Silence of the Apathetic ?

OK,

Not been on for a couple of months. Reasons may or may not follow at a later date. But I am really pissed off at the moment.

Not about the nuclear power debate; personally think that our globally loved PM is just indulging in some good old wedge politics.

Not about Howard describing people campaigning for gay marriage as fundamentalists but about the total lack of reporting here in Australia (or almoost anywhere) of the anti-Gay fatwa and associated murders in Iraq.

If one does a google search on the terms [gay fatwa iraq] there is a global hit count of about 194k pages. Click on "pages from australia" and you get 829 hits; a lot of those aren't relevant to this issue. Click on "News" (reporting proudly from 4500 news feeds) and you see a grand total of forty six.

Yup.

There are 46 articles or press releases that have been picked up by the Google bots. A grand total of 20 are in sources that are not immediately identifiable as gay.

[Compare that with the 255 currently listed media articles on gay rights crack downs etc in Poland. No 14yo's hacked to death in front of their family by the police - "yet".]

Why haven't we seen any of this in the Fairfax or News Ltd press? Or even ABC Online?

For goodness sake if "The Conservative Voice" (a US christian and politically conservative publication) can put a humanist spin on it per Iraqi Cops Kill Teenager for Being Gay, then surely, the ABC or the SMH can run something?

OK - I accept that maybe this comparison aint helpful, but there was 1 case of a horrific gay murder in a "civilised" place (Laramie, Wyoming, USofA), yes I do mean the Matthew Shepard case, there was international hue and cry. Google lists over 600k pages with that name in it.

Yet in Bagdhad when the UN has acknowledged that gays and lesbians are being specifically targeted by members of the Iraqi security forces, the Coaltion forces are aware, but refuse to allow free passage into the Green Zone.

Bush and Howard still praise the "nation building" that is going on over there. Here in the West, glbtiq-etc are railing for the right to get married. Great for wedge politics, and may well have ensured that W got back in via Electoral College gerrymander all-or-nothing votes in a couple of swing states.

In Iraq, Iran, Burma, North Korea, Singapore, Poland, Moldova, the entire Carribean, we have fellow humans who are persecuted, arrested, beaten, murdered, executed for their perceived sexuality.

Yup - SFS you're right. "Apathetic" was the word I was looking for.