More Shit from Iraq

From TomPaine.Com:

For the very first time, an official United Nations human rights report released last week has confirmed the “violent campaigns” against Iraqi gays and the “assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq.”

“Attacks on homosexuals and intolerance of homosexual practices have long existed, yet they have escalated in the past year,” says the latest bi-monthly Human Rights Report of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), released on January 16. “Islamic groups and militias have been known to be particularly hostile towards homosexuals, frequently and openly engaging in violent campaigns against them. There have been a number of assassinations of homosexuals in Iraq,” the report says.

Including a section entitled “Sexual Orientation” for the first time, the 30-page report goes on to say that the UNAMI Human Rights Office “was also alerted to the existence of religious courts, supervised by clerics, where alleged homosexuals would be ‘tried,’ ‘sentenced’ to death, and then executed.”

The report, along with the Iraqi LGBT website, states the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has issued a fatwa calling for the killing of gays and lesbians in "The worst, most severe way possible" in Iraq [update: In May 2006 he retracted the fatwa calling for murder, but kept the fatwa calling for "the punishment of lesbianism." And yet wikipedia can still state that Muqtada al-Sadr, who is 42 years Sistani's junior and the head of an independent militia known as the Mahdi army, has risen to prominence in the course of 2004 and his military activities have undermined the peaceful teachings of Sistani].