Ahmed’s Story

Ahmed’s Story – A Cruel, Barbaric Death
Ali Hili

May 5, 2006


Ali Hili, of OutRage! and Iraqi LGBT UK, was told about the execution of Ahmed Khalil by gay friends in Baghdad. They knew Ahmed and his family, and have collected eye-witness accounts from Ahmed’s neighbours, which they have relayed to Mr Hili in London.

This is Mr Hili's story about the execution of Ahmed, based on firsthand accounts given by eye-witnesses and neighbours

Ahmed Khalil was a likeable, playful 14 year old boy, born in the southern Iraqi town of al-Ammara.

The eldest child, he came from an uneducated family who lived in great poverty.

After the 2003 US-led invasion, the Iraqi economy collapsed, causing widespread unemployment and the disintegration of social services.

With no income or welfare support in al-Ammara, Ahmed’s family moved to Baghdad a couple of years ago, after the fall of Sadaam Hussein.

His father wanted to find a job to support his wife, two sons and daughter. The family settled in al-Dura, a very poor southern district of Baghdad.

Ahmed’s father worked as a night watchman on a building site for the pitiful wage of 10 dollars a month, plus permission for him and his family to live on the site until the construction of the new houses was completed. They lived in the shell of the unfinished buildings. It was a life of desolation and destitution.

Ahmed was often bullied by the neighbourhood boys for being poor. He had no one to protect him.

It is unclear whether Ahmed was gay or not. He had sex with men, often in exchange for small amounts of money and food. He did this in order to help his family financially. Sometimes they were so desperate, he had sex for a few potatoes or some bread.

Ahmed’s 'gay’ reputation spread all over his neighbourhood, causing great scandal. His behaviour was reported to the police by informants in the community.

In early April 2006, Ahmed was found dead on the doorstep of his house. He had been shot, with two bullets in the head and several bullets in the rest of his body.

According to a neighbour, who saw Ahmed’s execution from his bedroom window, four uniformed police officers arrived at Ahmed's house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck. The neighbour saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range.

Several other neighbours confirm this account, although they did not see the actual shooting. They say they heard gunshots and saw the police leaving the scene. They then found Ahmed’s body lying on the ground outside his house. It is believed by these neighbours that Ahmed was executed by the police.

Two days before Ahmed’s execution, his father was arrested and interrogated by the police. They demanded to know what he knew about Ahmed’s sexual activities and blamed Ahmed for corrupting the community. Officers eventually released Ahmed’s father. His son was killed soon afterwards.

Both Ahmed's mother and father wept over their sons’ brutal killing. Even though homosexuality is taboo, they did not agree he deserved to die. The family see him as a victim of poverty and police murder.

Because they are so poor, the family could not afford a funeral for their son.

The day after Ahmed was murdered, his family moved out of the area, fearing police retribution and denunciation within the local community. The family’s whereabouts and fate is unknown.

Ahmed is one of many hundreds of teenage boys and girls in Iraq who sell their bodies to survive and support their impoverished families.


Via www.uruknet.info

Greenpoint Market

What a Psychologist Learned from Jane Jacobs

By Seth Roberts
Huffington Post

Was Jane Jacobs, who died last week, disappointed by her obituaries? Sure, she was a genius who changed how we think about cities. Yes, it was fantastic how she won a battle against Robert Moses to preserve the livability and economic vitality of a large piece of Manhattan. But she wrote three books about economics (The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Nature of Economies) and only one about city planning (The Death and Life of Great American Cities).

Since the city-planning book was anti-city-planning, it was like (on a much smaller scale) Renata Adler being remembered for her attack on Pauline Kael. I had lunch with Jacobs a few years ago. She told me her favorite book of hers was The Economy of Cities. Her long New York Times obituary gave this book one sentence.

No doubt she saw it coming. I'm a professor of psychology at Berkeley. One day I had lunch with faculty in the public policy school. Most of them are economists. I said I really liked her work. "What do you like about it?" someone asked. Uh-oh! At a college class reunion (I graduated from Reed) several years ago I sat next to an economics professor. What do you think of Jane Jacobs's work? I asked. "Who's Jane Jacobs?" she replied. Double uh-oh!

That I, an experimental psychologist, could learn so much from her work shows there is much more to it than city planning. Much of my research involves self-experimentation, and I usually tell my students about it. Sometimes they say their other professors have said that self-experimentation is bad. In response, I turn to Jacobs. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she wrote about an isolated small town in North Carolina. Her aunt had been sent there in 1923. One of her aunt's goals was to build a church. Her aunt suggested to the townspeople that the church be built from the many stones that were lying around. Not possible, the townspeople replied -- you can't make buildings from stones. "These people came from a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals," wrote Jacobs. "But having lost the practice of construction with stone, people had lost the memory of it, too, over the generations and having lost the memory, lost belief in the possibility." Experimental psychology started with self-experimentation, I tell my students. It was built on self-experimentation. Your other professors have forgotten that.

I started college as an economics major, under the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith (who also died last week). I switched to psychology because I believed psychology was the basis of economics. Now this view is popular -- "behavioral economists" do psychology-like experiments to understand economic phenomena. But I've moved on: I now believe economics is the basis of psychology, at least human psychology. This is entirely because of Jacobs. She -- not Galbraith, not Veblen, not Samuelson, nor any of several dozen other economists I've read -- taught me the fundamentals of economics. This is her great achievement, in my opinion. She described how city economies work. And city economies are the basis of national economies.

After reading Jacobs, I saw that many hard-to-explain features of human psychology made sense as evolutionary adaptations to promote trade and economic growth. If two crickets or two pigeons or two octopus met at a party, neither would ask, "What do you do?" Because they would already know. All crickets make their living the same way, all pigeons make their living the same way, etc. Humans are the only animals that specialize -- for whom the job question makes sense. First came specialization (which began with hobbies). Gains from specialization led to many other features of human behavior.

1. Language. Language began with single words. These words helped "buyer" and "seller" find each other, as single words still do at a Guatemalan market where a seller shouts "toothpaste" repeatedly. Early language was the first advertising.

2. Procrastination. The mechanism behind procrastination promoted diversity of specialization because it magnified random differences. On Monday you do X and I do Y, for purely random reasons; on Tuesday we will tend to continue along our different tracks, eventually becoming expert in different things. As Jacobs said over and over, a healthy economy is a diverse economy.

3. Decoration. Our love of decoration caused us to support those who made decorations -- the first artists, who were also the first material scientists. Their discoveries, first used for art, later had more pragmatic uses.

4. Rituals/ceremonies/gifts. Most gifts involve purchase of something that neither the giver nor the recipient would otherwise purchase. Gifts are usually something "nice." Thus they help support artisans who make "the finer things"—and who by working at the edge of what's possible improve the state of their art. Rituals and ceremonies, with their special requirements (e.g., fine cloth, ornamentation), do the same. Collectors and collections, connoisseurship, music, fashion, and the poor quality of American college education can be explained in similar ways.

This theory of human evolution owes everything to Jane Jacobs.

Building and Demolishing in The Architect

BY Tobi Elkin
Huffington Post

In The Architect, Anthony LaPaglia gives a subtle yet textured performance as Leo Waters, a self-important middle-aged architect who lives with his quietly dysfunctional family in the suburbs of Chicago. Waters, who designed the low-income Eton Court Homes at the start of his career, has moved on to bigger and better projects of course, as the buildings deterioriate over decades of abuse and neglect in a tough South Side neighborhood. The conditions of the drug- and gang-infested buildings leave Tonya Neeley, played by Viola Davis, no choice but to organize the tenants to support her mission: she wants the city to tear the buildings down. No amount of sprucing up will amount to anything; the only answer is to wipe them away completely.

Tonya's rage simmers beneath the surface as she plies her neighbors with homemade banana bread and steely determination. Gangs run the elevators, and mold, asbestos, and rats, along with other social ills are part and parcel of daily existence for the tenants of the blighted buildings. Tonya, played masterfully by Davis, is tortured by her own demons: her teenage son jumped to his death from the top of one of the buildings. She has sent her 15-year-old daughter to live with an affluent family in the suburbs while an older daughter and a granddaughter remain with her at Eton.

Tonya does her research and tracks Leo down, landing in his architecture class at Northwestern where she confronts him about the campaign she's mounted to tear the buildings down. Leo, coming off of a lecture on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, seems genuinely shocked that Eton Court Homes, a project inspired by the architecture of Le Corbusier, could have slid into such disrepair.

Speaking of Le Corbusier, the concept of architecture as a social force played a major role in the French riots last year as HuffPo's Rachel Sklar points out, but seriously, is there any doubt that oppressive architecture breeds insufferable social conditions from which people feel there is no escape? The New York Times Magazine took up the topic as well, exploring the ways in which architecture has a direct influence on people's behavior and social interaction. A film called The French Democracy dramaticized the French riots, portraying the lives of three black French citizens.

In The Architect, while initially, Leo offers to help Tonya speed up requests for repairs, he ultimately decides to rethink the buildings and what might be done to update and improve them. Meanwhile, Leo's sexually conflicted son Martin, played by Sebastian Stan, decides to check the neighborhood out for himself, a journey that will inexorably jar his senses and identity.

Tonya visits Leo's gorgeous home to check out Leo's new model for Eton, a series of cosmetic tweaks that don't address the fundamental problems. When Leo's wife Julia, played by Isabella Rossellini, discovers that he hasn't visited Eton Court to see for himself what the conditions are, we are treated to the full extent of her anguish and marital unhappiness. Julia's indignant eruption catches Leo off-guard, and in a rare display of traditional role-playing that I haven't noticed in a contemporary film for quite some time, Leo exclaims: "You're my wife, you're supposed to support me." Right.

The always luminous Rosselini is awash in despair, anger, and alienation and we see she has lost herself in marriage and will come clean shortly thereafter, announcing her plans for separation. For his part, Leo is fully out of touch with his wife, yearning for the happy-go-lucky early days of their marriage. Their kids, however, see it all coming.

Gay Cowboy

Friend of mine
You've been a friend some time
And I'd like to tell you a tale

Well I have been watching you walk
And I'd like to do a little bit more than talk

Friend of mine
You've been a friend in kind
And I'd like to buy you a beer

Well I have been waiting all night
And I hope my moment is right

I wanna be your gay cowboy
I want a homo on the range
I want to hear some other spurs on the floor
When I walk in the door for a change
'Cuz my woman, she has been driving me insane

Friend of mine
You've been a friend this time
And I'd like to offer you this dance

There's nobody left at the bar
And I like where this is going so far

I wanna be your gay cowboy
I want a homo on the range
I want to feel some other hairs on the back
When I climb in the sack for a change
'Cuz my woman, she has been driving me insane

Bob turned to Bill
With a sad sudden thrill
They both closed their eyes
As they unzipped their flies
And began love man to man

I wanna be your gay cowboy
I want a homo on the range
I want to ride up in that saddle again
Where a friend is a friend without shame
And my love it is daring to speak it's name
'Cuz my woman, she has been driving me insane

Wetback Mountain

From the Mind of Mencia

Sprite

An ad for Sprite...Cute Little Bugger.

Virus

Apple's "Virus" TV Ad.

Since Adam was a Boy

Heath Ledger's "Gay" Cowboy Friend from Australia.

Gay Flamingos

Carlos and Fernando....5 years and counting.

Gay Old Time Over a Little Fairy Bird

Political Correctness at its worst.