US Gays Launch Boycott of Jerusalem Gay Pride

Perhaps QUIT and associated LGBTI groups opposing the the venue of Jerusalem for the World Pride events might show their support for the Palestinians by more than urging a boycott of the event in Israel. Especially since apparently they favor the "one state" solution, how about if they organized parallel events to take palce concurrently except held in the occupied Palestinian territories. Say a couple LGBTI pride marches through some of the Palestinian towns. The problems should not be insurmountable. Yes I understand that there would be concerns that the IDF might interfere. But perhaps they could be convinced not to lift a finger.

Of course I am being sarcastic. In the real world there are rarely only two sides. The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians presents problems for the LGBTI. However one feels about the "politics" from the point of view of the interests of those who are not LGBTI the reality is that it is possible for LGBTI persons to live openly in Israel -- you might get spit upon by the Haredi but not killed. While in areas of the Palestinians .....

The usual "political" argument goes along the lines that one should set aside any consideration of "selfish" personal interests "for the greater good". Apparently it is "selfish" of LGBTI persons to think that they should be able to live as themsleves instead of trying to survive in closets.

For Homosexual Palestinians, Israel Is Their Best Shot at Safety
JTA, December 24, 2003
Global Jewish News

By Dan Baron

TEL AVIV—Belying its name, Electricity Park is shrouded in darkness, an ideal spot for curb-crawlers keen to avoid attention as they prowl for male prostitutes at night.

The anonymity these streets offer serves as a refuge for the young men who ply their trade in this dismal corner of Tel Aviv. Many of them have far more to fear than the police or the occasional abusive client.

Tricked out in drag or the tight, modish attire of Western urban youth, dozens of gay Palestinian runaways eke out a dangerous living on Israel’s streets.

For these gay men, life in the seedy parts of central Israel is far better than the virtual death sentences they fled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sani—not his real name—grew up outside Gaza City, in a refugee camp whose clan networks and congestion made privacy practically impossible. He said he realized he was homosexual at age 16, in an encounter with another youth.

Sani’s secret was safe from his father, a local sheik, but eventually it leaked out to the Palestinian Authority police.

“They brought me in, held me for hours,” he told JTA. “During one round of questioning, they made me strip and sit on a Coke bottle. It hurt. And all the time I was more worried my family would learn why.”

Torture by Palestinian Authority security services or vigilante attacks by relatives is a fate suffered by countless gays in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where sodomy carries a jail term of three to 10 years.

Islam prescribes capital punishment for homosexual activity.

Those who survive torture and attacks either fade into meek self-abnegation or, like Sani, break away. But it’s an unlikely scenario, given the efforts Israel has made to tighten its borders over the last three years to keep out terrorists.

Sani’s freedom came at a price: He had to report other Palestinian gays to the police. But as soon as he got out of the Gaza lock-up, Sani got out of Gaza for good, posing as a day laborer to escape to the safety of Israel proper, where he joined an estimated 300 fellow gay runaways.

Now 22, Sani is always on the move, lodging with friends or rich clients he meets at Tel Aviv’s bath houses. If he is short on cash, he knows he can resort to street-walking in Electricity Park.

Sani phones home every few months to assure his mother that he is alright—on condition that she doesn’t tell his father and brothers anything about the conversations.

“She says they consider me dead, and it’s better that way,” he said. “I have nightmares about them coming to kill me.”

According to Shaul Gonen of Agudah, Israel’s homosexual rights association, at least three Palestinian runaways have been abducted by vengeful kinsmen, never to be heard from again.

“Being gay in the P.A. is, quite simply, deadly,” Gonen said.

Israel’s preoccupation with security also means that the runaways, in the country illegally, run the risk of being summarily deported if caught.

“The first danger to them is from family and community, as well as authorities” in the P.A.-controlled areas, Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International told Reuters. “Going to Israel is a one-way ticket, and once there their biggest problem is possibly being sent back.”

http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/israel/isnews006.htm

Reports of homophobic and sexist abuses by Palestinian authorities have greatly cooled my enthusiasm for “free Palestine” politics. It’s become increasingly clear, I think, that a free Palestine will not provide freedom for Palestinian lesbians, gays, and other sexual minorities; and will not provide freedom for many Palestinian women. So what do we mean, when we say we want to “free Palestine”? Is all this effort just to free straight, male Palestinians, while other Palestinians will have to be content with having one fewer boot upon their necks?

Gay Palestinians live in fear of arrest, detention without trial, torture and execution at the hands of Palestinian police and security services. They also risk abduction and so-called honor killing by vengeful family members and vigilante mobs, as well as punishment beatings and murder by Palestinian political groups such as Hamas and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement

What is the influence of Hamas in promoting homophobia among the Palestinian freedom fighters??

The Palestinian Authority under former leader Yasser Arafat usually had a more secular viewpoint, while Hamas was usually more right wing religious fundamentalist. Any intersection between these two groups would result in homophobic ideology spreading from Hamas to the PA..

Yasser Arafat's Legacy Remains Heroic;

http://www.covertactionquarterly.org/

http://www.covertactionquarterly.org/yasserarafat.html

Right wing Israeli Zionists are also usually homophobic, it is the secular middle and Israeli leftist peace activist groups (opposed to Israeli apartheid) that struggle to maintain civil rights for homosexuals. If it were up to Sharon (or Bush, or Hamas) ALL homosexuals would be put in "re-education" camps, regardless of their ethnicity..

The Judeo-Christian right wing is not very different from the Islamist right wing. The House of Saud and Kuwaiti royalty seem to get along fine with the Bush regime, the US military presence in Saudi Arabia maintains the royal families hold on power. The opposition to US presence comes in the form of even further fundamentalist thinking religious Wahabbists, who can channel the righteous anger of young men into self-righteous religious dogma. Homophobia, mysogyny, patriarchy and obsession with control and power run strong in all three rightist sectors of the above three "Abrahamic" religions. The right wing homophobic bigotry is contrary to the teachings of these same 3 religions, yet the leaders go unchallenged in this time of created conflict supposedly between these religions. The Saudi people's opposition to the US military presence in Saudi Arabia is channeled by Islamist religious fundamentalists in a similar way that 9/11 incited a wave of self-righteous Christian patriotism and continued support for the Zionists..

Chess games require the occasional sacrifice of an important piece so another more sweeping move can be made. The 9/11 WTC incident (media propaganda blinders) gave the Bush regime the needed "exceptions" excuse of "self-defense against terrorism" to invade former CIA puppet (military weapons supplied by D. Rumsfeld circa '80s) beneficiary Saddam's Sunni House of State Socialism (at the expense of northern Kurdish autonomy, Shi'ite "marsh" Arabs in the Tigris/Euphrates delta, relations with Iran) and secure the oil of the second largest petroleum export nation in the world. The Saudi royalty and the Bush regime now control over 50 % of the global petroleum supply so long as US corporations like Halliburton/Bechtel/etc are allowed to operate in Iraq...

The Zionist supporting Chrisitians in the US are led by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other reactionary types who have stated that "pagans, gays and secular humanists were to blame for 9/11" (Falwell said this the following day). Another term for the far right Christians who support Israeli apartheid is "dispensationalist". The dispensationalist view of Christianity studies the "Rapture" and draws links between symbolic Biblical script and current world events. They are certain that the world is ready for "Rapture", even if it comes in the form of a human produced nuclear holocaust..

Ironically these same Armageddon theorists (wishers?) also strongly support the increased development of US nuclear weapons and militarization at the expense of education and public health/nutrition programs..

Ever wonder why the nuclear bomb tested in New Mexico was named "Trinity"?

"The Atomic Age dawned at 5:29:45am on July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site in New Mexico, U.S.A. The first atomic explosion came less than 50 years after the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and brought many threads of physics, technology and politics to a dramatic culmination. The man-made thunder that echoed off the Oscuro Mountains continues to reverbrate through the modern world.

The purpose of Trinity Atomic Web Site is to tell the story of nuclear weapons through historical documents, photos, and videos. In the spirit of Project Gutenberg, the intent is to create an online archive from the large body of U.S. government information about nuclear weapons. For the most part the original documents will be allowed to speak for themselves, with an occasional thread of narrative or clarification if it is helpful."

above in quotes from Trinity Atomic Test Web Site;

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/


The nuclear scientists are kept too preoccupied by the production of military weapons to have time to work on neutralizing the radioactivity of nuclear waste. Bechtel Nevada would prefer digging a tunnel under Yucca Mountain (giving workers lung cancer from inhaling silicosis fiber shards) than spending research time and money on implimenting solutions to neutralize radioactivity of nuclear waste..

We ALL need to put pressure on the nuclear scientists to discontinue any new additional nuclear projects and come up with a solution to neutralize the radioactivity of nuclear waste..

August 6th is the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan by the US military. Los Alamos, Nevada Test Site and Lawrence Livermore have protest actions planned..

Together the people of Earth can make nuclear disarmament a reality..

Los Alamos Study Group;

http://www.lasg.org/

Shundahai Network;

http://www.shundahai.org/

Tortured & Jailed by the Palestinian Police
QX Magazine #462 - London - 10 December 2003

http://www.outrage.org.uk/qx-palestine.html

In the West Bank and Gaza, conviction for sodomy brings a three- to ten-year jail term, and gay men tell of being tortured by the PA police. Some of them head for Israel where one estimate finds 300 mostly male gay Palestinians living. Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International comments, "Going to Israel is a one-way ticket, and once there their biggest problem is possibly being sent back."

Palestinians living in the West who visit the Palestinian Authority are vividly aware of its drawbacks compared to Israel. "There is a difference between the Israeli and the PA occupation," wrote Daoud Abu Naim, a medical researcher in Philadelphia, while visiting family in Shuafat:

The Israelis whom I met with over the years have been diverse. Some have been insensitive to our needs, and some have not been. On the other hand, the Arafat/Rajoub regime is more than simply "corrupt." It is exclusively interested in setting up a dictatorship in which Palestinian citizens will have no civil liberties whatsoever.

http://www.washingtonpac.com/hell.htm

May. 15, 2005 4:24 | Updated May. 15, 2005 4:29
Jerusalem gay pride parade postponed to next year
By JPOST.COM STAFF

The international gay pride parade planned to take place in Jerusalem this summer has been postponed due to the upcoming disengagement operations.

The decision was arrived at a committee meeting of the Jerusalem Gay and Lesbian Center and was coordinated with the Interpride, the international association overseeing the parade, Israel Radio reported.

The 10-day, "Jerusalem World Pride 2005," slated to take place in Jerusalem in mid-August, will now take place in 2006.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1116037300882&p=1078397702269

This would mark the second time the Jerusalem Post claimed World Pride has been postponed. The last time was earlier this month and led to denials being issued by Interpride on the 365gay.com website and on Interpride's own World Pride website.

The latest news from InterPride is here http://www.worldpride.net/index.php?id=451 and only reflects the last time JPost tried to say the parade was postponed

LIKE YOU WOULD ATTEND!

YEA, THOSE TOW EROS YOU WOULD SPEND WOULD MAKE A DIFFRENCE

I agree you might want to wait for confirmation of the cancellation of the 2005 event for Jerusalem (transfer to another city for this year) with Jerusalem rescheduled for 2006. But the news flash in Ha'Aretz provided some more details which might mean that the story is genuine.

The problem is timing. August SHOULD have been safely well after the evacuation from the West Bank and Gaza. But with the delays and postponements that is now scheduled for August. Just guessing, but it would make sense that the Israelis involved in organizing the event decided that adding to security needs at a critical time wouldn't look good. Hell, perhaps a lot of them expect to be mobilzed.

It is now cofirmed on the world pride web site. Jerusalem will still have its normal pride parade and I hear that Israel pride will be in Eilat next week. We will just have to wait for 1 year for World Pride.