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ISIS, Wendy Williams, and 12-Year Old Girls
This past August 3rd marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the genocide of the Yazidi at the hands of ISIS. When ISIS captured the town of Sinjar in Northern Iraq, many Yazidis fled to Mt. Sinjar, thinking it would bring them safety. Instead, it led to the deaths of thousands, and to some of the most graphic stories and pictures imaginable. For example, while trapped on the mountain for ten days, some Yazidis cut themselves open so they could give their dehydrated children their blood to drink. The pictures of mass graves were reminiscent of the 1940s.
During the siege, one man killed his sisters, and some Yazidi women threw themselves to their deaths from Mt. Sinjar to avoid being raped and sold. Tragically, August 3rd was also the day ISIS started a massive sex slave trade of Yazidi girls (some as young as 7) and women.
I have been following the story of Yazidi sex slavery since that day, reading and sharing as many stories as I could find. The tough part is finding any. A little-covered story to begin with, the world seemed to have no interest in the plight of the Yazidi. Especially disappointing are the Western feminists who seemingly do not care about what is happening to Yazidi women and girls , but who devote themselves to “fighting” manspreading, slut-shaming, and the sexism of men controlling office air conditioning. We also just saw worldwide coverage of a woman who ran the London Marathon while on her period, “free bleeding” to fight oppression.
Early on in the story of Yazidi genocide, I saw this in The Daily Mail, and I’ve thought about it every day since:
There wasn’t a worldwide outcry. Michelle Obama never held up a sign with a hashtag about it. Those who scream the loudest that there is a “war on women” and a “rape culture” have been the most silent about the war on, and rape of, the Yazidi.
Recently, thankfully, the Yazidi have received some much-needed coverage. Mark Levin read about an organization called The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq, and had its founder, Steve Maman, on his show. He shared the story of the Yazidi with Levin’s millions of listeners, which led to a massive increase in donations at its crowdfunding site (Thank you, Mark Levin).
On Thursday, The New York Times published an article entitled “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.” Journalist Rukmini Callimachi details in vivid and sickening detail, the unimaginable horrors Yazidi girls and women are suffering in the massive, well-organized, and lucrative ISIS sex slave trade.
In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
That is literally just the beginning.
Just about the only prohibition is having sex with a pregnant slave, and the manual describes how an owner must wait for a female captive to have her menstruating cycle, in order to “make sure there is nothing in her womb,” before having intercourse with her. Of the 21 women and girls interviewed for this article, among the only ones who had not been raped were the women who were already pregnant at the moment of their capture, as well as those who were past menopause.
Beyond that, there appears to be no bounds to what is sexually permissible. Child rape is explicitly condoned: “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is fit for intercourse,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute of a pamphlet published on Twitter last December.
Since I first read the article, I have replayed “Child rape is explicitly condoned” in my head many times, and although I have no children, I get nauseated each time.
The story ends as it begins, with a graphic description of the rape a 12-year old Yazidi girl.
One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding.
“He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said.
Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child.
“I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled. “And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’ ’’
“And having sex with her pleases God,” he said.
Even though The New York Times article sheds valuable light on the story of the Yazidi, I literally have not seen one other person talking about it, aside from the kind people that retweeted and responded to my many tweets about the story. A search of Google News comes up with about 30 posts. Certainly not the kind of follow-up attention that The New York Times can normally bring to a subject.
This brings me to Wendy Williams. While I have heard of Wendy Williams and have a vague idea of what she does, I have never before seen her TV show. Apparently though, many others have. When I woke up on Friday morning, I looked at Twitter, and in the list of trending hashtags, I saw that about 85,000 tweets contained the hashtag #CancelWendyWilliamsShow, and the phrase “Wendy Williams” was in around 15,000 tweets. Maybe it’s because I am 44, but lately I have no idea what many trending hashtags are about, so I sometimes click on them to learn more.
This is typical of every tweet I saw: “Stop body shaming people for something they have no control over. It’s not funny at all #CancelWendyWilliamsShow.”
In her “Hot Topics” segment, Wendy Williams said of singer Ariana Grande (who, you might recall, caused her own social media stir when she recently said “I hate Americans. I hate America.”):
“She’s 21, she’ll forever look 12 which … I don’t mean that in a good way, I mean that in a … it’s nice to look younger than you are, but when you look too young and then you’re short, she’s only like 4 feet 11 … I don’t look at her as like a woman”
This. THIS?!?! This is what gets people so mad that people want a television show cancelled and its host silenced. That above tweet alone got 680 retweets.
For more than a year, 12-year old Yazidi girls have seen their male relatives killed, and they and their sisters and mothers abducted into a world of ISIS sex slavery that leaves them begging for their own deaths. Death, incredibly, a relief from being repeatedly raped day after day after day, by untold numbers of men who preach that child rape is a good thing. No matter how bad the depictions and images are, few seem to care.
For 20 seconds, a pop star is described as a 12-year old, and thousands upon thousands of people are in an absolute frenzy.
When you compare the reactions to The New York Times’ article and “The Wendy Williams Show” segment, there is no other conclusion but that the world’s outrage machine is out of control, and its moral compass is broken.
Published in General
Cameron, I’ve been in direct touch with Rukmini, and I’m working now to try to understand which groups are apt to be most effective in saving as many of those girls as possible. I’ll keep Ricochet posted. Obviously, the group that would be most effective is the US military. But I cannot, morally, just hang around and wait until the next election in the hope that “someone does something.” Yes, the world’s moral compass is broken. So is mine if I just sit here and say, “It’s broken.”
Wow Cameron, thanks for this. I read the NYT article and hope against hope that will actually publicize this issue. Interesting contrast to this Wendy Williams thing. The entire “war on women” thrown around in thus country is a joke.
I’m the mother of daughters and I teach girls. The #waronwomen has annoyed me because it trivializes the real war on women and their desperate suffering.
Cameron, thank you for this piece.
Claire, please let me know which organization(s) you recommend. I, too, can no longer wait and must do more than pray.
Distilled evil looks us right in the eye and, most of us, look away. It is horrific, ongoing and for most of the world it remains unknown or unacknowledged.
Is the crowdfunding site linked the most effective place to send resources?
I believe we all, one day, have to stand before the bar and answer the simple question, “Did you know of this and do nothing?”
Perhaps that’s why so many people don’t even want to know.
I’m working on finding out the answer.
Thank you, Claire.
Thank you so much, Claire
And thank you for reading it – Cameron
I don’t have kids, but I still can’t fathom any of it – Horrors only the sickest of the sick could inflict on innocent people – Cameron
There’s an old saying in the American South that kept occurring to me reading this post: “He needed killin'”. Looking forward to Claire’s counsel on where to donate. Most of those savages “need killin'”.
Here’s an earlier article by Nina Shea.
One point worth noting — and noted in the comments — is that while women and children are enslaved, the men are simply killed. This is a war on men as much as it is one on women. It’s genocide.
Dennis Prager also discusses what is being done to the Yazidi women, so you have his audience as well. Plus I think he reads Ricochet so if there are any organizations that Claire finds perhaps he can mention them on his show as well. I couldn’t even imagine what these women are going through and these stupid stories on a manspreading or Air conditioning that the feminist focus on makes me crazy. It’s such naval gazing for upper class bourgieous first world women, who don’t appreciate how good they have it.
Cameron,
I couldn’t agree more with your post and your feelings on this subject. However, someone needs to point out just what the New York Times is up to. The story that you quoted from The Daily Mail is what the story should be. This is as brutal a war crime as one could imagine. This is what the U.N. should be in business for to stop.
Unfortunately, everything at the Times must have a left wing angle or they won’t run it. The Times story emphasizes theology with the girl being raped repeatedly by the praying ISIS fighter. We are to assume that since all Religions are the same, meaning irrational, that this is the problem. We are not to realize that the particular theology of Jihad is the problem. This is a not so subtle slant on this story which I noticed immediately. The Times as always must have its slice of left wing agitprop before it will do anything.
The Times may be the paper of record but it is the broken record of krypto-marxist nonsense. Amazing when the The Daily Mail gets it right and the paper of record first misses the story and then tries to turn it the wrong way.
Regards,
Jim
Absolutely, James. The Daily Mail has been covering this story accurately and completely since day one. The NYT certainly has its angles, but at least it exposes the overall problem of Yazidi sexual slavery to an audience previously unexposed. But the NYT always comes with a price – Thanks, Cameron
Yes. In the NYT piece of August 13th a female who escaped described the sorting process whereby males old enough to have underarm hair are, “in village after village… driven or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the dirt and sprayed with automatic fire” with the older males.
The younger boys go with the females to be “sabaya”.
Meanwhile on CNN an anchor, fresh from being taken to school by Marco Rubio on another topic this week, worries that this story might reflect poorly on Islam.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/14/cnn-host-is-worried-that-isis-members-raping-12-year-old-girls-feeds-islam-a-bad-rap-video/
Chris Cuomo is really not a very intellegent man. He always seems really surprised that there are people who don’t believe in his worldview, he is the definition of living in a bubble.
Wow Cameron what a powerful piece.
Thank you for reading it, Tommy
I’m trying to get everyone I know to repost, retweet, etc.
Very moved by it.
It will brighten your spirits that at least a few more of them will be dead by tonight:
Brett McGurk @brett_mcgurk 14m14 minutes ago
At #Incirlik today in #Turkey, w/base commanders, U.S. F-16s, and Predators preparing to destroy #ISIL terrorists.
I was too, I donated to the gofundme page and posted it on facebook.
# 22
Amen, amen.
Please, more of this, as well:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2845668/SAS-quad-bike-squads-kill-8-jihadis-day-allies-prepare-wipe-map-Daring-raids-UK-Special-Forces-leave-200-enemy-dead-just-four-weeks.html
As satisfying as those photos from Incirlik are, I wish I didn’t know enough to be very, very unsure whether this is a strategy that makes any sense. I agree, unfortunately, with this analysis:
The entry of Turkey into the war is on balance damaging for the coalition’s chances against the Islamic State. The United States must determine how to salvage the situation.
Whether we have the ability to see this, I don’t know.
Cam,
This messed me up. Retweeting. Thanks.
I know it’s a rough read. Thanks for the RT, David. Cameron
I posted this on Claire’s thread but I think it is significant enough to post here too. We should not think that ISIS’ evil sex slavery is limited to foreigners. ABC just broke a story that former ISIS hostage was repeatedly sexually assaulted by none other than the leader of ISIS itself.
OK. There’s much more to say about this, but from the people I’ve been speaking to, this is the organization to which donations are best directed. I understand that they’re sincere and ethical and effective.
I’ll have more information about this, but wanted to pass this on.