More than 100 prisoners in Iraq are facing execution – and many of them are believed to have been convicted of the ‘crime’ of being gay, the UK-based Iraqi-LGBT group revealed this afternoon.

According to Ali Hili of Iraqi-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week. There is, said Mr. Hili, at least one member of Iraqi-LGBT who are among those to be put to death.

That innocent people die for their sexuality is a moral atrocity.  But many thousands of people (mostly women accused of extramarital relations) die in the Islamic world every year.  What’s really outrageous is that thousands of American soldiers died and trillions of dollars were paid to support regimes fundamentally opposed to Western values in the name of democracy.

Update: On the Afganistant front, Hamid Karzai just  ”signed a law the UN says legalises rape in marriage and prevents women from leaving the house without permission.”   Obama is raising the defense budget 26% above that of Bush, so you can bet that many more American soldiers will die to keep Muslim women slaves.  God bless democracy!