'We liberated a country for this?'

A few weeks ago, More4 News aired a report on the targeted killings of homosexuals in Iraq. 

Somewhat surprisingly, it generated hundreds of weblog stories in the US, as well as several hits in different languages, including Spanish and German.

The story received extensive coverage on over three hundreds American blog sites - among them, Time Magazine's Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan who said, "We liberated a country for this?"

The Petrilis File whose author Michael Petrilis said, "If I had my way, this important news account would air on American TV news channels, from local broadcasts to the networks and also all of the cable news channels."

Meanwhile, Direland directed its readers to the Channel 4 site to "Watch new Brit TV doc on murder of Iraqi Gays."

Our reporter was even invited for an interview on Air America Radio  - home of Jerry Springer, no less.

The left leaning blogs picked up the story as an example of how bad things had become in Iraq - while a few Conservative blogs used it to chastise extreme Islamists.

One blogger from Liturgy Outside wrote: "I can only wonder what Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin, our beloved 'founding fathers', might make of our initiating a war halfway around the world in order to institute religious zealotry."

On Free Republic, a conservative weblog, one comment illustrated the confusion surely echoed by many Americans "See- this is what makes it so hard. One day you think it's the Shia that are nuts ... next day you turn around and see that it's the Sunni. Tough call who's more depraved."

And more insight from another comment:

"So is the requested asylum being granted? The last paragraph makes it sound unlikely.(?) I didn't know if being persecuted because you were a sodomite was grounds for admission into the UK? (Hopefully not. and that goes double for the U.S.!!)"

One upset blogger on the other side of the political spectrum,  named doublevelvet, who runs a  Flickr photo blog simply said, "I need to react, but I need to be measured."

You can watch the original More4 News report here.

Comments

[doublevelvet]

Thank you for that link to my work on Flickr.
The reason I now approach this subject in a more measured way is because when I discussed it before in my work, this was delivered to my doorstep in London:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doublevelvet/45889713/