Islamic Bigotry: The Slaughter of 4,000 Gays

From Robert Spencer's FrontPage Magazine article:

At Columbia University on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared: “We don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. We don’t have this phenomenon; I don’t know who’s told you we have it.”

If there were any truth to this – and there is none – it would be because because the Islamic regime in Iran had killed them, since homosexuality can be a capital crime in that country. One notorious case occurred on July 19, 2005, when two teenage boys, Mahmoud Asgari, 14, and Ayaz Marhoni, 16, were hanged in a particularly brutal manner in Iran for the crime of homosexual activity. Although Iranian officials insisted that the death sentence was for the rape of a third boy, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has said otherwise. But Asgari and Marhoni were not alone. According to the Iranian gay and lesbian rights group Homan, the Iranian government has put to death an estimated 4,000 homosexuals since 1980. According to Scott Long, director of the Human Rights Watch Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program, Iranians who are suspected of being gay commonly face torture. Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission said Iran gays live with “constant fear of execution and persecution and also social stigma associated with homosexuality.”

Islamic Bigotry: The Slaughter of 4,000 Gays