, which claimed that only 30% of British Muslims disagreed with the claim that homosexuality is morally wrong and should be illegal.

In general, whether using manipulated polls or anecdotes, there has been a concerted effort to depict Muslims as overwhelmingly homophobic. Yet whenever there have been initiatives to help combat homophobia among Muslims, or when Muslim groups and mosques denounce homophobia, the same reactionaries who claim to care about the issue can barely contain their sneers. For what it's worth, I consider such tactics similar to those deployed by the Right (and, as it happens, the FBI) to divide black and Jewish groups in the United States by putting it about that black people are antisemitic - in an attempt to break up an historic coalition between oppressed groups. I raise all this because the burden of a recent attack article on British Muslims by Johann Hari involves the suggestion that Muslims just don't accept gays, and are in fact engaging in an escalating wave of violence against them. He writes:

The most detailed opinion survey of British Muslims was carried out by Gallup, who correctly predicted the result of the last general election. In their extensive polling, they found literally no British Muslims who would say homosexuality is "morally acceptable." Every one of the Muslims they polled objected to it. Even more worryingly, younger Muslims had more stridently anti-gay views than older Muslims. These attitudes have consequences - and they are worst of all for gay Muslims, who have to live a sham half-life of lies, or be shunned by their families.

No, Muslims are not the only homophobes among us. But the gap between them and the rest is startling. It's zero percent of British Muslims vs. 58 percent of other Brits who say we are "acceptable."

Hari isn't stupid. He knows perfectly well that this isn't a credible figure, that no one actually believes it. It is quite obviously a statistical freak. The results of previous polls, the existence of British Muslims who are gay, and the existence of British Muslims who are vocally supportive of gay rights, simply make it impossible that 0% of Muslims consider gays to be acceptable. If even the reactionary anti-Muslim wind-ups find at least 30% of Muslims who accept gays, then we can assume that this poll is an outlier. But this really doesn't need to be demonstrated - it's just common sense. Just as it's a common sense inference that almost 100% of Islamophobes in Britain are white.

Hari went on to claim:

"East London has seen the highest increase in homophobic attacks anywhere in Britain. Everybody knows why, and nobody wants to say it. It is because East London has the highest Muslim population in Britain, and we have allowed a fanatically intolerant attitude towards gay people to incubate there, in the name of 'tolerance'".

Ava Vidal was pissed off with this, and wrote to explain that Met crime figures actually showed a reduction in anti-gay attacks in those areas with the highest Muslim populations. Hari snorted that she was "extremely unintelligent". But Vidal was just underlining a point that had already been made to Hari by Patrick Lilley of UK Black Pride, and which he had ignored. The exploitation of homophobia to demonise East End Muslims is becoming urgent as Islamophobes with the support of EDL members try to organise what they're calling an 'East End Gay Pride' event, though the organisers apparently have nothing whatever to do with the East End. This actually raises the possibility that EDL members, who didn't dare march in the East End previously, will now be able to get in there under the pretext of opposing homophobia. It would seem rather important, therefore, not to make injudicious, disproportionate, inflammatory or just bigoted comments scapegoating British Muslims for the very real homophobia that exists in Britain. Unfortunately, Hari - who does know better, so it must be a self-serving, calculated provocation - has acted in such a way as to set back the ongoing efforts to overcome divisions between Muslim and gay groups with this disingenuous diatribe.

And yes, this is 2011, and we're still having these ridiculous arguments, even after a spate of anti-gay beatings and killings that have had nothing to do with Muslims.

Labels: bigotry, east london, homophobia, islamophobia, oppression, racism

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Glenn Beck of the contrarian left posted by Richard Seymour

If you're an antiracist, or a feminist, or a gay rights activist, or struggling against any form of oppression, Walter Benn Michaels has your number (via Pink Scare) - you're a neoliberal:

For me the distinction is that "left neoliberals" are people who don't understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

Yes - neoliberalism, the political philosophy of Hayek and Friedman, of Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet, whose intellectual sources include the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt and the fascist sympathiser Ludwig von Mises. The ruling class praxis whose first practical expression was the fascist coup in Chile. The ideology of the New Right whose hallmark was a virulent attack on the gains of the Sixties, including a legal war against gay rights, a cultural battle to force women back into domesticity, and a racialised drug war that resulted in soaring rates of black imprisonment. That neoliberalism arose as a kind of commitment to feminism, gay rights, anti-racism, etc. Moreover:

it’s hard to find any political movement that’s really against neoliberalism today, the closest I can come is the Tea Party. The Tea Party represents in my view, not actually a serious, because it’s so inchoate and it’s so in a certain sense diluted, but nonetheless a real reaction against neoliberalism that is not simply a reaction against neoliberalism from the old racist Right.

Meanwhile, the actual Tea Partiers seek a "return to the principles of Austrian Economics, and redirect the economy back to one of incentives to save and invest" and demand that the government "cut spending, balance the budget, and institute a plan for paying down debt."
Michaels' brew of logical inversion, fancy, tenuous connections and adolescent provocation should earn him a television spot.

Labels: anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, homophobia, neoliberalism, patriarchy, racism, sexism, socialism

Thursday, July 08, 2010

A case for expropriation in a nutshell posted by Richard Seymour

This is today's Daily Express front page:

People joke about such mega-combo-bigotry headlines from the Mail and the Express. But this, utterly vile, combination of racism and incitement to homophobic hatred is real. The Express has to be made to pay a price for this. The owners and editors of the Daily Express are scumbags, and the newspaper should be taken over and turned into a public utility.

Labels: asylum seekers, gay rights, homophobia, immigration, media, racism, scum

Friday, October 16, 2009

Mail's gay-bashing columnist 'speaks out' posted by Richard Seymour

Don't waste your time going to visit the Daily Mail website to read that Moir article. You can see the whole thing here. (Then, if you are moved by Charlie Brooker's column, you can complain here). As you'll have gathered by now, Mail columnist Jan Moir decided to use the death of singer Stephen Gately to suggest that something terribly sinister is afoot when gay men have relations. Gately died of natural causes, and the coroner's report confirmed this. Moir, though, smells a rat, and for once it isn't a co-worker. She induces that the cause of Gately's death must have actually been 'unnatural', in some sense related to his 'lifestyle'. (Can I just ask, in passing, whether my banal sexual and sumptuary habits amount to a lifestyle? Just curious.) Somehow, quite mischievously apparently, this was construed as homophobic. For, as Moir explains:

"The point of my column -which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read - was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all."

Yes. Unanswered questions. About the viability of gay relationships, particularly of 'civil partnerships', in light of the "ooze" of some supposedly "dangerous lifestyle" disclosed in the death not only of Gately, but also of Matt Lucas' partner, Kevin McGee. Those kinds of unanswered questions. Only a sick, politically correct, fascist bastard would construe that as evidence of homophobia. In fact, it's just common sense:

It seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

Coroner reports are all very well, but they can hardly be expected to deter the unflabble and infallible inquisitive instincts of the Daily Mail glitterati. And anyway, Moir clarifies that civil partnership stuff:

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Pause for a second and think about this. Moir is "on record" as supporting civil partnerships. That makes her practically a gay rights activist, for fuck's sake. Can you be so intolerant as to deprive a committed Stonewaller of the right to just ask some questions just because it might be a little bit inconvenient to your worn out ideology? Oh, sure. Some of you might have noticed the part of the article where Moir specifically contests the idea that civil partnerships are "just the same as heterosexual marriages", citing two recent celebrity deaths and the "dangerous lifestyles" they supposedly resulted from as evidence of her thesis. You might have even noticed that she appears to take exception to gays "always calling for tolerance and understanding". And, no doubt, in yet another affront to taste and manners, you are already forming your ignorant, ill-conceived opinions about her supposedly contradicting herself in a flatfooted attempt to evade responsibility for having written something vile. You might even be calling her a lying piece of shit at this point. But that's just because you are part of the conspiracy:

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

Quite. This is an orchestrated hate campaign, mounted by you-know-who against a tolerant, inclusive, committed supporter of the gay community. She's not a homophobe, she's just asking questions. Incidentally, something odd happened earlier in the week. A perfectly healthy gay man died, painfully and horribly, in the middle of Trafalgar Square. His lifestyle was definitely related to the cause of his death. I hope Moir will not be put off by this spiteful campaign, and will take the time to examine this case and its implications for those tolerance-begging, understanding-seeking types in our midst. More power to her typing finger.

Labels: bigotry, daily mail, gay pride, gay rights, homophobia, murder

Monday, October 12, 2009

The pitfalls of tolerance posted by Richard Seymour

Every now and again, I read something like this and have to stop and consider why it is inherently ridiculous and offensive. The Tories are lauded for adopting a new attitude of 'tolerance' toward homosexuals, and one feels an immediate pressure to partake of this cosiness, this idea that something uncomplicatedly benign is happening. Increasingly, moreover, one is apt to hear 'tolerance' name-dropped in respect of racial problems in the UK, in which the absence of 'tolerance' is either a euphemism for racism, or an attitude ascribed to supposedly self-segregating minorities. And in its function as part of a martial ideology, 'tolerance' is what NATO troops defend against 'native fanaticism'. The word and its various significations do a lot of ideological work, obscuring and inverting crucial social relations, and smuggling in a patronising attitude to the subjects of said 'tolerance'. Given this problem, I just wanted to clarify my thoughts by arranging them into a number of simple arguments, as follows:

I. There is a crucial distinction between the narrow terms of religious toleration, a doctrine elaborated in an attempt to manage Protestant schisms in early modern Europe (though the Ottoman Empire's 'millet' system could also be cited as an instance of toleration), and the broader terms of 'tolerance'. The toleration of religious belief is not on the same ontological plane as tolerance for ascriptive attributes. In its ultimate Lockean variant, the former asserted not merely the separation of church and state, but the privatization of ethical belief as such, the decoupling of religious or moral statements from social context. Alasdair Macintyre has useful commentary on this, but it is separate from the contemporary issue of 'tolerance'. The latter implies a model of political communities in which different groups and individuals experience one another as a burden that they have to put up with. It implies a fundamentally competitive model of human behaviour, whose excesses are avoided through tolerance. In this respect, it is deeply misanthropic.

II. Tolerance is an alternative to equality rather than an expression of it. Toleration in its old sense was compatible with bourgeois ideas of equality but, although 'tolerance' has a soft and generous texture to it, it bears a political freight of inequality, subordination and hierarchy. Thus, when American rightists are asked about gay marriage, their answer is that they are prepared to tolerate homosexuals but not dilute the 'sanctity of marriage' by allowing same-sex partners to wed. Even Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which banned known gays from serving in the military, would serve as a 'tolerant' alternative to legal equality, since it says that homosexuality can be tolerated as a private, or rather secret, affair of the individual.

III. Tolerance displaces social justice, and as such depoliticises intensely political questions. It became a dominant discursive tool in the 1990s precisely in such a way as to displace questions of power, discrimination and social justice. This was a novelty - in previous periods, anti-racist liberals and leftists were fully aware of the basically reactionary nature of racial 'tolerance', especially in US politics where northern elites would contrast their supposed tolerance with southern bigotry. That has to do with the success of the right in parlaying such questions into 'culture wars', in which - say - segregationist schools could assert their right to practise discrimination not by defending principles of white supremacy, but by defending local or indigenous cultural practises against an intrusively egalitarian state. They demanded tolerance for down to earth Christian folk, and railed against what they called 'reverse discrimination'.

IV. Tolerance is an expression of resentment. Historically it has been an attitude that dominative majorities adopt toward oppressed minoritiesm, and so it remains. To be the subject of this tolerance, one must have already been designated a worthy object of aversion by the majority, at best to be indulged on account of the magnanimity of those with power. To be the subject of this tolerance, one must already have been deemed normatively aberrant. That means that some sort of idea of what organically belongs and does not belong to a given political imaginary (community, nation, etc.) has already been stipulated: thus white rule, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. are often asserted in the very gesture of 'tolerance'. The subject of tolerance does not really belong, is foreign, and might easily be rejected by a much less tolerant host. As such, should the basis for this maganimity be undermined or threatened, tolerance can easily lapse into its opposite: "zero tolerance".

V. Tolerance has long had an imperial and colonial dimension which is greatly in evidence today. The Dutch empire has been lauded for its supposed tolerant attitude toward colonial subjects, in contrast to Spanish and Portugese rivals. Of course, said 'tolerance' was a pragmatic decision that made more commercial and colonial sense for the Dutch than trying to convert local Islamic sultanates to Calvinism. Puritan settlers in the New World practised 'tolerance' toward heathen Native Americans when they weren't busy wiping them out. Similarly, the British Empire tended to express its own cultural domination over the natives in terms of what may or may not be tolerated under British rule. Thus, William Bentinck, governor-general of the East India Company, wrote in 1829 on the practise of sati that the sole basis upon which it may be tolerated would be if such an attitude were necessary to conserve the many improving influences of the British empire as a whole. The discourse of Anglophone rule in South Africa was also framed in terms of tolerance: Cape Town, the centre of British commercial dominance, was lauded for the 'racial tolerance' practised there, in the context of racist imperial rule. Even when the labour practises of British capital began to stratify workers by race, from the Glen Grey Act onward, the dominant tone of colonial discourse remained that of 'tolerance' of the natives. And it was in stark contrast to the incoherent 'native fanaticism' that contrived false grievances against the empire, and persisted with intolerant cultural practises despite the attempts at education and racial uplift. In the contemporary Huntington/Lewis/Ignatieff school of imperial thought, tolerance is once more a peculiar attribute of Euro-American states, noticeable for its absence in the Orient. 'We' are tolerant because we have mastered our cultural biases, our instinctive narcissism and hostility toward others. We have assayed them and submitted them to the rule of reason. Instead of romantic nationalism and religious devotion, we have civic nationalism and belief constrained by inquiry. 'They' are intolerant because their cultural biases dominate them. Their alleged hostility and self-involvement, their desire to speak their own language and wear their own religous garb, is a sign of their fanatical rejection of tolerance.

All of which is to say that when we hear about tolerance, and it comes with a certain amount of self-congratulation (think of Blair and Major blissfully eulogising about a modern, tolerant England, relaxed and at ease with itself), its more sinister dimensions should come to mind and caution us against luxuriating in that sense of warmth and humanity that the term exudes.

Labels: colonialism, homophobia, imperial ideology, liberalism, racism, religion, tolerance

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Pink triangle, blue star posted by Richard Seymour

I don't know how I missed this: the Israeli government is trying to dragoon a gay international into supporting its belligerence toward Iran:

The new campaign, to be overseen by the Foreign Ministry, aims to appeal to people who are less concerned with Iran's nuclear aspirations and more fearful of its human rights abuses and mistreatment of minorities, including the gay and lesbian community.

The campaign plans to recruit the international gay community, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed in 2007 when he said there were no homosexuals living in his country.

The campaign will also reach out to Jewish groups who want to bring more attention to Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial and some members of the Iranian regime's anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist views.

About NIS 8 million have already been budgeted for the new campaign, which also includes increased briefings for foreign journalists on the Iranian nuclear program and greater use of the Internet and sites such as YouTube.

This is not the first time that Israeli leaders have sought to appropriate the progressive veneer of other people's struggles. Netanyahu has done it before. In 1999, he reportedly addressed a letter to Israeli gay groups arguing that the Palestinian Authority was anti-gay. Just as Israel's ultimate vindication in the West is that it is "the only democracy in the Middle East" (apart from the other democracies in the Middle East), so in general Israel's apologists are inclined to highlight the comparative liberality of the Zionist state compared to many of its neighbours. Obviously, this is as grotesque and cynical as Bush's attempt to pose as the liberator of womankind while dropping daisy-cutters on women in Afghanistan. And somehow, the idea of Israel promoting itself as the vanguard of gay rights fails to convince. A swaggering, macho garrison state where homophobia is rampant - this is the Stonewall of nation states? A country in which Pride demonstrators have been attacked and stabbed, where an elected politician literally thinks that gay sex can make the earth move (by causing earthquakes), in which the president once referred to gays and lesbians as "disgusting", in which a senior member of Olmert's cabinet referred to queers as "sick people", in which the very presence of gay people in the streets produces riots by demented reactionaries. This is the international prize-fighter whom LGBT people are supposed to get behind? And what's the programme supposed to be? Support gay rights by slaughtering Iranians? I wonder if the PR agents have contacted these people?

Labels: homophobia, Israel, the liberal defense of murder, zionism