WarSclerotic

BRUTAL MURDER: Trans Rights Advocate Raped, Burned Alive, Counter Jihad, August 22, 2016

Hande Kader was 22 years old.  Kader made a living through what Buzzfeed gently refers to as “sex work,” but was not in any sense ashamed of it.  Rather, Kader was an outspoken advocate for transgender rights and regularly appeared in public to appeal for those rights.  On the 12th of August, Kader was raped and burned alive.

Turkey recently had a shadow report submitted for United Nations inquiry regarding the Turkish culture of violence targeting gays, lesbians, and transgender citizens.  Dozens of murders have targeted these communities.  Turkish politics have been swinging in the direction of Islamist parties in the same period, and since the purge following a coup attempt last month those moves towards political Islam will be strongly cemented.  Islamist parties generally call for strict enforcement of Islam’s sexual mores as codified in traditional understandings of sharia.

Yet the submitted United Nations report does not mention the word “Islam” even one time, nor the word “Sharia.”  For those who prefer to make the distinction between sharia and fiqh, which not all Islamists do, the word “fiqh” does not appear either.  The submitted report, which was compiled by a set of LGBT advocates, does mention that the Turkish military continues to use an old version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that codified homosexuality as a mental disorder.  They do not speculate on what would cause Turkish military psychologists to refuse to accept the revisions to the DSM, now generations old, that changed this understanding of homosexuality.  Even if you think the connection between codified religious law and a refusal to move off the old DSM is not obvious, surely it is a question that deserves to be asked.  Yet even these LGBT organizations refuse to ask the question.

A similar but far lighter story played out this weekend in the United States.  There lesbian newscaster Sally Kohn denied the connection between sharia and violence against her community.  A satirical petition began to get her to spend a week without guards in a sharia-compliant city:

A lot of right-wing nazi bigots are saying Sally Kohn is an idiot for showing support for Sharia Law, especially considering that she is a gay woman. As progressives, we know both Sharia Law and Muslims are tolerant and very LGBTQ friendly.

In order to show how LGBTQ friendly the Sharia, and it’s practitioners, are, Sally Kohn should spend a week’s holiday proudly displaying her homosexuality in Raqqa/Riyadh or any other place where Sharia is the law of the land, without guards of course, to show how safe, and how pro LGBTQ these practitioners of Sharia Law are.

Kohn’s response to this petition was instructive.  She said that she opposes what she characterized as “authoritarian right wing extremism” in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.  However, she said, there were at least two non-Muslim nations on the list of nations in which homosexuality is punished by death.  Likewise, there were several Muslim majority nations in which homosexuality is not punished by death.  (Sometimes, she did not mention, it is merely punished with prison.)  Thus, she denied any necessary connection between sharia and violence against LGBT citizens.

Rather, she would like to try to paint this as an issue of a broad political left versus a broad political right — broad enough that it is somehow sensible to speak of “authoritarian right wing extremism” in Iran and Saudi Arabia as being like right wing politics anywhere else.

Perhaps Kohn should investigate her assumption here by checking with Hillary Clinton, whom Kohn has endorsedin the Presidential election.  Yet according to a report by Paul Sperry, Clinton’s liberal attitudes on sexual rights turn out to be constrained — just when she’s speaking to audiences in places like Saudi Arabia.

[I]n 2010, Huma Abedin arranged for then-Secretary of State Clinton to speak alongside Abedin’s hijab-wearing mother at an all-girls college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to a transcript of the speech, Clinton said Americans have to do a better job of getting past “the stereotypes and the mischaracterizations” of the oppressed Saudi woman. She also assured the audience of burqa-clad girls that not all American girls go “around in a bikini bathing suit.”

At no point in her long visit there, which included a question-and-answer session, did this so-called champion of women’s rights protest the human rights violations Saudi women suffer under the Shariah laws that Abedin’s mother actively promotes. Nothing about the laws barring women from driving or traveling anywhere without male “guardians.”

What does Hillary Clinton know that Kohn does not, that causes Clinton to agree that bikinis are shameful and unworthy of female dignity when speaking to an Islamist audience?  What does she know that causes her to avoid raising these most obvious of issues, or to challenge sharia’s legitimate power to force the submission of women as well as LGBT citizens?  Clinton has no trouble challenging American “right wing extremists.”  Doesn’t that suggest that there’s an important difference here, one that explains both why the oppression is so much stronger in Islamist nations and also why even ordinarily outspoken liberals like Clinton are afraid to challenge it there?

One can understand the hesitance of the LGBT groups in Turkey to raise the issue, as they might be burned alive.  Kohn and Clinton have no such excuse.  If they are not going to provide aid and comfort to these LGBT groups in Turkey, who will?  Would Donald Trump?