homophobia | ukwatch.net

Start Complaining

Tim Holmes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:49:16 +0000

The Advertising Standards Authority has received nearly 200 complaints about the Heinz mayonnaise ad, which - assuming a higher final tally - should make it one of the five most offensive this year. Let me describe the controversial sales pitch. There are some kids, with a mum in a white apron, and a dad, but - ah ha! - when the dad goes to leave, it turns out the mum isn't a mum, she's a bloke from a New York deli. The dad gives the him-not-her a kiss goodbye. Smack on the lips, like some kind of gay, except it has nothing to do with being gay - it is a joke about the mayonnaise being so authentic it's as if your mum has turned into a bloke from a New York deli.

Complaints have centred on the fact that one man kissing another could be construed as homosexuality, and oblige parents to explain to children what that is. Never mind that mayonnaise can't be advertised between kids' programmes because the fat and salt content is too high. So it doesn't matter that the product is so injurious to health that the mere mention of it is thought too toxic for pre-watershed telly; and it doesn't matter that both the stated and tacit messages of the advert are nothing to do with sexuality of any sort, it's a straight "mayonnaise is nice" underpinned by the British-ad fascination with men dressed as women revealed as men (think Bounty - wipe not bar).

I don't mind the existence of the odd humourless homophobe, but I'm interested by their sense of entitlement, considering what a marginal view they hold. They look around, see anti-discrimination legislation all about, see a gay wedding officiated by an actual bishop, and still think the ASA will be on their side.

It never occurs to me to lodge a complaint with the ASA and this is categorically not because I'm never offended. I'm constantly offended. I hate the preponderance of alternative indie music on the ad circuit, so that everything from a Samsung camera to a Toyota people carrier or an Orange chat plan is flogged with the voice of some sub-Joanna Newsome no mark. Not only is it cynical, this pretence that buying a big square car is the "alternative" choice, but it appropriates and tramples over the aural landscape of the outsider so that there's nowhere for even an outsider to feel at home. It's disgraceful; a genuine traducement of the purpose of art, which is to make us feel that we're not alone.

On feminist grounds, I object to the Corsodyl advert; a camera travels pervily over the body of a young woman, lingering on her thighs, arse and breasts, before coming to a stop at her mouth, where she's missing a tooth because of her poor oral hygiene. I guess it's meant to be funny, though it's hard to pin it down - is it a take-off of sexist 70s ads? I don't think it's even that self-aware. I think it's an old-fashioned reversal-of-expectation gag. "Ah! The shock! Her breasts were so promising, and yet she has a mouth like a graveyard. While we've got your horrified attention, ladies, might we suggest this mouthwash?" What a nauseating comic backwater. Who would want to explain to their daughter why this kind of thing would never happen to a boy?

Ok, I am rustling up a bit of this outrage. I have to admit that Corsodyl does work, and my mouth would be an emptier place without it. But my objections would have no greater trouble - considerably less, I think - gathering adherents than would those of people who don't like the kissing men. Why don't lefties complain more? First, we assume watchdog bodies such as the ASA will be on the side of a very old-fashioned respectability, despite all evidence that mainstream culture is more evolved than that. Second, we are lazy bleeders. When an ad featuring men kissing is one of the most complained about, that matters: not as a reflection on the nation's scattered homophobes breathing their last gasp, but as a sign that the rest of us don't complain anything like enough.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

Gay Iranian Safe - For Now

Ellie Keen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:19:33 +0000

In the latest protest aimed at preventing the UK from deporting 19-year-old Iranian Mehdi Kazemi to his homeland where he faces probable execution, 150 demonstrators braved hail, snow, and rain in London on Saturday, March 22, to rally outside 10 Downing Street, the official residence of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Protesters demanded that Brown's government refrain from efforts to deport any gay and lesbian Iranians.

For the moment, at least, the Brown government has put its original deportation plans for Kazemi on hold, pending formal reconsideration.

The Kazemi case has attracted worldwide attention ever since the UK Home Office ordered him to be deported last year after his student visa expired. While in Britain, where he had been a student since 2005, Kazemi learned that his longtime boyfriend, Parham, who was the same age as him, had been arrested, tortured, and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. In a lengthy e-mail to the Iranian Queer Organization describing his plight, Kazemi wrote, "If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed like Parham." (For background on the Kazemi case, read this reporter's February 28-March 5, 2008 article, " Another Iranian Tragedy".)

After losing an internal Home Office appeal against his deportation, Kazemi fled the UK, first to the Czech Republic and then to Germany, before finally arriving, after weeks of peregrinations, in the Netherlands, where he was detained as an "illegal immigrant." A Dutch court on March 3 ordered Kazemi returned to the UK, citing the European Union's Dublin Regulation, under which asylum applications must be processed in the first EU country in which the petitioner made an official claim for legal recognition as a refugee.

A worldwide campaign to save Kazemi from deportation to Iran was spearheaded by the Italian human rights group Gruppo EveryOne, which also launched an online petition campaign on Kazemi's behalf and mobilized other Italian human rights groups and the country's Radical Party to lobby the European Parliament to take action. In the UK, the militant gay rights group OutRage! and a newly-formed committee called Gay Asylum led the fight on Kazemi's behalf. None of the US gay rights groups, including the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, made any public statement about Kazemi's life-or-death struggle for freedom.

TV networks CNN, ABC in Australia, the BBC and Sky News in the UK, and Italy's RAI have all carried stories on Kazemi, as have major newspapers, including the Independent, the Guardian, and the Times in the UK, Corriere della Sera and La Republicca in Italy, and El Pais in Spain.

On March 14, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved a resolution on the Kazemi case that had been introduced with the support of 142 of its members and 62 members of the British House of Lords. The EuroParliament resolution pointed out that the Iranian authorities "routinely detain, torture, and execute persons, notably homosexuals" and that "Mehdi's partner has already been executed, while his [own] father has threatened him with death."

The resolution added that "the EU and its Member States cannot apply European and national laws and procedures in a way which results in the expulsion of persons to a third country where they would risk persecution, torture, and death, as this would amount to a violation of European and international human rights obligations." The EuroParliament stressed that the EU directive regarding criteria for refugee status "recognises persecution for sexual orientation as a ground for granting asylum."

The resolution "appeals to the Member States involved to find a common solution to ensure that Mehdi Kazemi is granted asylum or protection on EU soil and not sent back to Iran." More broadly, it argued that "more attention should be devoted to the proper application of EU asylum law in Member States as regards sexual orientation."

The resolution invoked the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits the removal of persons to countries where there is a serious risk that they would face the death penalty, torture, or other inhuman treatment, as well as the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Geneva Convention.

Within hours of the passage of the EuroParliament's resolution, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith issued a brief statement granting Kazemi a temporary stay of his deportation.

"Following representations made on behalf of Mehdi Kazemi, and in light of new circumstances since the original decision was made, I have decided that Mr. Kazemi's case should be reconsidered on his return to the UK from the Netherlands," Smith said.

Openly gay British MP Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democratic Party, who had campaigned on Kazemi's behalf, told the UK's Pink News, "I hope Mr. Kazemi will now come back to Britain [from the Netherlands] where arrangements are already in place for an urgent meeting with him, his family, specialist lawyers, and myself to prepare a new application to the Home Office."

Hughes added, "It is becoming more and more clear that sending gay people back to Iran under the present regime is completely unacceptable."

But it is not only young Kazemi who remains at risk for deportation to Iran. Another 12 gay and lesbian Iranians living in the UK also risk being sent back into the hands of the theocratic Tehran regime.

Prominent among them is 40-year-old lesbian Pegah Emambakhsh, who became a refugee in the UK in 2005 after her partner in Iran was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death by stoning. Her request for asylum was refused, and in August 2007 she was arrested in Sheffield and imprisoned to await deportation. But after a worldwide campaign on her behalf, she was released on September 11 last year while her appeal of the deportation order remains pending.

However, the Independent reported on March 7, Emambakhsh has lost her latest appeal.

"Ms Emambakhsh narrowly avoided deportation in August last year but only after her local MP, Richard Caborn, and other parliamentarians persuaded the Government to allow her to stay while further legal avenues of appeal were explored," the British newspaper reported. "She says she was already on the way to Heathrow [Airport] when she learnt of her last-minute reprieve. But last month the Court of Appeal turned down her application for permission for a full hearing. Ms Emambakhsh said yesterday that she was 'very disappointed' by the ruling but planned to apply for a judicial review at the High Court. The Home Office has also agreed to consider fresh legal representations on her behalf."

The UK was embarrassed when Emambakhsh was offered asylum by the center-left government of Italy's Premier Romero Prodi, an implicit criticism of the British plan to deport her to Iran. Prodi acted after Gruppo EveryOne mobilized pressure.

Emambakhsh told the Independent, "I will never, never go back. If I do I know I will die."

As the Independent noted in a March 6 article on the Kazemi case by the newspaper's law editor, "The Home Office's own guidance issued to immigration officers concedes that Iran executes homosexual men but, unaccountably, rejects the claim that there is a systematic repression of gay men and lesbians."

At Saturday's Downing Street demonstration, OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell denounced Brown's Labour government for "failing LGBT refugees."

"Asylum staff and adjudicators receive race and gender awareness training but no training at all on sexual orientation issues," he pointed out. "As a result, they often make stereotyped assumptions - that a feminine woman can't be a lesbian or that a masculine man cannot be gay. They sometimes rule that someone who has been married must be faking their homosexuality.

Tatchell went on to say, "The government refuses to explicitly rule that homophobic and transphobic persecution are legitimate grounds for granting asylum. This signals to asylum staff and judges that claims by LGBTI people are not as worthy as those based on persecution because of a person's ethnicity, gender, politics, or faith."

Moreover, Tatchell noted, "The Home Office country reports on homophobic and transphobic persecution are often partial, inaccurate, and misleading. They consistently downplay the severity of victimization suffered by LGBT people in violently homophobic countries like Iran, Nigeria, Iraq, Uganda, Palestine, Algeria, and Jamaica.

And, he said, "Cuts in the funding of legal aid for asylum claims means that most asylum applicants - gay and straight - are unable to prepare an adequate submission at their asylum hearing. Most solicitors don't get paid enough to procure the necessary witness statements, medical reports, and other vital corroborative evidence."

It's clear that Kazemi, Emambakhsh, and the other Iranian LGBT refugees seeking asylum in the UK still have a difficult road ahead of them.

The online petition for Mehdi Kazemi, which can be signed at the bottom, is at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/UKMADHI/. The Iranian Queer Organization's website is www.irqo.net. OutRage! leader Peter Tatchell's website is http://www.petertatchell.net/. The website for Italy's Gruppo EveryOne is http://everyonegroup.com. Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/direland

A Bloody Disgrace

Ellie Keen — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:27:57 +0000

Cradling my niece in my arms, she was white as a sheet and lying lifeless with the sedative effects of the medication — and only 3 weeks into this world. Heartache, uncertainty and concern.

A week later, two blood transfusions done and dusted, she lay in her incubator with a smile on her face and a glint in her eye.

It was at that point I decided to sign the register and give the gift of life — perhaps replace some of the blood she had so kindly been given and maybe save a few other lives along the way. It was nothing, a thirty-minute appointment, chocolate biscuits and a drink of orange juice — simple?

So you would think. I cannot give blood. My disease? I’m gay.

Gay and bisexual men in Britain cannot give blood as we are seen as a high risk of blood-borne infection and disease. The blood transfusion service claim “it’s not about being gay and bisexual, its about the act of having sex with another man and the risk involved”.

Hmmmm, that sounds gay to me.

Since the 1980s, the British government has tried to brush AIDS and HIV under the carpet and affix this disease firmly to the gay community. A scary shadow of homosexuality that dare not show its face in modern day blood transfusions.

Britain has seen a massive increase of cases of AIDS and HIV since the 1980s and surprisingly (for the government) this has been in the heterosexual community.

The British transfusion services have for years denied the gay community the option to give the gift of life, and instead have put the lives of British citizens at risk, should there be a major disaster and thousands of people needing blood.

Being gay means that you will bed hop, have multiple sexual partners and take risks no more than heterosexual people will.

The government must change this outdated, homophobic and offensive law and allow gay and bisexual people to give the gift of life.

I ask for support in the campaign to overturn this discriminatory situation. Please sign an online petition at . You can also join the bebo group at .

[Robert McDowell is a member of Scottish Socialist Youth, and can be contacted at .]

Galloway's Iranian propaganda?

Ellie Keen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:12:55 +0000

George Galloway, the Leftwing Respect MP, has been accused of making allegations that border on paedophile smears and play to homophobic prejudice. He claims that the boyfriend of gay Iranian asylum seeker Mehdi Kazemi was executed for “committing sex crimes against young men”.

The insinuation of such a claim is that Mehdi’s boyfriend was a rapist or a child sex abuser. It also stigmatises Mehdi with the shame that he was the partner of someone who committed sexual assaults on male youths. He will suffer with this stigma when he is returned to the UK and could face considerable personal hostility from people who have heard and believe these allegations against his boyfriend.

Mr Galloway made his astonishing allegation on Channel Five’s The Wright Stuff. You can watch his interview here.

He has been asked to explain the source of his claim, but has so far failed to do so.

I am not aware of any paedophile-style sex abuse claims against Mehdi’s partner. Moreover, no human rights group has mentioned any evidence that Mehdi’s boyfriend was a rapist or a child molester.

Although the regime in Tehran frequently defames political, religious, ethnic and sexual dissidents with false claims of kidnapping, rape, alcoholism, sodomy, adultery, drug-taking and hooliganism, even the most extreme ayatollahs have not made allegations that Mehdi Kazemi’s boyfriend was involved in sex abuse.

Nevertheless, Galloway has broadcast this very serious, potentially defamatory, allegation to the British public, and has then failed to back it up with evidence.

To some people, Galloway’s claims look like propaganda in defence of the totalitarian, homophobic Islamic Republic of Iran. His passionate opposition to a war against Iran, which I share, seems to have clouded his judgement; leading him to downplay the regime’s persecution of lesbians and gays, which includes state-sanctioned executions.

In the same interview for The Wright Stuff, Galloway went on to state: “All the [British] papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay. That’s not true.”

His claim that lesbian and gay people are not at risk of execution in Iran is refuted by every reputable human rights organisation, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the International Lesbian and Gay Association. None of these esteemed bodies are anti-Iran warmongers, as Galloway has subsequently seemed to imply.

The leftwing US journalist, Doug Ireland, has documented cases of the flogging and execution of men who have sex with men in Iran. These are just the cases we know about. It is likely that some similar executions never get media coverage in Iran and are therefore unknown to the outside world.

The Iranian Queer Rights Organisation also confirms that homosexuality is a capital offence and that gay Iranians are subjected to brutal punishments, including torture and hanging.

The government of Iran admits that it has the death penalty for homosexuality. Gay people are sometimes tortured to make confessions – even false confessions. Iranian law makes no distinction between consensual and non-consensual same-sex relations. Both are punishable by execution.

If Iran doesn’t execute queers, why does it need to retain the death penalty for same-sex relations? Why doesn’t it repeal a law it supposedly never enforces? Why doesn’t it announce a moratorium on hangings for homosexuality?

As with other dissidents, gay men are usually hanged in public by the barbaric slow strangulation method which is deliberately designed to maximise and prolong the suffering of the victim. These gruesome public barbarisms are also designed to terrorise the gay population.

To discredit the gay people it hangs, and to stir up public homophobia in support of its medieval religious-inspired punishments, the regime sometimes frames gay people with false charges of rape and child sex abuse. It wants to create the impression that homosexuals are monsters, in order to deter men from seeking same-sex relations.

This is what happened in the case of 21-year-old Makwan Moloudzadeh, who was executed in Iran last December. He was hanged for alleged sex offences against male teenagers, when he himself was a mere 13 years old. Amnesty International condemned his trial as “grossly flawed” and a “mockery of justice.”

Human Rights Watch reports that Moloudzadeh was coerced and tortured into making a confession. According to Amnesty International, his accusers retracted their sex assault allegations and admitted that they had been pressured into making false claims against him.

Even if Moloudzadeh had been guilty as charged, he should never have been hanged because the alleged offence was committed while he was a minor.

Strong evidence for Moloudzadeh’s innocence is the fact that hundreds of villagers turned out for his funeral; which would not have happened if the official Iranian account that he was a child sex abuser was true.

In a second interview on The Wright Stuff, Galloway launched into a scurrilous attack on Medhi’s friends and supporters, and the defenders of lesbian, gay and bisexual human rights in Iran, including myself:

“This (Mehdi Kazemi’s case) is a useful story for the war propaganda machine, the khaki machine now taking on a tinge of pink….what I will not accept is people being used, as Tatchell is, as the pink end of the war machine. That’s what Peter Tatchell has become by attacking Iran in the way that he does.”

At the antiwar protest in London on March 15, which I supported and attended, Galloway repeated these claims in his keynote speech. He said the “khaki war machine now has its pink contingent”. He went on to imply that people who support gay rights in Iran are “useful idiots” and said their aim is to “bamboozle the public to go along with mass murder in Iran”.

It is untrue and deeply offensive to suggest that those of us who oppose homophobic persecution in Iran are backing the bombing and invasion of Iran. We are not.

I am on record in my writings and speeches as opposing an attack on Iran. When, for example, I exposed Tehran’s racist and neocolonial persecution of its Ahwazi Arab ethnic minority, I stated categorically:

“I am part of a new campaign group, Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI). HOPI opposes both a US war on Iran and the tyranny of the Iranian regime. My motto is: Neither Washington nor Tehran!

A war against Iran would be another disastrous neo-imperial adventure, which would strengthen the Tehran dictatorship. President Ahmadinejad would play the patriot and manipulate nationalism to rally the population behind him. He would use a US military attack as an excuse to further crack down on dissent in the name of safeguarding national security.

The overthrow of the theocratic police state by the Iranian people – not by US military intervention – is the best way to resolve the nuclear crisis and prevent a needless, unjustified war. With no dictatorship in Tehran, President Bush and the neo cons would lose the rationale for a military strike against Iran.”

Galloway’s insinuation that I am banging the war drum and siding with imperialism is both laughable and dishonourable.

For nearly 40 years I have supported the Iranian people’s struggle against dictatorship, first against the western-backed Shah and, since 1979, against the clerical tyranny of the ayatollahs. I have been totally consistent. I am not suddenly focusing on Iran’s human rights abuses and doing the dirty work of the Washington neocons, as Galloway seems to suggest.

Undeterred by criticisms that his outbursts collude with homophobia and with a viciously anti-gay regime in Tehran, Mr Galloway boasts: “I have an unblemished record of support for lesbian and gay equality.”

Well, not quite. The Public Whip website (which monitors MPs votes) notes that Galloway did not vote on 8 out of 10 of the major parliamentary votes on gay law reform in recent years. His repeat absence is a strange way to express support for gay rights. Most other MPs turned up to vote. Why not George?

Galloway is, of course, a Respect MP. A commitment to gay rights was entirely absent from Respect’s 2005 general election manifesto. Some insiders claim gay equality was originally included but was removed to appease Muslim fundamentalist voters (this apparent assumption by Respect that all Muslims are homophobic fundamentalists is just plain wrong – they are not).

The policy section of the Respect website has included a one-line opposition to discrimination based on sexual orientation but it is hidden away under “other policies”. Not exactly upfront.

One of Respect’s major funders is Dr Mohammed Naseem. He is a one-time member of their executive and was a Respect parliamentary candidate. He is also a leading member of the Islamic Party of Britain (IPB) which appears to advocate the death penalty for consenting adult homosexuality in certain circumstances.

The IPB is viciously homophobic in other respects too, as it’s website explains, and as my OutRage! colleague, Brett Lock, has revealed.

Naseem is a strange bedfellow for a supposedly pro-gay rights MP.

George Galloway was magnificent before the US Senate, exposing the Iraq debacle. Sadly, he now sometimes seems to be exonerating a cruel, unjust regime in Tehran that is responsible for some of the worst state-sanctioned homophobia in the world. This regime is also responsible for the equally heinous persecution of trade unionists, women’s rights campaigners, student leaders, human rights advocates, investigative journalists and activists who defend Iran’s subjugated minority nationalities, such as the Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis.

Misguided, untruthful attacks on Iranian gay people, the queer rights movement and the pink community do not strengthen the antiwar movement and the struggle against US imperialism. On the contrary, they play straight into the hands of the tyrants in Tehran and their mirror opposites in Washington. They betray all Iranians who are yearning and striving for democracy, human rights, social justice and the self-rule of Iran’s oppressed minority nations.