Suhail Kewan, writing in Al Quds al Arabi, is right to criticize the way Israel uses gay rights issues to whitewash its crimes against the Palestinians. It's important to point out that the fact gays in Israel have civil rights they don't have in other Arab countries or in the Palestinian areas does not mean that Israel is not illegally occupying Palestinian land and is responsible for Palestinian displacement and loss.
However, Kewan doesn't do a good job making his point. For two reasons:
To say that homosexuals exist in Palestinian society (as he puts it "every village has one or more") does not prove anything in this discussion because it's not about weather they exist or not but weather they have rights or not.
The language he uses to talk about homosexuals proves that they are held in contempt: the two proverbs he shows off with, especially the one that closes the essay about how Arabs (He means Arab men), who let others humiliate them, are the homosexuals of this world, only expose his own homophobia and ignorance.
1 comment:
Amal, you mean whether, not weather.
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