Tel Aviv is a not only a holy emerald city for gays; it’s the only place in the Middle East where gays are free to walk hand-in-hand and kiss in public.

A few days ago, Iran hanged four gays from cranes in public squares (and this after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad previously said that “homosexuality does not exist in Iran.”) Saudi Arabia beheads homosexuals, the Taliban put homosexuals to death by collapsing a wall on them, in Gaza Hamas refers to gays as “perverts and mentally sick” and in the Islamic-oriented West Bank “immoral behaviors” are a good reason for torture.

Islamic law prescribes five separate forms of death for homosexuals. To these, the Palestinian Authority added several of its own. As Yossi Klein Halevi reported a few years ago in The New Republic, in Tulkarem a Palestinian homosexual was forced to stand in sewage up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a cell infested with insects. During the interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4229064,00.html