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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
Thank you for the direction to the additional analysis, I will check it out.
Thank you for saying this, Claire. Often when we talk about the middle east, it comes off as if the men are just living it up. Peter’s post about Hiroshima prompted me to re-read Wikipedia’s page on the Nanjing massacre. It’s well known that rape by Japanese soldiers was rampant, though it’s not as well known that boys and men were forced to have sex with their sisters, daughters and mothers–a form of rape most cruel as it forces guilt on the conscience of an innocent. This is not exclusive to Nanjing, either. Every genocide seems to reveal these sorts of stories.
Men are raped in war, and if it’s true that rape is always about power and has nothing to do with sex, we should expect they would be. Maybe the subject gets so little media coverage because of its rarity, but my guess is bias is at play. Men get raped in prison. Why should the battlefield be any different?
I’ve never bought that. Can anyone claim Russians gang-raped German women (and hell, pretty much ANY women they found, including Russian, Slovakian, Czech, etc) because of “power”? Hell no. They raped them because they were women and they wanted sex, and they knew the circumstances of the war would let them get away with it. Not a lot of occurrences of the Red Army going after German men. There’s some power aspect to rape, but there’s some power aspect to lots of sex, forced or not. When men are raped in war, it almost certainly is a power thing… a way of humiliating the conquered, a kind of emasculation by an enemy that doesn’t respect you. But women? That’s male soldiers giving themselves a reward for war services. Even in civilian rapes, most rapes female AND male are more about the sexual desires of the rapist than any feminist theory twaddle about sexism and power.
The theological justifications for this savagery raise some uncomfortable questions. Muhammad’s wife Aisha is generally believed to have been nine-years-old when they “consummated” the marriage. If he were just a historical figure, even a revered one, it would be easier to overlook this fact. As a supposed prophet of god, his actions are presumably sanctioned by the almighty.
Having children isn’t necessary to be disgusted by this. All you need is basic decency.
Thanks for following up on this. We’ve done a bit to help this morning from our peaceful spot on the globe.
I’ll soon have more information about other groups that are helping. One issue, I now understand after doing some research, is that publicizing specific rescue efforts on social media endangers these women. The women and girls who are being saved are smuggled out through a pretty complex mechanism, which I now understand better but for obvious reasons won’t go into, here. There are good reasons to conduct the fundraising for this discreetly.
At the risk of diverting attention away from the crisis for Yazidis, this incident shows that the “theology of rape” teachings are pervasive with the Islamic State. Here is one version of the story, which has also been covered by the Associated Press.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/leader-of-islamic-state-raped-american-hostage/2015/08/14/266b6bf4-42c1-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html
Claire beat me to it. The org is YAZDA.
Radio host John Batchelor and his producer Lee Mason (a wonderful, warm woman) have been covering this regularly since last Fall. Lee traveled, on her own nickel and at great risk, to that godforsaken Mt. Sinjar where the Yazidis had fled and became entrapped. The Yazidi man who founded YAZDA is based in Houston I believe.
We ended up giving our entire Christmas budget to YAZDA plus sent some shoes for the barefooted refugees.
Please give whatever you can:
http://www.yazda.org/
Bless you, Cameron, for starting this discussion and caring so much.
Take a look at Matthew Barber’s page, there’s a ton of info including an excellent half hour interview with him. Barber is at U-Chicago/Near East Studies, and he is on the board of YAZDA.
Tweets by Matthew__Barber
Cameron, can’t thank you enough for shedding some light on this, I was in northern Iraq in June and July working with the Yazidi and preparing to go back. Please keep getting the story out!
Wow, hope you report on your experiences here at Ricochet! It’s easy to say the old line “never again” but much harder to actually do something about it. God’s speed.
Phillip, Welcome to Ricochet !
Please write a post for us about your work with the Yazidi.
Cameron, it was good talking to you tonight, and I’m so grateful you pointed me here.
Name dropper ;-)
Thank you Melissa, it was very nice to meet and hang out with you – Cameron