Friday, September 28, 2007

Don't like gay people? Move to Iran!

They don't have any there, according to their president. Actually, the Qu'ran says that you must execute people who perform homosexual acts if it is observed by two witnesses. Or, it's confessed. So unless the President has inspected all the closets in his country, I don't know how he knows.

3 comments:

Blue Devil Knight said...

What does the Hebrew Bible say about homosexuality? Is there anything clear about the punishment due for guy-on-guy action or gal-on-gal lovin'?

Anonymous said...

I doubt Ahmadinejad said Iran has no gays. From memory, that's not what the translator said. It was more along the lines of: "We don't have that kind of problem in Iran like you have in the West". This could mean simply that homosexual behavior is illegal in Iran, unlike in America (apart from Minneapolis airport, of course).

The constantly trotted out allegation about his statement that Israel must be "wiped off the map" also rests on dubious, or at least debatable, translation and interpretation.

America's support for the 1953 coup against Mossadegh, its support for the Shah, its support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, its support for the corrupt and highly undemocratic regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, its support for ethnic Arab terrorism in southwest Iran, its war of occupation in neighboring Iraq, its determination to build military bases right on Iran's western border, its positioning its warships in the Persian Gulf, and its huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, all make it unsurprising that the Iranian regime regards the US regime with suspicion.

Ahmadinejad got a larger percentage of the popular vote in Iran than Bush got in either of two presidential elections (in the first of which Bush lost the popular vote).

True, the system is rigged only to allow certain types of candidates a realistic chance of winning. And, er, the same is true in Iran. In Iran the clerical class has an effective veto. In the US the corporate class has it.

Victor Reppert said...

Yes, the Jewish law made homosexual activity a stoning offense (along with disrespecting one's parents), but I don't know of anyone trying to implement the Jewish law today, except the lunatic fringe Christian Reconstructionists.

I'd be inclined to agree that US policy has done little to make Iran our friend.