Gay Days in the Middle East

With all the news about Israel and Gaza, I thought I'd try to highlight a different side to all the fighting and show how religious extremists, both Jewish and Muslims, can at least agree on their contempt for gays, lesbians, and transexuals, even from their own communities ... especially from their own communities.

Saar Netanel, who features in the first part of this clip, is an openly gay member of Jerusalem's City Council (and someone I once knew socially). Here he is visiting the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Meah Shearim. An escape like that only happens in the movies, but you'd hardly expect it in a documentary.

I don't know Bodi, the Palestinian drag performer, and there is no footage of the Hamas sticking a gun in his mouth and threatening to kill him. I can only wonder if they realized how phallic that actually is. His performance, however, is ... well ... something else.

I am showing this to highlight one simple point. After all the fighting is over, and the fundamentalist Jews and Muslims finish killing each other, you can be sure that they will end up turning on their own people.



I could be trite and quote Bonhoeffer here about how first they came for this group and that, but instead I'll quote this lesser known poem by him:

A friend is a gift to a friend,
Not from the heavy soil where blood and
Race and oaths are mighty and holy,
Where the earth itself watches over the sacred,
Hallowed, and ancient ordinances,
And defends and avenges them,
Not from the heavy soil of the earth,
But from free choice and the free desire
Of the heart, which are not in need of
An oath or a law.

Take that, Rick Warren!