Navonim - The Ramblings of Garnel Ironheart

Navonim - The Ramblings of Garnel Ironheart
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Monday 29 June 2009

Abominable Hypocrisy

Once upon a time, the homosexual lifestyle was "the love that dares not speak its name". Today it seems to have become "the annoyance that just won't shut up". Like most other ethnic/cultural groups, it has become obsessed with showing itself in public society. Hence the annual "pride" parades in major cities around the world, including Israel.
The hypocrisy of the movement, however, is obvious to those who are paying attention. Every year there is a to'evah parade in Yerushalayim and, protestations to the contrary, the main point of holding it there is not to demonstrate so-called pride but to offend the traditional and religious citizens of the city by shoving this so-called lifestyle in their face. Fine, it's a free country. They get to parade, others get to protest, and life goes on.
But think about it. When parade organizers are looking for cities to celebrate in, they're actually quite circumspect about where they want to go. They will show up in Yerushalayim or in front of the Vatican with great enthusiasm, but it's a sure bet that they've never called to make scheduling inquiries of the mayors of Mecca, Medina, Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran or Islamabad. It's obvious why, of course. The survival rate of such a parade would be pretty much 0% once the locals got finished with them. Fine, they're not free countries. They don't get to parade there.
So why is it that when it comes time to choose political protest topics for the parade that it's the one country in the MiddleEast that gets targeted? What does this say about the real motives and political leanings of some of the movement's leadership?
Yes, yes, it's an Arab gay who was leading the protest but even he comes off as clueless:
Her announcement came with a warning to grand marshall El-Farouk Khaki not to use his ceremonial position as a pulpit to promote an anti-Israeli boycott.
Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, today called for disciplinary action against Mr. Khaki, a founder of the national support group Salaam: Queer Muslim Community, because he spoke to a QuAIA event on the weekend.
A flier for the event said “Israel has now begun to frame itself as a tolerant, queer-positive democracy. This can never be reality under Occupation.”
Mr. Dimant said Mr. Khaki’s presence -- he made opening remarks and welcomed the main speakers -- “has already contravened Pride Toronto’s stated policy.”...

QuAIA’s most prominent member, film-maker and York University professor John Greyson, said he wonders whether today’s decision signals that social justice activism is being “wholeheartedly cut out of Pride.”
“To take activism out of Pride really takes it back to a place of shame,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a Pride where I wasn’t part of an explicitly political action, and we were trying to be as militant as possible... The whole purpose of Pride was about visibillity and fighting for our equal space in society, so for them to start saying ‘Oh, but you don’t have equal space’ just turns back the clock in an extraordinary way, and is really unacceptable.”

Greyson's statements sound like that of a spoiled child who has been told he can only watch television for five hours a day instead of six. Yes, we'll talk over the downtown core of a major city, fill it with hundreds of thousands of people and have a day long celebration. But if his banner can't go up, well it's just like in the old days when people were hounding and killing us, isn't it?
But El-Farouk Khaki (a nice colour for pants and another word for excrement, I'm just saying...) is particuarily odious. He's worried about the Occupation? The last time I looked, being gay was a capital offence in the so-called Palestinian Authority. In fact, it's only in those areas controlled militarily by Israel that gay Arabs have some modicum of safety and if they want to openly express their lifestyle, it's to Israel that they have to go. Yet he wants to make an anti-Israel protest at the parade?
This is the face of hatred. Look well at it.

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