Saturday, August 22, 2015

Frank Bruni, "Gay and Marked for Death": No Mention of Iran



In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Gay and Marked for Death," Frank Bruni tell us of a special United Nations Security Council meeting on L.G.B.T. rights, but remarkably manages to make no mention of Iran. Bruni writes:

"Although Monday’s discussion isn’t a formal one that Security Council members are required to attend, it’s nonetheless the first time that the council has held a meeting of any kind that’s dedicated to the persecution of L.G.B.T. people, according to Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.

And it’s an example, she told me, of a determined push by the United States and other countries to integrate L.G.B.T. rights into all discussions of human rights by international bodies like the U.N.

. . . .

The Security Council meeting, which the United States is co-hosting with Chile, will focus on the Islamic State’s brutality against gays as a way of getting countries who might not be sensitive to the plight of gays, but who have profound concerns about the Islamic State, to pay attention."

The focus of the Security Council meeting will be on the Islamic State's brutality against gays? Question: Why is the Security Council also not focusing also on the barbaric conduct of the Islamic Republic of Iran? In an August 20, 2014 Front Page Magazine article entitled "An Execution Wave Against LGBT Iranians," Dr. Majid Rafizadeh observes:

"As the Obama administration continues to communicate and diplomatically negotiate with Iranian officials in Vienna, New York, and elsewhere, President Obama has not even slightly expressed his concern about the unfair actions, executions, discriminations and prosecutions of LGBT individuals, as well as the increasing repressions of women under the Rouhani administration. Where do the Islamic Republic’s human rights abuses belong on President Obama’s agenda?

Two weeks ago, two Iranian men, Abdulla Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, were executed in the southern part of the Islamic Republic for reasons that included 'consensual sodomy.' According to the Daily Beast, 'Their deaths are part of a wave of executions in Iran, with more than 400 in the first half of 2014 alone, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights.' One of the Iranian sources pointed out that Chahzanjiru and Chahzanjiri were executed in order to 'promote community safety' as well as to 'reduce the suffering of the victims.'"

Executions in Iran in 2015? As reported by Amnesty International:

"The Iranian authorities are believed to have executed an astonishing 694 people between 1 January and 15 July 2015, said Amnesty International today, in an unprecedented spike in executions in the country.

This is equivalent to executing more than three people per day. At this shocking pace, Iran is set to surpass the total number of executions in the country recorded by Amnesty International for the whole of last year.

'Iran’s staggering execution toll for the first half of this year paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale,' said Said Boumedouha, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme."

But there is no mention of Iranian savagery against gays by Bruni or Power. I wonder why . . .

No comments:

Post a Comment