Ahmadinejad "misquoted" over gays in Iran
10.10.07
Taken from YnetNews
Iran's president was
misrepresented by Western media when he was quoted saying there were no gays
in Iran, and actually meant there were not so many as in the United States,
a presidential aide said on Wednesday. Addressing
New York's Columbia University last month, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad replied to a question about gays in the Islamic
Republic saying: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country." Speaking
through a translator, he also said: "In
Iran we don't have this phenomenon." The remarks
drew widespread criticism in the West.
Homosexuality is punishable by death in the Islamic Republic.
"What Ahmadinejad said was not a political answer. He said that, compared to American society, we don't have many homosexuals," presidential media adviser Mohammad Kalhor said.
Kalhor told Reuters that because
of historical, religious, and cultural differences homosexuality was less
common in Iran and the Islamic world than in the West. New
York-based Human Rights Watch said in May the last person known "with
reasonable certainty" to have been sentenced to execution in Iran for
consensual homosexual conduct was in 2005. But it did not know if the
sentence had been carried out.
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