No Gays In Iran

International News, By danny corvini, 25th September, 2007

Amid much controversy surrounding his presence in New York, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a guest speaker at the Columbia University on Monday.

He was introduced by the university dean Lee Bollinger who described him as a “petty and cruel dictator” who must be “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated” to continue to question the Holocaust, which saw the death of six million Jews in Europe last century.

The Iranian president, who rightly or wrongly is labelled a sponsor of terrorism by US president George W. Bush, spoke of Iran’s right to develop nuclear power for its energy needs and warned that the American threat of a possible war is illegal and without foundation.

The audience cheered Ahmadinejad when he talked of democracy for Palestine and jeered him at other times, most notably when he declared that: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals.” He described the presence of a visual queer community in the west as a “phenomenon”, and said “I don’t know who has told you we have it (in Iran).”

Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and when gays are outed or found out they are punished with death. The Iranian president’s absurd claims are in line with the denial of homosexuality displayed by some Iranian religious clerics and politicians.

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