Definitely a good idea.
>Here's my take on the matter, based on the findings of the Committee
>against Torture at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
>for Human Rights:
>"There Currently Is No Active Policy of Prosecution of Charges of
>Homosexuality in Iran":
UNCHR has noted a lot of things about Iran. E.g. treatment of women as "tyranny," which if one reads Monthly Review webzine (and the rather disapproving editor's note to another article that point by point shreds the claims of the first) doesn't exist. It is the same organization that deplores Iran's treatment of religious minorities like Jews (and others), has criticized its judicial system, and so on.
On Iran's supposed treatment of "gay" prisoners.... UNCHR also notes that the majority of prisoners who have caught or spread infectious disease (like AIDS and hepatitis) have done so through shared needles rather than sex (not that that doesn't take palce).
So who do you believe? It takes us back to the fact-checking question..
Official sources often make pronouncements that don't reflect reality – surely we can agree on that – which can be challenged then forced to change by the testimony of witnesses and victims, etc.
How long did we know what was happening in Guantanamo before the UN said something? Fact check the Guantanamo story. Check with the people who control the facts and you will hear that it is a paradise. Of course we have to rely on what people who have been imprisoned there say.
At any rate, the underlying question in these series of posts, to me, doesn't seem to be specific human rights abuses, but whether or not those abuses will be used to bring about a war on Iran.
And I would just reiterate that Parsi is vehemently opposed to this issue being used that way. He accuses people who would do that of not really having the interest of Iranian gays at heart. There's more he has said on this that will appear in my next article.
As to the use of the Iraq's alleged homophobia as a rationale for war...I don't really remember hearing it at all. I remember people like Wolofowitz and Rice and Bush and Cheney going on about WMD, terrorist ties, both of which were known to be erroneous, and that Saddam was a dictator, not their main reason, but the only that was true. Nope Bush et al were never really big defenders of the gays. I don't doubt that some people used homophobia (erroneously of course) to rationalize that Iraq was bad, but I doubt very much that persuaded Congress to vote for war in October 2002, or that it was the issue that gave Bush just enough political momentum in March 2003 to ignore the majority of Americans who opposed rushing to war on the flimsy evidence he had offered up. (Situation for gays in Iraq has deteriorated tremendously since the occupation.)
I can't accept that we have to buy what really appears to be going here: that because the Bush administration says one thing the opposite must be the truth, and that is what the left has to pitch to the world. When communists did that about the USSR, not only were there not a lot of people who bought into it, but huge sections of the left used it to show how they were different kinds of socialists than the "Stalinists," and really the "Stalinists" were just foreign agents anyway (still hear that one pretty frequently). And some even advocated aligning with the capitalists to overthrow the Soviet-aligned states.
I'll give another example. PA just published an article severely critical of Slobodan Milosevic authored by a Bosnian (forner Yugoslavian) Communist Party leader. You can imagine the letters to the editor. Some opponents of the war against Yugoslavia and its subsequent dissolution apparently became so invested in holding Slobodan up as a great socialist hero they overlooked major problems with his leadership. My point is that why, in the process of opposing another war, do we have to swing the pendulum to far the other way. Isn't there a way to convince the millions of people who need to be convinced in order to stop a war that they should do so without trying to convince them of the perfections of the society that is being targeted?
Yes, you are right, fact-checking is a very good idea, and I am open to input.
All the best.
_________________________________________________________________ Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/