Stories from the Territories

Mahmoud Zahar - Hamas Foreign Minister

“Are these the laws for which the Palestinian street is waiting? For us to give rights to homosexuals and to lesbians, a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick?”

Rami - 23 yearl old Gaza Refugee living in Tel Aviv

“When I was 11, I remember Fatah and other militant groups dragging people suspected of being gay out of their homes. They would break their legs and other bones and some were executed in public. Then the police would write on a wall the reason for the beating or killing as being against the morality of Islam.”

“Tel Elawa is the famous jail in Gaza up on a hill. There were many cells where people were tortured. Some rooms were pitch black, full of rats and cockroaches where you would be just left. Other people were given electric shocks; some had their heads tied into a sack full of shit.”

“You would be forced to sit on a glass bottle then kicked around until it broke inside you.”

Freikh Abu Meday - Minister of Justice for the PA

“We do not have a problem with this subject as there are no homosexuals living in the Palestinian Authority.”

Joseph Massad - AP of Modern Arab Politics & Intellectual History at Columbia University

"The Gay International whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist."

"Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community."

"For the Gay International, transforming sexual practices into identities through the universalizing of gayness and gaining 'rights' for those who identify (or more precisely, are identified by the Gay International) with it becomes the mark of an ascending civilization, just as repressing those rights and restricting the circulation of gayness is a mark of backwardness and barbarism,"