While most Canadians, according to a Stats Canada report released in December 2011, feel safe from crime even as the Harper government pushes ahead with its omnibus bill cracking down on crime, the devil, as they say, is in the details.
Based on data collected since 2009, ninety-three percent of Canadians surveyed were satisfied with their level of personal safety. The figure reflected information gathered in 2004 when ninety-four percent reported a general satisfaction with their safety.
The latest data is based on random surveys of approximately 19,500 individuals across Canada.
Ironically, at the same time the report was released, there was an article posted by PostMedia News of an Iranian gay immigrant who was attacked, beaten, and had his throat slashed in what is believed to be a homophobic attack in Toronto.
The young man, named as only Mojtaba, aged 29, is quoted as saying he was taunted about his sexual orientation during the attack, carried out by someone he recognized from one of his classes at Seneca College in Toronto. Mojtaba was waiting for a friend at 11:30 in the morning when his attacker started looking at him "suspiciously."
"He said, What are you looking at?" Mojtaba is quoted as saying. "I said, Nothing." A few moments later, the individual reappeared accompanied by a young woman believed to be his girlfriend.
"He was whispering something to her and when he was walking near me, I said, What’s wrong?" The other man, later identified as Daniel De Silva aged 21, then launched into a physical assault, assisted by the young woman who held Mojtaba down as De Silva kicked and beat Mojtaba. A group of other students stood nearby videotaping the assault but not intervening. Mojtaba was able to break free after an individual finally did intervene and reported the assault to his program coordinator who noticed the cut on Mojtaba’s throat, the apparent result of being slashed with a sharp pencil.
"I’m afraid now," Mojtaba told reporters. "I come to Canada, a country that carries the name of human rights, and you see something like this happen at a college...I came here to be free....Where can I go now?" he said.
Mojtaba came to Canada in 2009, he said, to escape the persecution, violence and torture of gay men and lesbians in Iran.
Iran is a fundamentalist Islamist theocratic nation. The regime under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a repressive one for Iranians, but deadly for gay Iranians. In July 2005 two gay Iranian teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari, aged 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, aged 18, were arrested for ‘acts against humanity’, tried, and condemned to death by public hanging. The images of these two boys on the scaffold and swinging at the end of the rope were posted all over the Internet, setting off a firestorm of controversy and condemnation of Sharia law, under which the Iranian penal code operates. They weren’t the only ones. Payam Amini, aged 21, was also publicly executed for sodomy. Other gay Iranians are routinely rounded up, flogged, tortured, and imprisoned.
According to The Boroumand Foundation, an Iranian human rights group, there are records of at least 107 executions with charges related to homosexuality between 1979 and 1990. Amnesty International reports at least 5 people convicted of "homosexual tendencies", three men and two women, were executed in January 1990, as a result of the Iranian government’s policy of calling for the execution of those who practice homosexuality. In April 1992, Dr. Ali Mozafarian, a Sunni Muslim leader in Southern Iran, was executed after being convicted on charges of espionage, adultery, and sodomy. Various human rights organizations and activists claim between 4,000 and 6,000 gay men and lesbians have been executed in Iran since 1979 when the current Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah.
According to Iranian law, gay sex in any form is punishable by death. Violators are reportedly given a choice of four methods of execution: hanging, stoning, halving by sword or being dropped from the highest perch. Hanging is, apparently, seen as the most humane.
Tracking the number of individuals executed for being gay or lesbian in Iran is problematic. Technically, individuals are not executed simply for being gay or lesbian. The death penalty is reserved, ostensibly, for cases of drug trafficking, murder, and rape. Those gay men, such as Asgari and Marhoni, who are executed often have additional charges, usually false but accepted by the court, of non-consensual sex, and most often the charge is of the rape of young boys, further fueling the outrage against homosexuals.
All sexual relations that occur outside a traditional, heterosexual marriage (i.e. sodomy or adultery) are illegal and no legal distinction is made between consensual or non-consensual sodomy. Homosexual relations that occur between consenting adults in private carry a maximum punishment of death. Homosexual rape is a capital crime. The death penalty is legal for those above 18, and if a murder was committed, legal at the age of 15.
In the case of minors charged with sodomy or other forms of gay sex, the death penalty is not supposed to apply and the punishment is "only" the lash. However, both Asgari, a minor, and Marhoni, a minor at the time of his arrest, were listed as being 19 years old in the court transcripts.
To further illustrate the bizarre universe which Iran and its leaders occupy, President Ahmadinejad, after being invited to speak to students at Columbia University, responded to questions posed to him by students regarding the execution of gay Iranians by discussing drug smugglers instead. When pushed by moderator and Acting Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, John Coatsworth, Ahmadinejad stated: "In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you we have that."
However, in what was seen by many as a "progressive" move, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini issued a fatwa (religious decree) two decades ago declaring gender reassignment surgeries for "diagnosed transsexuals" to be acceptable under Sharia law and to be paid for by the government. The fatwa has placed Iran’s gay men and lesbians between a rock and a hard place; face execution for being gay/lesbian or undergo forced gender reassignment and be now seen, technically and legally at any rate, as heterosexual. Not much of a choice.
For a culture steeped in machismo, where ‘to be a man’ is all important (which is one of the reasons male homosexuality is so despised; it is seen as some sort of abdication, even rejection, of one’s manhood, no matter how masculine an individual gay man may be), being forced to undergo castration and being designated a female, the choice between that and death might make death the more attractive option.
The cult of machismo is endemic to the Middle and Near East and throughout the Mediterranean. Yes, it far too often, in fact almost always, leads to misogyny, sexism, the diminishing of women, even violence towards women who cannot or will not conform to the expectations placed upon them by male relatives ("honour killings" being one of the most notorious outcomes) but it is about men taking pride in being men, and all that entails. To then literally and figuratively remove that from an individual steeped in that mindset, that culture, whether he is gay or not, is horrific. So, of course, is the hanging, stoning, or halving of someone because he or she is gay. How could one choose which fate to embrace? One is an immediate (one hopes) death and the other a form of living death. It’s barbaric. Medieval. Twisted. It’s like something out of some post-Apocalyptic scenario, some science fiction fantasy of an alternate world devoid of humanity and compassion.
In the case of Mojtaba, the Seneca College student attacked for being gay, these horrors are ingrained into his psyche. In 2007, the then-25 year old was arrested, detained and tortured for attending a gay party.
"There was about 15 of us [at the party]," Mojtaba said. "To scare us, the police would pick a man from the group and bring him to the bathroom and he [would] never come back. Some of those from the party, I don’t know what happened to them," he said. "There is no mercy. I’ve known people who have been executed."
Mojtaba was luckier than most; he was released. He immediately boarded a train in his hometown of Shiraz, the site of some of the executions, and escaped to Turkey, a secular Muslim state, to seek asylum. A year later, he emigrated to Canada with the assistance of the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, a non-governmental non-profit organization that helps Iranian LGBTQ individuals gain asylum in the West. He is now a permanent resident, safer here than in his homeland, but apparently not safe enough.