Yesterday I had a good conversation with Mike Signorile on his talkshow on the SIRIUS Satellite Network station OutQ, which is advertised as "Information, and Entertainment for the Gay and Lesbian Community." We got into the moral relativism of secular liberals, in particular when it comes to Islam and human rights. I brought up a recent bizarre case in point: the Columbia University queer student group that agreed with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that there are no gays in Iran--on the conceptual grounds that "Western" concepts such as "homosexual" cannot be applied outside our borders.
After the interview I had a chance to thank Signorile for calling attention to the case of Mehdi Kazemi. Kazemi is a 19-year-old Iranian who came to Europe to study, learned that his lover in Iran had been apprehended and executed by the authorities for gay. His application for asylum in Great Britain was turned down in 2006 and he fled to Netherlands, narrowing avoiding deportation to Iran, where would face almost certain death. Now the Dutch are refusing to consider the case, which may end up at the European Court.
How, we wondered, has this story received so little attention from mainstream media outlets?
2 comments:
Hi
a website has now been set up to support Madhi's case - the 19yo gay Iranian threatened with deportation to execution by the British government
http://www.madhikazemi.com/
cheers
Paul Canning
I ordered your book today after hearing you on Point of Inquiry.
Do you have any links to the statement or whatever from the Columbia queer group? Thanks
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