RUTHFULLY YOURS

The LGBT establishment has, it seems, been hijacked by a politicized elite that cares little about the rights of their brethren in the Islamic world.
LGBT activists and celebrities have never once promoted a boycott of the Islamic regimes that stone, execute and jail their homosexual citizens. Why do they not orchestrate a campaign to boycott Iranian, Indonesian, Palestinian and Turkish goods?

Whenever Islamic radicalism has been defeated after its reign of horror and fear, what follows among ordinary citizens are scenes of hope and liberation.

Syrian women burned the burqas the Islamic State forced them to wear, after the militants were being driven out from the city of Manbij. “Damn this stupid invention that they made us wear,” one woman said as she set fire to the garment. “We’re humans, we have our freedom”.

When the Taliban tyranny in Afghanistan ended, women’s faces also began to reappear on the streets; and men, forced by the Taliban to grow beards, flocked to buy razors.

Why hasn’t the West raised the question of gay rights under Islam? Go ask the LGBT establishment.

“Fight the nationalism that invokes walls and borders”. This was the platform in 2017 of Rome Pride, the annual event of Italy’s LGBT movement; it called for “resistance” against “populism” and yelled slogans such as “Make Italy Gay Again”. But as the English magazine The Spectator noted, “the battle for gay rights stops at the borders of Islam”. The Islamic State knows this well and, borrowing the slogan used by President Obama after the Supreme Court declared same-gender marriage legal, ISIS took to using the hashtag #LoveWins. Islamic supremacists laugh at our weakness.

During the summer, in cities across the West, the LGBT movement celebrated two weeks of marches and parades for “Rainbow Pride.” At Chicago’s “Dyke March,” the organizers ejected marchers who carried rainbow flags with the Jewish Star of David. They were labelled “offensive” for this “inclusive” event, despite the fact that hundreds of gay Palestinians have found refuge in Israel.

Who still takes Human Rights Watch seriously? Well, I know the Guardian does, because it was that paper, the flagship of the British left, that alerted me the other day to the fact that HRW had issued its annual report. A quick search showed that the report had also made headlines in other major media, such as Newsweek and ABC News.

The report, of course, is nominally about human rights around the world. But it’s been a long time since HRW, founded in 1988, was really about human rights. For a long time now, it’s been hiring staffers with radical political backgrounds who are quick to berate Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Israel, while turning a blind eye to brutal Third World regimes, especially Islamic ones. Exemplary of HRW’s perverse perspective was its years-long campaign of defamation against British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who won its wrath by speaking up about the execution of gays in Iran.

The individual behind the slander of Tatchell was Scott Long, then director of HRW’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender rights program. Long didn’t just reprove Tatchell; to quote Tatchell, he “grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defense of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism.” In a breathtakingly unscrupulous 2009 essay, Long issued a series of flagrantly dishonest charges against Tatchell that Tatchell convincingly refuted, one by one, on his own website. Despite widespread criticism of Long for his savaging of a highly regarded gay-rights hero, HRW took five years to finally apologize to Tatchell and give Long the heave-ho.

In 2009, HRW suffered a major embarrassment. Robert L. Bernstein, its founder and longtime chairman, who had stepped down in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed reproving HRW for what it had turned into. HRW, he recalled, had been established “to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters.” Yes, he granted, “open, democratic societies have faults,” but they also have ways of fixing them. Closed societies don’t – which is why HRW’s founders “sought to draw a sharp line” between the two and “prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.” But in the eleven years since his departure from HRW, lamented Bernstein, HRW had increasingly ignored this crucial open/closed distinction.