TWISTED ANTI-GAY BIGOTRY OF I.S. ZEALOTS
THE rabidly homophobic Islamist terrorist, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to Islamic State minutes before carrying out the Florida atrocity. He was keenly aware that there could be no other outfit on earth that would take more pleasure in the knowledge that it was gays who were singled out for slaughter.
The massacre has thus brought into tragic focus the murderous hatred Islamic State – and those its barbaric ideology now inspires to commit atrocities around the world – has for homosexuals.
IS supporters are indeed jubilant at the choice of target.
Over the past two years, its blooddrenched foot soldiers have themselves been executing anyone it deems to be homosexual among the millions of Muslims it rules over in Syria and Iraq.
Unlike in the Florida nightclub attack, the grim body count of gay victims in the self-declared, secretive caliphate is unknown to the outside world.
However, judging by its steady stream of graphic videos of the merciless executions, and other reports from the region by independent observers, the number of homosexuals murdered by IS far exceeds the 49 who lost their lives in Florida.
Inside its caliphate, those accused of homosexuality are first paraded in public by masked men, who read the charges against them in a local square before leading them onto a rooftop.
The condemned are blindfolded, and have their hands tied behind their back.
Then they are casually thrown from the roof to the ground.
Those who survive the fall are stoned by a crazed crowd of locals that includes whole families – including small children.
In Syria, as many as ten men have been murdered in this way at the same time. Perhaps especially heartbreaking is the fact that victims have included young boys who, in any civilised society, would not even be considered old enough to be sexually mature.
Given this terrifying state of affairs, many Westerners have drawn the conclusion that Islam as a religion is uniquely irrational in its treatment of homosexuality.
The reality, though, is far more complex.
For instance, while the Koran does indeed single out homosexuality as a sin, it is the only transgression in the Muslim holy book that is not given a specific punishment.
Moreover, the Koran says that those found guilty of indulging in homosexual acts should be given the opportunity to repent, and subsequently rehabilitated into society.
For more than a millennia after the birth of Islam, the relevant Koranic verses were sensibly interpreted by leading Islamic scholars as meaning that homosexuals should be left alone – so long as they did not behave in a way that would disturb the public order.
Remarkably, from the ninth century until the 21st, almost all love poetry written in Arabic was addressed to beautiful male youths.
And in stark contrast to Christian Europe during the same period, where homosexuals were hanged and burned at the stake even well into the 19th century, there is only one example of homosexuals in the Middle East being executed.
Indeed, the easy-going attitude survived for much of the last century. Western gays flocked to countries like Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt precisely because, unlike at home, homosexuality was tolerated. So how can Islamic State, and so many internationally recog- nised Islamic countries, now justify the persecution, imprisonment and execution of homosexuals according to sharia law?
Of course, Islamic State itself has shamelessly ignored the teachings of the Koran when it comes to this subject – as it does to justify the actions of its death cult generally – and instead exploits the infamous ‘hadiths’ or ‘sayings’ of the Prophet Mohammed to justify the carnage.
But these ‘sayings’ have been shown to have been largely invented by Muslim rulers over the years.
Things had already begun to change for the worse for local gays, though, with the rise of political Islam – promoted by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, which originated in Egypt – in the 1980s.
Regimes in north Africa which were worried by the rise of hardline Islamic opposition parties cynically started trying to curry favour by using laws against ‘outraging public decency’ – established by the former colonial powers – to prosecute gays.
With the rise of Islamic State, Arab regimes now feel more threatened than ever.
As a result, their cruel strategy of adopting the radical Islamists’ social agenda is being pursued even more shamelessly.
Which means the extremist position taken by Islamic State is becoming ever-more entrenched into these historically tolerant Muslim societies.
From Egypt to Tunisia, Saudi Arabia to Morocco, homosexuals are now being tortured and imprisoned as never before – just as atheists, liberals, pro- democracy and women’s rights advocates are also being smeared as foreign agents, traitors and devil worshippers by the regional media.
EvEn in once staunchly-secular Turkey, where homosexuality is legal, gays are facing an unprecedented backlash. The climate is so overtly hostile that in response to the Orlando massacre, a pro-government Turkish newspaper, Yeni Akit, published the grotesquely homophobic headline: ‘death toll rises to 50 in bar where perverted homosexuals go!’
The tragedy is that this has all been happening just as the West has been travelling in the opposite direction, championing individual freedoms and sexual diversity.
And while it is true that fundamentalist Christians do not approve of gay people, they do not go around massacring them.
Omar Mateen had spent his entire life immersed in the culture of the United States, yet despite this he was filled with enough hatred and bile to carry out the worst massacre of gays in modern Western history.