Hillary Mann Leverett, apologist for murder

Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett are the voice of Iran in Washington — not the voice of the Iranian people, mind you, but the voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran — apologists for the repression, torture, and murder of the Iranian people by a tyrannical regime; as such, they are the very worst sort of self-appointed ‘experts.’

Before the violent suppression of the Green Movement by the Revolutionary Guards on the orders of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei after he stole the presidential election last year, the Leveretts were little more than an embarassment; but since the imprisonment, torture and murder of unarmed Iranian citizens by the Leveretts’ friends in power, the Leveretts are looking more like apologists for authoritarianism and murder.

Neither Flynt nor Hillary have any discernible credentials on Iranian affairs, other than their close friendship with the mullahs who run the country. True, both were once on the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State, but Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of State and once Flynt Leverett’s boss, has publicly questioned the origins of the fax that the Leveretts cite as evidence that the Iranian government was eager to reach a ‘grand bargain’ with the United States over nuclear proliferation. The provenance of the ‘Grand Bargain fax’ that the Leveretts tirelessly cite as conclusive evidence of the pacific intentions of the Iranian regime has been questioned even by the editor of Kayhan, an Iranian newspaper under the supervision of the Supreme Leader’s office, as Lee Smith points out (Grand Bargainers, Planet Iran.com, 2.24.10). “We are even a bit suspicious that the Swiss ambassador wrote that fax himself,” the newspaper’s editor has said. In other words, the central piece of evidence in the (very weak) case that the Leveretts make for a policy of engagement with Iran may well be a hoax, and the Leveretts themselves (who have close connections with the regime) may very well know that it’s a hoax.

Another senior policy maker from the same administration in which the Leveretts served, Richard Haass, has explicitly disavowed the Leveretts’ rosy view of the regime, writing in Newsweek in January 2010 that “we can no longer remain on the sidelines in the struggle for regime change in Iran.” Contrary to the Leveretts’ insistence that there is no evidence that the election was stolen, Haass (who has enormously more sense as well as experience in foreign policy than the two Leveretts put together) puts it quite simply: “The authorities overreached in their blatant manipulation of last June’s presidential election, and then made matters worse by brutally repressing those who protested.”

In stark contrast to the clear analysis of Richard Haass, the Leveretts offer clever non-statements that are impossible to call outright falsehoods, such as Hillary’s declaration that “It was eminently plausible that Ahmadinejad could win the election,” as Leverett stated in an interview with Charlie Rose on March 29. Such a statement is clever because it does not commit either Hillary or Flynt Leverett to an explicit assertion that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually won the presidential election last year, but nonetheless creates the impression that he did, though the Leveretts offer no evidence to support such assertions, other than referencing public opinion polls that they claim indicate popular support for Ahmadinejad both before and after the election at levels that ‘track’ with the vote tally announced by the government in the wake of the stolen election. But no credible public opinion survey can be conducted under an authoritarian regime when that same regime is imprisoning, torturing and executing those who dispute the poll results.

The nicest thing that one could say of them are that Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett are ‘influence peddlers,’ as Lee Smith of Planet Iran.com called them, trading on their connections with the regime in order to advance their own peculiar and entirely self-interested agenda. As Smith points out in “Grand Bargainers,” the ‘background dinners’ which the Leveretts present as a kind of salon,” help to generate business for an energy and consulting firm called Stratega, whose CEO happens to be Hillary Mann Leverett.” In other words, the Leveretts have a direct financial stake in the business they generate with U.S. and Western companies operating in Iran and which they promote through their public statements on the current state of affairs there — hardly a disinterested analysis of the politics of the Islamic Republic.

Flynt Leverett, shameless influence peddler

But the Leveretts are shameless in promoting an image of a benign regime with a smiling and popularly elected president as they take their talking points from press releases issued by the Iranian embassy in Washington and defend with as much gusto as they can the regime that has murdered its own people in a so far successful attempt to cling to power. The Leveretts’ key source of information about Iranian government and politics is apparently their co-author, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, “who has emerged as the Iranian government’s chief spokesperson in the English-language media,” as award-winning journalist Omid Memarian has pointed out. The reliance of the Leveretts on Marandi as a news source is no more credible than Judith Miller’s reliance on Scooter Libby — Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — as her primary news source for stories about the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, plastered on the front page of the New York Times as the Bush administration beat the drums for war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It is important for me as an openly transgendered woman of Asian birth to point out that the Islamic Republic of Iran has also executed gay teenagers for having engaged in consensual sex — acts of unjustified judicial murder that are not only profoundly immoral and that have prompted international condemnation, but which would seem to belie Ahmadinejad’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran. The problem is not merely the homophobic Ahmadinejad, of course; the power of the president is limited by that of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, who cannot be challenged in any election or removed by the judiciary or the people. Paradoxically, his predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, actually issued a fatwah approving of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) for transsexuals in Iran; but the logic behind it was not at all transgender-supportive; Khomeini issued the fatwah because he was persuaded that surgical procedures could be used to change gay men into heterosexual women. Obviously, the fatwah was based on a number of serious misconceptions about sexual orientation and gender identity, but even though SRS is officially sanctioned in Iran, the reality of the lives of transsexual and transgendered people remains bleak, as portrayed in the documentary “Be Like Others,” about transgender life in Iran, where the regime of the mullahs persecutes transgendered and gender-variant people despite the option of SRS available to at least some.

What is particularly shameful about the Leveretts is that they give a bad name to those who argue against the growing drumbeat of war against Iran; while it is absolutely clear to me that the regime is incapable of reform as long as Khamenei and his cohort are in power, I also oppose military action against Iran by the United States or by Israel, which would only strengthen the regime now in power in Tehran. But neither the government of the United States nor the government of any other state can make effective policy unless it is informed by an accurate and probing analysis of the situation in Iran, including a comprehensive documentation of the massive human rights abuses committed by the regime; the influence-peddling Leveretts, trading on their connections with the mullahs to make money off the misery and oppression of the Iranian people, can do nothing but misinform policy-making.

The post Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett: Shilling for Iran appeared first on Pauline Park.

Isfahan: Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

First North American LGBTQ Muslim Conference Held in New York
By Pauline Park
Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY)
3 June 1999

Think “Islam and homosexuality.” The mind immediately conjures up images of a gay man in Iran being stoned to death by an angry mob while an imam fulminates against the abomination of men who lie with men and women who lie with women. Such images capture part of the reality, but they also render invisible the lives of queer Muslims and the complexity of their struggle.

Certainly, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission have amply documented the horrendous record of human rights abuses against queer people in Muslim countries. Honan, the exiled Iranian gay rights group, has estimated that over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed — some stoned to death, others burned alive — since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan last year, scores of accused homosexuals have apparently been killed by having brick walls
collapse on them or by being thrown from tall buildings or mountaintops. But behind the veil of clichéd images of Islamic fundamentalism, a movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims is beginning to coalesce.

The Al-Fatiha Foundation convened the First North American Conference for LGBTQ Muslims and Friends, “Creating a Community,” here in New York Memorial Day weekend. Conference participants demonstrated the geographic and demographic diversity of the queer Muslim community, with blond-haired and blue-eyed European Americans mingling with olive-skinned Americans and Europeans of Arab and South Asian descent. Among the 60 or so attendees, there were practicing Muslims, including recent converts, non-observant individuals raised Muslim but alienated from their faith, as well as representatives of other faiths.

Al-Fatiha is an international organization founded in 1997 to provide a safe space for LGBTQ Muslims to share individual experiences and institutional resources, and help them reconcile their sexual orientation and/or gender identity with their faith. This last task is not made easy by passages in the Quran that seem to contain explicit proscriptions against homosexuality and cross-dressing. Interpreting such Quranic passages was the subject of a rather intense debate at the conference. Even Al-Fatiha’s founder, Faisal Alam, admits that he himself has not fully reconciled his sexuality and his faith.

“But when you face God and the Prophet on the day of judgment, the first question he’ll ask is not whether you are gay or how many sex partners you had, but did you believe in me?” Alam declared. “Male homosexuality in the Quran is conceptualized in heterosexual terms, and those Quranic proscriptions on homosexuality can be understood in the patriarchal context in which they were conceived,” Dr. Ghazala Anwar argued, “hence women and gay men have common cause in a feminist re-interpretation of Islam.”

Anwar was critical of the selective way in which fundamentalist governments had implemented traditional Islamic law. “Under sharia law, due process requires that four males witness anal penetration in order to make it subject to prosecution, which would make it practically impossible to prove,” Anwar said. “But in the contemporary Muslim world, people have forgotten about such provisions for due process.” Anwar also noted that the punishment of stoning someone to death was derived from sharia law and is not mentioned in the Quran itself. Anwar said that both Islamic fundamentalists and progressives were selective in quoting from the Quran on the subject of homosexuality and transgender, and that both had to develop a more rigorous methodology for interpreting scripture.

On a panel on interfaith perspectives on homosexuality, Will Berger, representing Dignity (the organization for LGBT Catholics), challenged literal interpretations of scripture. “Sometimes we just have to say that scripture is wrong,” he argued, citing the example of the Biblical justification of slavery. The panel found consensus on the need to recognize the full humanity of those in the religious Right opposed to LGBT equality. “Love well those who are your enemies right now, because in a few years, they will be your friends,” urged Dr. Louie Crew, who 25 years ago founded Integrity for lesbian and gay Episcopalians and described the progress the group has made since then. “A victory that diminishes your enemy is no victory.”

On a panel on the progressive interfaith movement, Surina Khan, a research analyst at Political Research Associates who studies authoritarian and racists movements in the U.S. said, “We need to be careful not to demonize the followers in [the religious right] movement, most of whom are sincere.” Khan suggested that the movement’s leaders were manipulating their followers.

A discussion on the merits of establishing a gay mosque sparked lively debate across a number of faiths represented. Donald Maher of the Spiritual Rainbow talked of the need to minister to lesbian and gay Catholics within the church, while Berger of Dignity and Rabbi Robert Young of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah spoke enthusiastically about the special energy that comes from having an LGBT-specific worship space. Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, described the work of the Jerusalem Open House, an LGBT community center that seeks to meet the needs of Muslim and Christian Arabs as well as Jews.

More informal and intimate discussion sessions also addressed the lives of queer Muslims in the US and abroad. In a women’s discussion group, for example, one young Pakistani-born lesbian told of how she was pursuing a master’s degree in part because she needed an excuse to avoid being married, and said only half in jest that she would probably end up with a Ph.D. A first-generation immigrant mother expressed the need for a Muslim P-FLAG because non-Muslim parents could not fully understand the religious and cultural context in which she was struggling to be supportive
of her transsexual daughter’s transition. A transgendered Irish Catholic convert to Islam told of his concern for his children should his involvement with a queer Muslim group become known in his small Muslim community in Florida. On a more hopeful note, an African American lesbian told of how she had found a progressive mosque in New Jersey in which she could be “out” even to the female imam.

In Arabic, Al-Fatiha means “the Opening,” and refers to the opening passage of the Quran; but the organization’s name may refer to a different kind of opening as well, expressing the hope that Al-Fatiha may begin to open the heart of Islam to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Muslims
everywhere.

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (interior)

For further information contact:
Al-Fatiha Foundation,
212.752.3188

Arab & Persian LBT Women & Friends Gathering
(718.596.0342, x35)

Gay & Lesbian Arab Society (GLAS)
http://www.leb.net/glas
Jerusalem Open House, 617.247.8420,
http://www.poboxes.com/gayj

South Asian Lesbian & Gay Association (SALGA)
212.358.5132

Al-Fatiha is an international organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims & their friends!

Al-Fatiha Foundation
Tel./Fax: (212) 752-3188
405 Park Avenue, Suite 1500
New York, NY 10022
http://www.al-fatiha.org

The post Al-Fatiha and the First North American LGBTQ Muslim Conference appeared first on Pauline Park.