RUTHFULLY YOURS

Back in January, the U.K.’s Gay Times ran a morbidly fascinating piece. Following the latest attacks in Paris and ISIS’s throwing of gays off buildings, the magazine asked, “Is Islam itself really a threat to the gay community?” Readers may be unsurprised to hear that the next sentence read, “The answer is simple. ‘No.’”

According to the piece (written by one Thomas Ling), there is nothing in Islam that need worry gays. But what, I hear you ask, about the Islamic traditions? What about the Koran? Fortunately, Gay Times had this covered, insisting that the Koran says “nothing at all” about being gay. Phew! So everyone can flip over to the articles on diets and work-out routines?

Well, not quite. The reason given was that “the word ‘homosexual’ simply didn’t exist when it [the Koran] was written.” Okay, but what about the founder of Islam, Mohammad, and his injunction to kill people who are gay? Our intrepid reporter avoided that hadith but did note another “prophetic narration,” which says, “When a man lies with another man, the throne of heaven shakes.” (The author fails to make the obvious frippery that if you’re really lucky the earth will also move.)

Anyway, having got near the rub, Gay Times author promptly slipped into the more comfortable issue of Biblical injunctions on homosexuality. He insisted that “the ruthless and reckless applications of Sharia law by IS are not inevitable consequences of Islam.” To give the reader a boost, we are reminded of a Muslim MP who voted for same-sex marriage and told how great the work of an “anti-Islamophobia” group was before closing with some bashing of tabloids for their publishing “negative” news stories about Muslims. The whole exercise in casuistry concluded thus:

Maybe it’s time to accept that Islamic State has very little to do with the teachings of Islam. Maybe we should start comparing their fighters to terrorists like Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, motivated by skewed personal beliefs, instead of to an entire diverse religion. It’s maybe then that society can accept Islam and promote a tolerance that can be proudly looked back on by future generations of gay Muslims.

That’s a lot of “maybes.” So let me add a couple of my own. “Maybe” Gay Times and Mr. Ling are wrong. Maybe they are in fact only symptomatic of the slow learning of gay communities in the West when it comes to Islam. And maybe, just maybe, after Orlando, a few more people will realize that the patchwork-quilt paradise of societal atomization we call “diversity” is a hell of our own creation.

It isn’t surprising that most gay spokespeople and publications lean left. For historic reasons — principally the political Right’s opposition to gay rights — most gay spokespeople continue to think that the political Right is the sole locale from which anti-gay sentiment can come. For many years Pat Robertson was their worst nightmare. But Pat Robertson just wanted to stop gays from marrying. He didn’t call for people to throw us off high buildings.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/06/13/isis-takes-credit-for-stabbing-police-commander-wife-near-paris/

Through its same wire service that has claimed credit for Orlando, Brussels and other attacks, ISIS took responsibility for the double murder of a police commander and his wife.

The 42-year-old cop was in front of his suburban home in Magnanville, about 30 outside of Paris, this evening when he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant.

The attacker then took the victim’s wife and 3-year-old son hostage inside their house.

Police surrounded the property, evacuating nearby residents, and attempted to negotiate for a few hours before storming the home and fatally shooting the attacker. The wife was found dead inside the house; the toddler was rescued.

Le Parisien newspaper reported that a neighbor heard the attacker yelling “Allahu Akbar.”

The paper said the police commander had been stabbed nine times in the abdomen and the assailant announced the wife’s murder on social media after he killed her.

The ISIS-linked Amaq Agency later issued a breaking news alert stating an “Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife with blade weapons near Paris.”

Another massacre and where to sheet the blame? Polite convention precludes making more than passing mention of the killer’s creed, while ‘too many guns’ and ‘mental illness’ are getting tired. So let’s settle on a non-specific strain of homophobia and leave the Prophet out of it
Another barbaric Islamic terrorist massacre, killing 49 people and injuring over 50 in an Orlando gay nightclub; and the heart searching begins among the mentally challenged. What drove American-born, Afghani-parented, frequent-mosque-attending, prayer-mat-toting, Omar Mateen? It is a mystery.

His ex-wife said he was mentally unstable. He apparently beat her and kept her housebound. CNN after flirting as best they could with all kinds of possibilities, including white supremacism, had a get out. Of course, it makes sense now; he was around the bend. Well, wife-beating and keeping women secluded might just be the way devout male Muslims go about their lives. Sounds crazy to us but not to an Afghani or, say, Saudi-Arabian, I dare say.

President Obama couldn’t bring himself yet again to mention Islam as being complicit, though he did manage to blame guns. Expect the gun laws in the US to get most emphasis by Democrats who are clearly oblivious to the zero correlation between worldwide terrorist attacks and gun laws. There is no accounting for sheer wilful blindness and imbecility.

Mind you it is likely that Mateen was unbalanced. I tend to think that anyone who would deliberately gun down people in a nightclub is probably deranged. But where does that get us when clearly there are so many deranged people inspired by Islamic scripture.

Wikipedia lists 220 worldwide Islamic terrorist attacks in the six years 2010 – 2015, which have received “significant press coverage.” So far 29 are listed for 2016, including the Orlando attack. Countless other less significant attacks have occurred. It is quite easy to see online estimates of over 20,000 Islamic attacks since 9/11.

These are numbers of plague proportions carried out by people who are apparently mentally unbalanced. Is it something in the water? In fact, it is something in the book. And more of us better start comprehending that before we are buried as a civilisation – the LGBT crowd among them.

It just might have been no accident that Mateen targeted a gay nightclub at the start of Ramadan. There is plenty of support in the Hadiths for killing homosexuals, including by throwing them from high buildings. Of course Islamic apologists are fond of quoting Old Testament condemnation of sodomy. I too would think this relevant if there were bodies of Jewish or Christian religious zealots who went around giving life to these passages by encouraging the killing of homosexuals. As it is, it is totally and completely irrelevant and, I suspect, deliberately deceptive and distracting.

The Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49 people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1. Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3. It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4. The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

Not all Muslims are homophobic. Many are gay or lesbian themselves. Some even have the courage to venture into the gender fluidity that the 21st century West has come to recognize. But these LGBT Muslims are running directly counter to their religion.

In his 2006 book “Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law,” the Dutch scholar Rudolph Peters notes that most schools of Islamic law proscribe homosexuality. They differ only on the mode of punishment. “The Malikites, the Shiites and some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites are of the opinion that the penalty is death, either by stoning (Malikites), the sword (some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites) or, at the discretion of the court, by killing the culprit in the usual manner with a sword, stoning him, throwing him from a (high) wall or burning him (Shiites).”

Under Shariah—Islamic law—those engaging in same-sex sexual acts can be sentenced to death in nearly a dozen countries or in large areas of them: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, the northern states of Nigeria, southern parts of Somalia, two provinces in Indonesia, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. Death is also the penalty in the territories in