Posted on 05/23/2004 12:34:38 PM PDT by schaketo
PHOTOS OF TORTURED IRAQI PRISONERS BEING FORCED TO SIMULATE GAY SEX HAVE BROUGHT TO LIGHT THE FRIGHTENING CULTURE OF HOMOPHOBIA WITHIN THE US MILITARY, MYLES WEARRING REPORTS.
As a gay man and a person of Arab descent, Mubarak Dahir felt a double sting from the pictures he saw on the television news.
“Looking at the blurred-out photos of hooded Iraqi prisoners being forced to perform simulations of gay oral sex on one another, I had to wonder what it was that my fellow Americans in uniform who were directing the scene found the most despicable: the fact that the men were performing gay sex, or that they were Arabs,” he wrote on AlterNet.org.
No one can doubt the photos of naked Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison clearly display the US military’s deep-seated culture of homophobia.
Members of a military police brigade were photographed smiling or giving a thumbs up gesture as they forced naked Iraqi men to simulate oral or anal sex, masturbate, urinate on one another, or stay handcuffed to a bed with women’s underwear over their heads. Prisoners were also threatened with male rape and were taunted with anti-gay slurs.
“I think the first thing that has to be said is that the images are deplorable from a human rights perspective,” Steve Ralls, spokesperson for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, told GayCityNews.com. “It’s very disturbing that American troops thought that same-sex sexual acts could be used as a tool of humiliation. That is clearly a strong statement on how the US military views lesbian and gay people.”
A March report by Major General Antonio M. Taguba documented beatings of the prisoners, the rape of one man with a flashlight, and an assault on one prisoner with guard dogs. The Taguba report quoted a civilian contractor, Adel L. Nakhla, who worked in the prison and observed some of the abuse.
“They called them all kinds of names such as ‘gays’ … then they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by ensuring that the bottom guy’s penis will touch the guy-on-top’s butt,” Nakhla said.
Human rights activists agree that the culture of the US military, which has a policy of discriminating against gay men and lesbians under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, made the abuses possible.
“It’s a military that is operating under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, so it’s no mistake that soldiers around the world would be living with this view that this sort of humiliation is not only acceptable, but expected,” Paula L. Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, told GayCityNews.com.
Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the newspaper Southern Voice that “the events reflect the most base, paranoid, or extreme elements of military homophobia. There are many different layers to homophobia – gays and straights can’t trust one another, gays are rapists, homosexuality is a mental illness – but these instances of torture in Iraq represent the most extreme, fringe paranoid elements of homophobia, that to be gay is to be subhuman.”
Ummmm....okay - I guess the gay agenda is running out of steam - grasping at any kind of straw to get some attention.
Yeah...for some reason I just couldn't find all those dots. It is amazing the lengths "liberals" will go to perpetuate stereotypes and the idea of victimology.
Subhuman? No. Just a sexual perversion -- like pedophelia or bestiality.
Interesting article in that it raises front and center that most people find homosexual behavior offensive. Perhaps not new news but it kinds of brings those feelings out into the open and out of the closet (pardon the pun). Not good news for the homosexuals.
Guess that the humiliation wouldn't have anything to do with the Arab world's macho man sense of self, would it?
~ OR ~ "No one can doubt..." that the troops running the prisoners through their paces were homosexual themselves!
I havent even read most of this article, but the headline alone deserves a response:
In the fine print of the Abuse 'scandal' over-reporting was the notice that *most* of the pictures were taken on a single day, in a single cell-block and involved a small number of detainees.
They happened around Nov 8th last year.
The guards had decided to use this humiliation to punish some prisoners accused of RAPING A TEENAGED BOY ALSO IN THE PRISON! And also to punish some for starting a riot.
this was wrong, but making this men do this was perhaps the guards attempt to make a punishment that fit the crime.
Not homophobia but homosexuals getting their jollies. Pain, torture, mutilation are all part of homosexual practices.
"that to be gay is to be subhuman."
no --- to be gay is to be happy. To be homosexual is to be perverted.
Does every action committed have to be somehow an affront to the homosexual community?? I am wondering how they are going to turn the beheading of Berg into an attack on homosexuals? Any guesses?
A--ids
Y--et
?
"Pain, torture, mutilation are all part of homosexual practices."
Yes. One could consider the SA (brownshirts).
In the Arab/Muslim culture, a man can be sentenced to years in prison and thousands of lashes merely for wearing women's clothes. And they call the West homophobes. Unbelievable.
They misbehaved that way because they "fear the queer"?
"Not homophobia but homosexuals getting their jollies. Pain, torture, mutilation are all part of homosexual practices."
I think Rush insinuated that the pictures were homoerotica and nothing out of the ordinary--typical of what you'd see in the bathhouses in San Fran.
My thought is that there were homosexuals inside the military that couldn't be weeded out with the "don't tell" policy, and they just acted on their fantasies, IMHO.
Who said that? To engage in homosexual acts is to be sinful, not subhuman, but it must make this homosexual (Aaron Belkin) feel better about his own perversion to accuse non-homosexuals of this belief.
Homosexual Agenda Ping - I guess you could call this humor...
Can you figure out how "homophobia" caused the stupidity at Abu Ghraib???
I'd say it wasn't enough homophobia.
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
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