Gays are law-abiding, better-educated than the norm, economically productive and tend to be less of a drain on the state, says Rod Liddle. They don’t stand a chance in this country
Should we afford Iranian homosexuals political asylum in this country, or send them back to be hanged in their home country? I suppose there is a certain, dwindling, lobby in Great Britain which would argue we could hang them here and then bill Iran for the cost. Surely not many people still cleave to such a view — although we ought to remember that within my lifetime homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain. This point is made frequently by lefties who wish to draw some sort of equivalence between the Muslim world and our own country — see, we persecuted the poofs too. Yes, we did, unforgiveably — but we didn’t actually hang them, or whip them. Or indeed, as they do in Iran and Saudi Arabia, whip them first and then hang them.
Two gay kids were hanged back in 2005 in Mashhad, having first been subjected to the requisite 228 lashes. They were 16 years old at the time of their ‘offence’, but this plea of mitigation cut no ice with the Iranians. The whole business has re-emerged with the case of Mehdi Kazemi, another gay Iranian teenager, whom the British government wishes to send back to Iran. Kazemi’s boyfriend was hanged there a couple of years back and he fears, reasonably enough, that the same fate awaits him. In the 29 years since Iran experienced its joyful and uplifting Islamic revolution and the overthrow of the Shah, an estimated 4,000 homosexuals have been put to death, inshallah.
The case of Mehdi Kazemi has been reported with a degree of sympathy by the liberal British media which, by and large, doesn’t like seeing people hanged.
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