As I was writing my post about Out Magazine’s coverage of Pete Buttigieg’s fascist antics I came across a couple of articles.
Videos Surface of Brutal Attack of Palestinian Gay Men, Trans Woman
Two gay Palestinian youth were spotted in Ramallah and brutally attacked by people while police stood by idle.
There are no laws to protect LGBT people under the Palestinian Authority, where homosexuality is a punishable crime.
@BuzzFeedLGBT https://t.co/fSDPpSjlJa
— Mark Halawa – مارك حلاوه ?️ (@HalawaMark) December 2, 2019
A transgender Palestinian woman and two friends were brutally attacked by a group of men near Ramallah in the central West Bank on Monday.
According to reports, the trans woman — whose name is Sammy — was with friends in the West Bank to attend a doctor’s appointment in the village of Kafr ‘Aqab. A group of men reportedly from the Kalandia refugee camp attacked, robbed, and destroyed the vehicle in which the three were traveling.
According to a friend of the victim, the altercation started when a group of young men began recording Sammy and a friend in a clothing store. Afterward they went out to their car and attacked a male friend waiting outside.
“The girls heard the screams, and when they came out of the store to see what was going on, the group of men assaulted them as well,” Miriam told the Israeli news outlet ynetnews. “They stole 52,000 shekels [or $15,000] from Sammy, took her and her friends’ phones, and then told them to run away.”
The group was able to make it back to the checkpoint at the entrance to the village, where they medical attention for their injuries back in Israel.
After videos of the attack were posted on social media by Mark Halawa, a businessman whose parents are Palestinian refugees, LGBTQ+ people and allies condemned the local police, who stood by and watched as the victims were assaulted [sic].
“Two gay Palestinian youth were spotted in Ramallah and brutally attacked by people while police stood by idle,” Halawa wrote on Monday. “There are no laws to protect [LGBTQ+] people under the Palestinian Authority, where homosexuality is a punishable crime.”
The response from police is unsurprising, however, as Palestinian authorities have previously threatened to “crack down” on LGBTQ+ events in the West Bank.
Sammy was thrown out by her family after they discovered her gender identity and currently lives in Jaffa, where she is currently receiving gender affirming care from the LGBT Center in Tel Aviv, ynetnews reports.
Note the bolded parts.
There is no legal protection for LGBT people in Muslim territories. The Muslims who attack suspected LGBT people are not arrested. The victims of Muslim anti-gay violence were given medical treatment and sanctuary in Israel.
To be a good Progressive, you have to support the Palestinians over Israel, to be a good gay you have to be Progressive, so to be a good gay you have to support the people who savagely attack gays in the street over the people who give them refuge from their attackers.
Want more proof? How about this article:
Stop Asking Ilhan Omar to Condemn Palestine’s LGBTQ+ Crackdown
Why? She advocates for Palestine statehood, largely by way of the destruction of Israel. Shouldn’t’ she as a Progressive explain how she can advocate for social justice for Palestinians while Palestinians murder gays?
Omar has been a leading critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a stance that recently led to the lawmaker — in addition to fellow House Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) — being banned from Israel after Donald Trump tweeted she hates “Israel & all Jewish people.”
Clearly siding with the president, right-wing news website Washington Examiner claims Palestine’s “vicious anti-gay intolerance betrays everything the progressive women claim to stand for.”
“The merits of Israel’s decision to deny the congresswomen entry are ripe for debate, but one thing is no longer disputable: the blatant hypocrisy of supposedly progressive Democrats supporting an illiberal Palestinian Authority government over our Israeli allies,” says the conservative online rag, which incidentally has a long history of transphobic reporting.
Absolutely, 100%, spot-on, accurate.
While it’s great that Omar is using her platform to amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ Palestinians, she is not obligated to respond every single time a brown or Muslim person does something wrong — just as we don’t ask all white people to condemn mass shootings perperated by Caucasian males, the group most likely to be mass shooters.
Actually, you fuckers do. All the time. Every time some tragedy happens you blame the NRA and want all of us to be thrown in jail or murdered.
This controversy harkens back to the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, which were used as a McCarthyian litmus test to prove Muslims’ loyalty to their own country. If they didn’t condemn the horrific acts of terrorism committed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, Muslims were viewed as suspect and possibily seditious. Even if they did denounce the attacks, they were expected to do so again and again — and sometimes it still wasn’t good enough.
Asking people to condemn the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens is just shameful.
Also, cry me a river. When Muslims and Progressives accuse Jews of dual loyalty, the Left just can’t muster up that condemnation of anti-Semitism.
This expectation isn’t just racist and xenophobic; it causes Americans to create fallacious connections between Islam and mass terror in their minds, even when they’re more likely to be blown up by someone who looks like Donald Trump than llhan Omar.
It’s racist. Of course, it is. Also, the assertion of the risk of terrorism here is patently false. Show me the Conservative with a Chic-Fil-A sandwich in one hand and an AR in the other shooting up a Pride Parade. I must have missed that story.
Omar has herself spoken out on this issue. During a panel at the Muslim Collective for Equitable Democracy, she was asked by a member of the audience to censure female genital mulitation (FGM). Omar responded that she had made her position on the issue clear many times and was tired of being interrogated on the subject.
“So today, I forgot to condemn al Qaeda, so here’s the al Qaeda one,” the Congresswoman said in July. “I forgot to condemn FGM. Here that goes. I forgot to condemn Hamas. Here that goes.”
The problem with Omar is that when she speaks, she says things that show support for terrorists and she has to be reminded to condemn them, and when she does condemn them, she does it sarcastically.
Maybe we question her motivation because she’s given up ample reason to question her motivation, like some people who did something.
Let’s be clear: LGBTQ+ Palestinians absolutely need all the support they can get. But according to the fact-sheet Omar herself tweeted, alQaws says one of the ways onlookers can best support queer and transgender people on the ground is to resist “pinkwashing”: the idea that Israel’s support of LGBTQ+ rights makes all its humanitarian actions virtuous or that Palestine’s lack of support makes everything it does bad.
“Perpetuating tiresome tropes of presenting Palestinians as inherently oppressive and Israel as a liberal state that protects [LGBTQ+] rights is counterproductive and factually baseless,” the organization says. “[…] We ask you to steer away from these lies that are intentionally used to justify their colonization of Palestine.”
And there is the doublethink. The Palestinians are murdering gays and the Israelis are saving them, but they have to hate the Jews and support the Palestinians so they come up with some SJW jargon to stave off the cognitive dissonance and make this illogic hold in their minds.
It’s sound advice, but something tells me no one will ever expect every white person who has criticized Omar to respond to it.
See, you are a racist if you expect one of the strongest supporters of a Palestinian state to support gay rights in that state.
That’s how you stop Progressive gays from seeing that there are only four lights and acknowledging the truth about the condition of LGBT people in Muslim countries. If they stray from the orthodoxy, beat them back with the stick being called a racist.
Lastly, there is this story:
Teenage Boys Plead Guilty to Brutal Attack on Lesbian Couple
A group of teenage boys have admitted to harassing and attacking a lesbian couple during a late night bus ride in London.
The altercation took place on the upper deck of a double decker in the North London residential district of Camden. A group of teenage boys began harassing Christine Hannigan and Melania Geymonat and pelting them with coins after Hannigan claims they demanded the couple show them “how lesbians have sex.”
The three assailants — whose names have not been released to the media but are aged 15, 16, and 17 — pled guilty to “public order offenses.” Two reportedly laughed as CCTV footage was screened in the courtroom showing them physically assaulting the couple, who were badly bloodied following the scuffle.
We all know what the text in bold means.
According to a report published in The Guardian earlier this year, the number of hate crimes in England and Wales has doubled in the past five years.
I wonder what has happened in the last five years? Want a clue? Look at this other excerpt from the linked Guardian article.
However, hate crimes against Jewish people more than doubled, with 18% of religious hate crime offences targeting Jewish people (1,326 offences), compared with 672 in the previous year.
What demographic hates both Gays and Jews and has significantly increased in London in the last five to ten years?
I can give you a few more hints.
How about this article from The Independent:
Woman charged with homophobic hate crime after Pride marchers verbally abused in London
Jamila Choudhury is accused of a public order offence during the Waltham Forest Pride event on 27 July.
Footage widely shared on social media showed a woman wearing a black niqab shouting at a marcher draped in a rainbow LGBT+ flag.
Or maybe this article from the Huffington Post:
Can We Finally Talk About Muslim Homophobia in Britain?
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.
It would seem that Islamic violence against gays is a worldwide event, from beating them in Palestine to shooting them in Florida to beating them in London.
But… to be a Progressive means that fact can’t be acknowledged and you have to promote anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism.
This is the Queer Progressive Doublethink.
The left calls contrasting Israeli vs Palestinian treatment of gays “pinkwashing”, and refuse to let that reality alter their support for Palestinians.
Man… just let them eat themselves, fewer enemies to deal with afterwards.
On the “every time some tragedy happens you [the left] blame the NRA…”
Not only that, but neither the NRA nor any of its members nor any other gun owner has ever advocated mass murder as a good thing. But many Muslim leaders have and still do, and a substantial fraction of the Muslim population not just in the Middle East but also in Europe support mass murder and terrorism.
So, unlike the NRA case, asking a Muslim to make a statement rejecting terrorism has a rational basis.
I’m surprised the article didn’t blame Israel.
“It would seem that Islamic violence against gays is a worldwide event, from beating them in Palestine to shooting them in Florida to beating them in London.
But… to be a Progressive means that fact can’t be acknowledged and you have to promote anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism.”
That’s a bingo.