Beege Wellborn:

WaPo realizes American conservatives are the reason Muslims have been throwing gays from rooftops

Dat me.

This is a watershed moment in American darkness.

Sorry, I meant "journalism."

The Washington Post has, perhaps, finally reached the nadir of the slimy depths they will willingly dredge to find some way to calumniate and malign American conservatives.

In a stunning piece of deductive reasoning, written by a Muslim WaPo reporter (and obvious scholar) who attended the American University in Beirut and still lives there, the paper boldly states that what we've thought of for hundreds of years as a general Muslim distaste for the alphabet soup sex lifestyle is? NOT culturally and religiously motivated.

Oh, no, no, no. How wrong we were.

This will be big news to many people.

Islamic hostility to LGBT-whatevers is entirely due to the fact that they are aping the hateful behavior of American conservatives.

For reals.

And there it is.

Not only are stupid American Muslims being trickerated by crafty Christian conservatives, but Muslims in Muslim countries are likewise being spun up by (checks notes) Ben Shapiro and Chaya Raichik, two Orthodox Jews.

So crafty. So.

BEIRUT -- When Turkish activists announced they would hold their annual Pride parade in Istanbul's main square last month, authorities put the city on lockdown. Subways and highways were closed. The square was cordoned off by police.

It had all been a ruse. With police distracted, LGBTQ people agreed to meet up in other parts of the city. It was still a celebration, if a more subdued one.

"The community is basically playing whack-a-mole at this point," said Talya Aydin, a trans woman who ran in Turkey's parliamentary elections this year. "And the community will win every time."

Turkey's president, Erdogan, is a fundamentalist, some would say jihad-curious, Muslim, and was so long before he ever began subscribing to the LibsofTikTok Twitter account and listening to The Boyscast.

Across the Middle East, LGBTQ communities face a growing crackdown, echoing efforts by prominent American conservatives to restrict the rights of gay and transgender people and erase their influence from society.

You're literally trying to erase Islam's long, well-known, and frequently bloodstained history of not being down with the Theater Club Kidz.

In the Jordanian capital of Amman, a movie screening with a gay male lead was canceled recently on orders from the governor. In Lebanon, a beer commercial that appeared to include a gender nonconforming person was met with widespread derision online, similar to the backlash faced by Bud Light in the United States after it partnered with a transgender TikTok star. "Just like BudLight...go woke, go broke!" read one comment on Twitter, now known as X.

So Lebanon was totally pro-gay until they saw Kid Rock shooting Bud Light cans?

This article from 2018 says otherwise.

Lebanon last year became the first Arab country to hold a gay pride week, though the opening event was canceled because of safety concerns after threats of violence.

In fairness, the Muslim making the threats had just read then-gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis' white paper, These Obese Drag Queens Are Stomping on My Last Nerve Here... It's Like They're Not Even Trying Anymore

Islamic scholars overwhelmingly teach that same-gender sex is a sin.

The Muslim holy book, the Koran, tells the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom - and sodomy in Arabic is known as "liwat," based on Lot's name.

Men having sex with each other should be punished, the Koran says, but it doesn't say how -- and it adds that they should be left alone if they repent.

Sometimes they repent on the descent from being thrown off the roof of a building.

According to ISIS' radical interpretation of Islam, gays should be thrown from a high building then stoned if they are not dead when they hit the ground. The group bases this gruesome punishment on one account in which the Prophet Muhammad reportedly said gays "should be thrown from tremendous height then stoned."

Well it's so hard to understand what he was really trying to say there. It's so confusing, all this poetry and metaphor. Who can say what Mohammad could have possibly meant when he said "Gays should be thrown from a tremendous height and then stoned"? I guess he meant "Trans women are women."

Back to the Washington Post:

Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have always stood out in the region on LGBTQ issues. All have queer scenes, all have hosted Pride parades or similar events. But in all three places, the community exists in a legal gray area -- neither criminalized nor protected by the law.

Not protected by the law, you say?

Was this before or after these Muslims heard of What Is a Woman?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, facing a tough election this year, targeted the LGBTQ community throughout his campaign. "Mr. Kemal, we know you are a supporter of LGBTQ," he said at a rally in the Black Sea city of Rize in May, a taunting reference to his opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. "We will never allow [LGBTQ people] to injure your family," he told his supporters.

Well, anyway, I'm sure Erdogan didn't use any kind of incendiary lanaguage likening homosexuality to a poison killing the body of society.

When confronted by a reporter over his divisive language, Erdogan responded: "The thing called LGBTQ is a poison, once introduced into the family institution."

There has been similar rhetoric from his political allies, including Istanbul governor Davut Gul, who justified banning this year's Pride march on the grounds that "no activity that threatens our family institution, which is the guarantee of our nation and state, is allowed."

For purposes of disclosure, I should note that Istabul governor Davut Gul is a frequent donor to the Ace of Spades site. He bought a t-shirt 18 years ago and once was a guest blogger when I was on vacation. He wrote to me once "I love the 'Slice Like a Hammer' joke. Why don't you do that any more? I always say that to the homosexuals I am braining with a hammer. I tell them, 'I am slicing you like a hammer here, do not make a maniac out of me, or I will kill you, pervert ghoul of hell. They never laugh. Some people just don't 'get' my sense of humor."

And Washington Post -- you're saying all of this anti-gay feeling from Erdogan and his allies is stoked up by conservatives in America in the last couple of years...?

CNN, 2017: Homophobia and Violence Grows Under Erdogan's Shadow.

Editor's note: This story contains homophobic language some readers might find offensive. The non-binary pronouns "they" and "them" have been used in the singular form to refer to individuals who do not identify as a specific gender. "LGBTI+" refers collectively to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex or another sexual minority.

Ankara, Turkey (CNN) -- It was a warm summer night in July 2015 and Kemal Ordek, a sex worker at the time, was waiting at home for the next client to arrive.

Two men, posing as customers, entered Ordek's apartment in Ankara. They beat Ordek -- whose gender is non-binary-- stole their phone and one raped them. At one point a third man, a relative of the other two, entered the apartment and demanded money.

The men dragged Ordek, 32, out into the street and towards a nearby cash machine. There, Ordek spotted a police car and ran to tell the officers what had happened. The attackers followed, telling the police they were "family men" who had been lured into Ordek's home. They denied doing anything wrong.

Ordek's version of events was dismissed by police on the spot, Ordek says. The officers threw Ordek and the men into their patrol car and drove to the police station. "Don't even dare make a criminal complaint. I'll chop off your head, we'll kill you," one attacker said, according to Ordek.

Police were threatening to behead gays who were reporting crimes -- several years before Jordan Peterson came to prominence.

Later that night, police released Ordek's attackers without explanation. Ankara police declined to comment by phone or text message, asking that CNN send its request by handwritten letter.

...

For the next year, Ordek says the attackers unleashed a campaign of intimidation against them. Ordek also claims that pressure was applied by police to drop the complaint.

Police arrested the attackers last November. They were ultimately convicted for their crimes and sentenced to seven and a half years each for looting. One of the attackers had faced 20 years in prison for aggravated sexual assault but his lawyer was able to get that charge dropped upon appeal.

While the case gained support from human rights organizations and attention from the national media, Ordek's family disowned them.

"My father told me, 'you better get killed instead of being raped because this is against our honor,'" Ordek said.

Ordek said that, when he told his son that, he was just quoting Megyn Kelly.

Although homosexuality has been legal in Turkey since 1923, Turkey has one of the worst records of human rights violations against LGBTI+ people in Europe, according to a 2016 report from the European Region of the International LGBTI Association.

...

LGBTI+ activists fear that the fight for justice will become even more difficult following Erdogan's referendum win in April which gives him sweeping new powers over the judiciary.

Remember, this article is from 2017. Before the Washington Post says that Erdogan began "mirroring" American conservatives.

Before Erdogan became Prime Minister in 2003, he garnered support by giving a voice to minority groups, including the LGBTI+ community, declaring in 2002, "homosexuals must also be given legal protection for their rights and freedoms." But two years later, Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) removed the phrase "sexual orientation" from a draft law, describing it as "unnecessary."

As Erdogan tightened his grip on power in the intervening years, activists say he and his government became more conservative, more Islamist and more homophobic.

In 2010, then former state minister for family affairs, Selma Aliye Kavaf told Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, "homosexuality is a biological disorder, a disease ... something that needs to be treated."

In 2013, Erdogan described homosexuality as a "sexual preference" that was incompatible with the "culture of Islam" in Turkey.

Remember that last declaration by Erdogan. It's about to become important. When the Washington Post tells me that that Muslims are just "mirroring" what they see American conservatives doing today, it sure seems like they must have their wires crossed. Because the most you can claim, as a "link," is that American conservatives are "mirroring" Muslims, not the other way around.
Back to the Washington Post:

Last month, Turkey's Radio and Television Supreme Council levied fines against streaming platforms including Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime for showing "homosexual relationships" that are "contrary to social and cultural values and the Turkish family structure."

As I just showed in that CNN article from 2017: That has been Erdogan's official position on homosexuality since 2013. But Erdogan's official policy from 2013 is "mirroring" what he sees American conservatives doing in 2022-2023, huh? He picked that up from the Joe Rogan podcast, huh?

Although the talking points about protecting the family echo those espoused by some right-wing politicians in the United States, there are other influences closer to home, specifically Russia.

And there's another influence even closer to home: It's called the Koran, Sally. Look it the fuck up.