Iran regime theater director: Purge gays from Tehran district
A 2008 British WikiLeaks cable said Iran’s regime executed 4,000-6,000 gays and lesbians since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
By BENJAMIN WEINTHALA MAN WALKS on a Tehran street this week. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared this week that ‘from Sunday we can sell our weapons to whomever we want and buy weapons from whomever we want.’(photo credit: REUTERS)
A leading Iranian regime theater director Ghotbedin Sadeghi delivered a homophobic rant against Iran’s persecuted LGBTQ community in March, prompting outrage from activists over his anti-gay rhetoric.The news website IranWire reported on Wednesday that Sadeghi told Online Art that the neighborhood around Tehran City Theater was “very shameful,” adding it had “turned into a place for thugs, offenders, and homosexuals who do not observe the cultural sanctity of this place." Sadeghi continued that"the private area of the City Theater complex must be defined; shameful things are happening around this building."IranWire wrote that Sadeghi’s comments means that he called for the area “to be cordoned off.” Sadegh, who was born in 1952, earned his bachelor's degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran in 1975.A 2008 British WikiLeaks cable said Iran’s regime executed 4,000-6,000 gays and lesbians since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.IranWire reported artists and activists outside of the Islamic Republic condemned Sadeghi in a statement: "Ghotboddin Sadeghi's stance is a continuation of a policy that criminalizes the life of homosexuals, treats the bisexual society as sick and targets trans people with a call to stigmatize, marginalize and even eliminate this group from society.”In 1979, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, about his regime’s execution wave with respect to“ those who were executed and had nothing to do with the regime, the people who are still being shot today for adultery, or prostitution, or homosexuality. Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?”Khomeini responded that “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”
