Love beats ISIS
ISIS’s thirst for blood is matched only by its hunger for publicity
On Sunday, 28-year-old Subhi Nahas will serve as one of the grand marshals in New York City’s Pride March. For the young, gay Syrian refugee who’s faced threats from both ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, it’s been a terrifying road to the front of the parade.
He fled Syria in 2012 after enduring years of oppression — both by the government and his own family.
“I was escaping for my life,” he tells The Post.
Nahas was raised with two brothers and four sisters in the northwestern town of Idlib, an area now controlled by al Qaeda. Around age 8, he started to realize that he was different than many of his peers in Syria, where homosexuality was outlawed in 1949.
“I just knew that I liked looking at boys, but I kept it to myself,” says the soft-spoken Nahas. “You grow up pretending to be someone, but behind closed doors you’re completely someone else.”
That changed at age 15, when a therapist who was treating Nahas for depression outed him to his parents. They started obsessively monitoring his activity, and his father was abusive. Nahas still bears a scar, slightly visible under beard stubble, from an attack in which his dad slammed his chin into a kitchen counter during an argument.
Living openly in Syria would never be an option, but since the civil war erupted in 2011 it’s become increasingly dangerous, with much of the country controlled by al Qaeda and ISIS. In recent years photos and videos have emerged of gay men being thrown to their deaths from rooftops by ISIS jihadists — or stoned to death by cheering onlookers if they somehow survive the fall.
Nahas thinks the crowds are worse than the militants. “The cold faces you see — the people helping to do this, cheering for killing gay people? I can’t imagine I was actually living among them.”
In 2012, Nahas feared for his life when regime soldiers pulled him and other passengers off a bus at a roadside checkpoint. He was taken to a nearby detention facility, where he was isolated from the others and taunted with anti-gay epithets.
“They immediately noticed that I walked differently, that I talked to them differently,” he says. “I was really scared.”
After a couple of hours he was released with no explanation. He hadn’t been physically harmed, but Nahas decided he had to get out of the country.
Three months later, a gay friend who had successfully fled Syria for Lebanon helped him do the same. Nahas told his parents he was leaving for a job and fled the country with just a backpack full of clothes and $300 in his pocket.
He stayed in Lebanon for six months, working as a humanitarian activist. Then he went to Turkey where the economy was better and they were more welcoming to gays.
But Nahas was still in danger. Through a friend back in Syria he learned that a childhood classmate had joined ISIS and threatened Nahas’ life. “He will find a way to kill you,” the friend warned.
Fearing for his life, he stopped going out alone in public.
“I did not suspect that somebody would come and kill me in a grocery store — but it felt so scary because it
might happen,” he says. In 2014, he applied for refugee status in the US, and in June 2015, he touched down safely in California. The relief he felt was immediate.
“I felt like I owned my life again,” says Nahas. “I can be who I want to be without fear.”
He now lives in San Francisco, working for a language-translation company while also pursuing his
“shadow career” of helping refugees. He also has something that was never an option in Syria: A boyfriend, of nine months.
Last August, he was even asked to address the United Nations Security Council about the plight of gay refugees. “My experience is a mirror of the horrible things that are happening over there — and mine is nothing compared to other people’s experiences,” he says.
He’s had little contact with his family, most of whom remain in Syria. He last spoke with his mom a few months ago, and he hasn’t been in contact with his dad in years.
“I don’t ask to talk to him at all because I know it would be very uncomfortable,” he says.
Nahas, who describes himself as non-Muslim but won’t talk about his religious beliefs out of fear for his family’s safety, has no plans to ever return to Syria.
But he hopes that by speaking out on American soil he will offer hope to gay men and women who remain back home.
“I’m doing this for the people who are still there,” he says. “I want people in the Middle East to understand that there’s a big community out there to stand with them. They’re not alone.”
I can be who fear. I want to be without — Subhi Nahas on his new life in the United States
He could hav been me.
On May 22, in the eastern Syrian province of Dier ez-Zor, 15-year-old Jamal Nassir al-Oujan was apprehended by militants of the Islamic State for the “crime” of being gay. He was given a short trial, summarily found guilty and sentenced to death by stoning. According to an anonymous eyewitness account gathered by a local news agency, members of the public were ordered to participate in the brutal killing.
When I was a 15-year-old gay kid struggling to come out of the closet, the worst fate I could have ever imagined was being rejected by those who loved me. Fortunately, that never happened. But never in my worst nightmares did I consider the prospect that I would be stoned to death in public.
Yet that is the fate awaiting gays living under ISIS’s sadist rule. And as this month’s deadly shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, committed by American-born Omar Mateen who pledged fealty to ISIS, shows, the terror group’s murderous homophobia now has American gays in its target sights.
From the very beginnings of its rule in parts of Syria and Iraq two years ago, ISIS has claimed Koranic injunction for its war on homosexuality. A “penal code” released by the group in December 2014 lists death as the penalty for samesex relations.
Horrifying, yes. But what most strikes me most about ISIS’s brutality is its unabashed openness. Not even the Nazis were so candid about their evil. As World War II drew to an end with the advance of the Soviet Red Army and Germany’s defeat in sight, guards at Auschwitz and other concentration camps went about destroying the evidence of their crimes. Across Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, slave laborers were ordered to dig up the corpses of murdered Jews from mass graves and construct giant pyres with alternating layers of bodies and wood, the remains going up in flames.
After the war, when the full enormity of what the Nazis had done was becoming known to the world, surviving members of the Third Reich did not defend their actions on principle. Instead, they entered the infamous “superior orders” plea, arguing that they were but cogs in a long, complex chain of command, just following the instructions of their superiors.
Say what you will about ISIS — there is none of this sort of weaselly obfuscation when it comes to its barbarism. ISIS is without question one of the most brutally violent movements in the world today, targeting not just gays, but anyone they randomly label an infidel. And it wants everyone — future generations included — to know it.
An atrocity last month may rank as its most repulsive, though that is an admittedly subjective claim. It all depends upon how you rank the varying prospects of being buried alive, thrown off a building or dipped into a vat of nitric acid.
In May, a source in the Iraqi city of Mosul (captured by ISIS two years ago), claimed that, after seizing a group of accused spies, group members executed them via the latter method. “ISIS members tied each person with a rope and lowered him in the tub, which contains nitric acid, till the victims’ organs dissolve,” reads a report from Iraq News. Nitric acid is normally used in the processes of photo engraving and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. One can scarcely imagine what effect it has upon contact with the human body.
Days before, the terror group seemed to have reached the depths of depravity when it executed a 7-year-old boy, Muaz Hassan, for the crime of “cursing divinity” while playing a game of pick-up soccer in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital. Believed to be the youngest victim of ISIS’s long reign of terror, Hassan was shot by firing squad before a crowd of hundreds of people. His parents reportedly “collapsed in grief.”
It’s a testament to how inured we have become to the region’s atrocities that such pitiless acts of inhumanity no longer register upon our consciences. A few dozen Christians beheaded on a beach in Egypt, a Jordanian pilot burned alive in a cage, a gay man tossed from the rooftop of a high building and then — visibly still alive — stoned to death by an angry mob below, a Syrian Arab Army officer run over by a tank. Can any one of us who have paid even the most remote attention to world news honestly claim to be shocked anymore by such headlines? Perversely, we seem to expect them.
What connects all of these murders, aside from their obvious moral degeneracy, is the very public way in which they have been advertised to the world. Beginning with the beheading of American journalist James Foley in the summer of 2014, when ISIS first began to garner worldwide attention, the organization has made a point of broadcasting its crimes to the world in slickly produced, social-media-friendly videos and other forms of mass entertainment. Unlike the Nazis, who tried to carry out their crimes in secret and then cover them up after it became clear the Reich would fail, ISIS has no such shame or concern for its reputation.
On the contrary, spreading the news of ISIS horror forms a crucial component of the group’s strategy. Advertising its nascent state as a sort of real-world, Islamist version of “Grand Theft Auto 5,” where the only law is Sharia and devout young men can have their way with all manner of Shiite apostates, Yazidi sex slaves and Western aid workers, ISIS has created a paradoxical land of utmost religious virtue and hedonistic carnage. The Islamic State is a place where the most violence-importuning verses of the Koran meet “A Clockwork Orange.” Boasting of its conquests in online videos and its own jihadist magazine, Dabiq, ISIS gains recruits through the allure of sacred virtue and ruthless machismo. According to Shiraz Maher, an expert on Sunni jihadism at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College London, “brainwashed” is too forgiving a term to describe the young Muslims from Western countries
who up and leave their comfortable Western lifestyles to brave the deserts of northern Syria and Iraq. “They know only too well exactly what they are doing,” he writes. “They have consciously decided to immerse themselves in a blood-soaked narrative of vengeance and power, in which they will annihilate their enemies, destroy Western values and ensure the triumph of their perverted, totalitarian version of Islam.”
Other Islamist terror organizations like al Qaeda and the Taliban have been similarly bold in their rejection of human rights and civilized norms. In March 2011, the Taliban very publicly dynamited the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. The magnificent, 4th century statues carved into cliffs were “idols” worthy of destruction, according to then-Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
Neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda, however, boasts the technological savvy of ISIS. Broadcasting savagery does more than attract recruits; it also inspires fear into the enemy. “Shooting their victims in the back of the head is too clinical, too swift,” writes Maher, “The message of terror must be spread by more gruesome killings.”
Two weeks before the fall of Mosul, ISIS distributed a video entitled “Clanging of the Swords.” In addition to the usual pornographic violence, it also featured terrifying images of men digging their own graves. By constantly bombarding its enemies with a triumphalist narrative of inexorable conquest, ISIS not only reassures a continuous stream of fighters from across the world that it is on the path to victory against the infidels, it convinces adversaries to lay down their arms and retreat.
The Obama administration seems to believe that by refusing to acknowledge the Islamic component of the Islamic State, it will beat ISIS at its own game. Earlier this week, the Justice Department initially redacted all mentions of ISIS from the transcript of Mateen’s 911 phone call, in which he swore his allegiance to the terror group and repeatedly insisted that he was committing his crime in the name of Islam.
In a way, it’s understandable that Obama wants to deny ISIS the publicity it so obviously craves, particularly when the terrorist in question had no known contact with the organization prior to his killing spree. But we are long past the point of being able to censor ISIS or minimize its baleful media impact. If enlisting moderate Muslims in the war against Islamic extremism is to be successful, surely the case must be made to them that this is a problem they need to confront within their own communities.