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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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Tough ISIS decisions cow Congress as Obama preps national address
Rachel Maddow outlines the very difficult choices facing the United States in constructing a strategy for dealing with ISIS in Iraq and Syria ahead of Wednesday’s prime time address to the nation by President Obama.
*****
Readers: Tune in tonight. It should be very interesting.
Thoughts? Blog me.
Alycedale: Sometimes I just post a write without saying much, kick back, and become curious to see what conclusions my readers come to, what they learn, and who will respond. That being said, it doesn’t surprise me that you were the one to point out the truth. I agree with what you said. The honest truth would have been to title the write: The police caught the cop who allegedly sexually abused 8 black women because the perpetrator picked the wrong woman.” In other words the perpetrator made a mistake and fucked with the wrong black woman, hence he got caught.
I can’t say that I would do the exact same with the cop as you described. I HOPE I am never in that position to test whether I would. What I do know for sure is that my lips would not be sealed. It seems you certainly have inspired the courage of at least one woman to come forth and report her perpetrator, so I thank you for being you and putting it out there.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
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(CNN) – The little boy looks barely old enough to walk, let alone understand the dark world he’s now inhabiting.
He should be toddling around a playground with his friends. But instead, he wears a black balaclava, crouched down in a desolate street with his tiny hands clenched around an AK-47.
He pulls the trigger and the recoil of the shot knocks him back, his limbs unable to control the rifle. An adult takes the weapon from the boy’s hands as he stands up and steps away, casting a blank glance into the camera.
It’s just one of the many videos that ISIS – the Sunni terror group that has declared an independent Islamic state stretching from northern Syria to central Iraq — has produced to boast of its youngest “recruits.”
And as the radical Islamist group strengthens its hold on this huge swath of land in the heart of the Middle East, it is cramming its warped ideas into minds that are often too young to understand.
Mohammed, whose name has been changed out of fears for his safety, was one of them. He has now fled to safety in Turkey, but was just 13 when ISIS said he should attend one of their children’s camps in northern Syria.
“My friends and I were studying at the mosque, and they taught us that we should enrol in jihad with the [Islamic State],” Mohammed told CNN. “I wanted to go, but my father did not allow me to.”
When ISIS found out that Mohammed’s father had prevented him from attending, the militants sent a patrol to their house.
“[They told me] ‘if you prevent Mohammed from coming to the camp, we will cut off your head,’” his father, who declined to be named for this story, told CNN.
So off Mohammed went to the camp.
“For 30 days we woke up and jogged, had breakfast, then learned the Quran and the Hadith of the Prophet,” Mohammed says. “Then we took courses on weapons, Kalashnikovs and other light military stuff.”
Some of the militants at the camp were kind, joking and laughing with the younger recruits. Others made the boys watch hideous things.
“They used to bring young [kids] to the camp to lash them,” Mohammed says. “When we go to the mosque, they order us to come the next day at a specific time and place to [watch] heads cut off, lashings or stonings.”
“We saw a young man who did not fast for Ramadan, so they crucified him for three days, and we saw a woman being stoned [to death] because she committed adultery.”
Mohammed says he understood some of the lessons taught at the camp — like the importance of prayer and fasting — but didn’t understand words like “infidels,” and why he should fight them.
The boys would take oaths of allegiance to ISIS’ leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and were considered ready to fight once they completed the religious and military courses taught at the camp.
Mohammed’s father, terrified for his son, tried to visit him several times, but was turned back by guards who told him that the boy wasn’t there, or on patrol somewhere else.
“He is only a child, they might make him a suicide bomber and [convince him] that will be in paradise and stuff like that,” he said. Despite his fears, Mohammed’s father expressed doubt that the militants’ lessons would truly stick in his son’s mind.
“How can a child like that be convinced? Where is the conviction in that? He is a child, it’s not possible,” he said. “He just saw his friends and kids his age went to the camp, so he wanted to go with them for entertainment. They thought war and guns were entertainment.”
Mohammed’s father was eventually able to pull him out of the camp, and the family fled to Turkey.
Now Mohammed doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t want to go back to school — he thinks he’s too old for that now — and thinks he might like to learn the trade his father practiced before they were forced to flee their home, fearful of what ISIS militants would make him do.
Mohammed says one of his friends at the camp has been killed on the front lines of ISIS’ war with more moderate rebel groups fighting to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“He was martyred in Deir Ezzor when he fought the Free Syrian Army with ISIS,” Mohammed says. “He was my age, 13 or 14 years old.”
ISIS may preach absolute fealty to Islam, but Mohammed doesn’t recognize the militants’ message in his own understanding of his religion.
“I love my religion because I am a Muslim,” he said. “And I used to go with my father for the prayers before ISIS came. But my father has taught me that religion is not about fighting, but it is about love and forgiveness.”
Mohammed and his family are safe now. But as ISIS spreads its tentacles across the region, an increasing number of Syrians have nowhere to hide — and the group’s murderous drive to convert everyone they encounter knows no age limits.
*****
Readers: I’m with Obama. ISIS needs to be punished for what they did, and degraded and destroyed to limit their reach, before they further warp the minds of their young and anyone else they come across, enabling them to spread their evil even further.
My heart goes out to the family and friends of Steven Sotloff.
Peace & Love:”Live it, Give it.”
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
(CNN) – Hundreds of children have been systematically raped, beaten and sex trafficked in a northern English town for more than 12 years. And it is still going on, a government commissioned report says.
The “appalling” revelations also expose cultural tensions and lack of communication between authorities and the town’s ethnic minorities that may have helped stop it.
Social counselors saw evidence of sexual exploitation early on, but turned a blind eye, according to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham.
And so the abuses amassed, which included gang rape and death threats at gunpoint.
At least 1,400 cases of abuse went on between 1997 and 2013 — a conservative estimate, the report says. This year, specialist investigators are handling 51 cases. Other teams are looking at additional cases.
Torturous sexual abuse
The exploitation has reached a level tantamount to torture, according to the report.
“There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone,” the report says.
Some victims were not even in their teens.
“Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators,” the inquiry says.
The report accuses politicians, social services and police of “blatant” failure to stop them, citing an inability to traverse cultural barriers with Rotherham’s small Muslim community.
Fear of label of racism
The perpetrators often worked together and were mostly of Pakistani heritage; the victims were mostly white girls, the report says.
An earlier report said that “Asian” gangs originally were exploiting women and girls “for their personal gratification” but later turned to making money with it, passing girls around.
Social counselors often took a hands-off approach to the cases for fear of being branded as racists or stoking a right-wing backlash in the city.
“Several (counselors) interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion. To some extent this concern was valid, with the apparent targeting of the town by groups such as the English Defence League,” the report says.
Though known victims were mostly white, the report delved into an underbelly of alleged systematic abuse by select groups of Asian men against women in their own ethnic groups.
These often go unreported, because the victims fear vengeance or public shame in their communities, the report says. Perpetrators may be using that fear to blackmail these victims into continued sexual servitude.
Community left out
Cultural differences also hindered effective involvement with concerned members of Rotherham’s Pakistani community.
Authorities turned to male community leaders and imams and greatly left out women. Many ethnic Pakistani women told the Inquiry that it made them feel disenfranchised and prevented people from speaking openly about abuse.
Members of both genders said they missed any direct engagement on the topic by officials. “This needed to be addressed urgently, rather than ‘tiptoeing’ around the issue,” the report said.
Under the rug
Some social counselors also hoped cases they were seeing were one-off occurrences and hoped they would go away. That may have been bolstered by the fact that the vast majority of child sexual abusers in Britain are white males.
Research reports on the problem began appearing a few years ago, but they had little effect.
“The first of these reports was effectively suppressed, because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained,” the report said.
Social services managers downplayed the problem. Officials thought reports were exaggerated. Law enforcement gave it little importance.
“Police gave no priority to (child sexual abuse), regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime,” the report said.
Improvement but frustration
By the time awareness of the problem increased by 2009, thinly staffed social service workers were overwhelmed by the number of potential victims.
There has been a marked improvement in training police to recognize sexual abuse and work together with social services, the inquiry says.
“But the team struggles to keep pace with the demands of its workload,” according to the report. And finances are running low.
And still, few cases even make it to court.
Additionally, I found this on youtube:
And this write from the NY Times tells Lucy’s story in more depth:
Years of Rape and ‘Utter Contempt’ in Britain
Life in an English Town Where Abuse of Young Girls Flourished
ROTHERHAM, England — It started on the bumper cars in the children’s arcade of the local shopping mall. Lucy was 12, and a group of teenage boys, handsome and flirtatious, treated her and her friends to free rides and ice cream after school.
Over time, older men were introduced to the girls, while the boys faded away. Soon they were getting rides in real cars, and were offered vodka and marijuana. One man in particular, a Pakistani twice her age and the leader of the group, flattered her and bought her drinks and even a mobile phone. Lucy liked him.
The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.
She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.
But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.
“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed.
Lucy’s account of her experience is emblematic of what investigators say happened during a 16-year reign of terror and impunity in this poor northern English town of 257,000, where at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way. One girl told investigators that gang rape was part of growing up in her neighborhood.
Between 1997 and 2013, despite numerous reports of sexual abuse, only one case, involving three teenage girls, was prosecuted, and five men were sent to jail, according to an official report into the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham published last week.
Even now, the official reaction has been dominated by partisan finger-pointing and politics. The leader of the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has resigned, and the police chief is under pressure to follow suit. But criminal investigations continue, and more than a dozen victims are suing the police and the Council for negligence.
The scale and brutality of the abuse in Rotherham have shocked a country already shaken by a series of child abuse scandals involving celebrities, public officials, clerics and teachers at expensive private schools. The Rotherham report suggests that it continues unchecked among the most vulnerable in British society.
It has highlighted another uncomfortable dimension of the issue, that of race relations in Britain. The victims identified in the report were all white, while the perpetrators were mostly of Pakistani heritage, many of them working in nighttime industries like taxi driving and takeout restaurants. The same was true in recent prosecutions in Oxford, in southern England, and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale, where nine men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan origin were given long prison sentences in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls. Investigators in Scotland have reportedly uncovered a similar pattern of abuse.
Sexual abuse of children takes many forms, and the majority of convicted abusers in Britain are white. But as Nazir Afzal, the chief crown prosecutor in charge of sexual violence and himself of Pakistani heritage, put it, “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”
The grooming tends to follow a similar pattern, according to Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work who was commissioned by the Rotherham Council to carry out an independent investigation following a series of reports in The Times of London: a period of courting with young men in public places like town centers, bus stations or shopping malls; the gradual introduction of cigarettes, alcohol and sometimes harder drugs; a sexual relationship with one man, who becomes the “boyfriend” and later demands that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends; then the threats, blackmail and violence that have deterred so many girls from coming forward.
But the report also outlined how those victims and parents who did ask for help were mostly let down by the police and social services, despite a great deal of detail known to them for more than a decade, including, in some cases, the names of possible offenders and their license plate numbers.
“Nobody can pretend they didn’t know,” Ms. Jay said in an interview.
Unimpeded, the abuse mushroomed. Over time, investigators found, it evolved from personal gratification to a business opportunity for the men.
Increasingly, the girls were shared not just among groups of men locally, but sold, or bartered for drugs or guns. They were driven to cities like Sheffield, Manchester and London, where groups of men raped them, sometimes overnight.
When parents reported their daughters missing, it could take 24 hours for the police to turn up, Ms. Jay said. Some parents, if they called in repeatedly, were fined for wasting police time.
Some officers and local officials told the investigation that they did not act for fear of being accused of racism. But Ms. Jay said that for years there was an undeniable culture of institutional sexism. Her investigation heard that police referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”
In the minutes of a meeting about a girl who had been raped by five men, a police detective refused to put her into the sexual abuse category, saying he knew she had been “100 percent consensual.” She was 12.
“These girls were often treated with utter contempt,” Ms. Jay said.
Lucy, now 25 but too scared to give her last name because, she said, the men who brutalized her still live nearby, knows about contempt. During an interview at her home outside Rotherham, she recalled being questioned about her abuse by police officers who repeatedly referred to the main rapist as her “boyfriend.”
The first time she was raped, there were nine men, she said, one on top of her, another to pin her down and force himself into her mouth. Two others restrained a friend of hers, holding open her eyelids to make her watch. The rest of the men, all in their 20s, stood over her, cheering and jeering, and blinding her with the flash of their cameras.
When she went to bed that night, she found a text message from the man who had groomed her for months: “Did you get home all right?”
She hesitated, then texted back: “Yes, I’m fine.”
At that moment, she said, rape became normality. “I thought, ‘This must be my fault, I must have given them a signal,’ ” she said.
Unlike other victims, Lucy came from a stable family. Her parents owned a convenience store and post office. They lived in a middle-class neighborhood. “I had been brought up in a nice world,” she said. “I thought rapists were people hiding in bushes, and pedophiles were people who drive white vans and park outside schools.”
After that first rape, she said, she began to think she had overreacted, and told her friend that she had been upset because she had lost her virginity. After school, they went back to the town center. The leader of the group took her to McDonald’s and rolled her a marijuana cigarette, she said. For a week, it was as if nothing had happened.
Then he raped her again, and soon the rules changed. The girls were to speak only when spoken to. They had to sit quietly in town and wait. Taxis would come by and pick them up. They were raped by different men in different places, mostly outdoors.
There seemed to be no way out. “They threatened to gang-rape my mother, to kill my brother and to firebomb my house,” Lucy said.
Once, she said, when they thought she might go to the police, a man with gold teeth whom she had never seen before dragged her into his car, a dark-green Honda with left-side drive, and put a gun to her head: “On the count of three you’re dead,” she said he told her. He pulled the trigger on three, but nothing happened. “Keep your mouth shut,” he said. “Next time there will be a bullet inside.”
Eventually, Lucy’s parents sold their business and moved to Spain for 18 months. “It became quite clear that leaving the country was the only way we could save Lucy,” said her mother, who participated in parts of the interview.
Lucy experienced years of depression and anorexia, her mother said. She now works as a consultant on child sexual exploitation issues for police departments and charities.
“They say it’s vulnerable girls these people are after,” her mother said. “Well, of course they’re vulnerable. They’re innocent. They’re children.”
*****
Readers: And once again, young girls who are the victims are interrogated and treated as if it was their fault.
Ladies, it is really up to us to save our own lives because no one else is going to be more invested in our lives than us. This happened in the U.K., but as we all know, this could easily happen in the U.S. too.
It’s obvious that women and girls don’t matter much to men or we wouldn’t have to endure what we encounter on a daily basis around the world. Men seem to forget that they come from a woman’s womb…if it weren’t for women they wouldn’t be here. Yet, they continue to abuse and viciously rape and torture females treating us as if our lives are worth nothing.
Until there are strict laws that are put into place, to protect young girls and women, this will continue to happen. Until authorities stop blaming the victim and perpetrators pay a heavy price…so heavy that they will think twice, and perhaps if only for the reason of self-preservation, before committing a heinous crime against women, this will continue to happen.
How can we do this? It all starts by women supporting women and making sure that our voices are heard at the polls, by voting in politicians who truly care about the overall well-being of women and support women. We haven’t gotten what we need from men and we’re not going to.
It’s up to us. I know I keep saying this, but how much more evidence do we need…how much atrocity do we have to experience…how much more pain and suffering do women and girls need to endure before we do something to change it?
The time is now.
And the time is in November when our voices can make a difference by the people we vote in to be in charge, and to make the changes that we need for our own self-preservation.
Are you with me? Anything to say? Blog me.
Peace & love…we could certainly use more of both.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Since today is Friday and we’re moving into the weekend where we all know…lovers get together and start flapping lips, I thought this should be the write to post…not to mention a “wink and a smile” to my Asian readers.
Hidenari Terasaki (James Shigeta) kisses the hand of his wife, Gwen (Carroll Baker), in the 1961 film Bridge to the Sun.
Actor James Shigeta had the looks, the talent — and the voice.
“It’s melodious. It’s deep. There is something quite sensuous about it,” says L.S. Kim, a film professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Kim adds that Shigeta — who died from pulmonary failure on Monday in Beverly Hills at age 85, according to his agent Jeffrey Leavitt — embodied an unusual sight on the big screen: a self-assured Asian-American man.
“In many portrayals of Asian-American men in particular, there is no sense of confidence. And with James Shigeta, his screen presence was as deep and seductive as his voice,” Kim says.
A co-star of the 1961 movie musical Flower Drum Song, Shigeta broke barriers on screen as one of Hollywood’s first Asian-American actors to play romantic lead characters. In Bridge to the Sun, a 1961 film based on a memoir of the same name, Shigeta played Hidenari Terasaki, a dashing Japanese diplomat from Tokyo who meets cute and later marries Gwen Harold, a young white woman from Johnson City, Tenn.
Bridge to the Sun was based on a memoir about a real-life interracial couple living in Japan during World War II.
The ‘Tragedy’ Of Being Asian-American
Only two years earlier, Shigeta had made his film debut in The Crimson Kimono as a Japanese-American homicide detective in Los Angeles caught in a love triangle between his white police partner and a key witness in their murder case. For a black-and-white film from 1959, there was a bit of a surprise ending for Shigeta’s character.
The plotline became a selling point for The Crimson Kimono. Movie posters showed Shigeta’s character kissing a white woman. “Yes, this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a Japanese boy!” one poster declared. “What was his strange appeal for American girls?”
In The Crimson Kimono, Shigeta plays a homicide detective investigating the murder of a burlesque dancer in Los Angeles.
Shigeta’s role in that film won him a Golden Globe Award in 1960 for most promising newcomer.
“He clearly had the talent, but the roles weren’t there, because unless there was a role that was written for an Asian-American, he would not be considered. And that’s the tragedy here,” explains Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s elected public defender who interviewed Shigeta for The Slanted Screen.
A Pioneer Who ‘Led The Way’
In the documentary, which Adachi wrote, directed and produced, Shigeta recalled an exchange he had early in his career with an MGM producer who told him, “If you were white, you’d be a hell of a big star.” Shigeta, who was born in what was then the Territory of Hawaii to a family of Japanese descent, said that encounter was “the first time that [he] had some kind of a clue as to the fact that there might be some discrimination out there.”
“It’s a very difficult business. It’s a constant struggle even if you’re not Asian,” says actress Nancy Kwan, who co-starred with Shigeta in Flower Drum Song. “He was a pioneer. He led the way.”
Shigeta leaves behind a career on screen that lasted half a century. He had smaller, supporting parts in Die Hard and in television series like Hawaii Five-O. But in his earliest movies, he often got top billing and the girl. And for an Asian-American actor, that’s a benchmark still remarkable today.
♥♥♥♥♥
Readers: Congratulations to James Shigeta for a long successful career in spite of the fact that Hollywood couldn’t see past the color of Shigeta’s skin to make him a BIG star. May he rest in peace.
PS: I’m intrigued and swooning from watching the clips…I think I’ll rent the movie. If this doesn’t get you ready for the weekend, tell me what will. Blog me.
AH: I get it. Thanks for explaining so well how it all works.
Al: Thank you. I hardly ever check that e-mail as I get over 600 e-mails a day there, so I just send it up to the cloud. I rarely get time to read them but when I do I will look for it.
Adam: I understand about Bita. I knew that she would never be reading. See…you’re already releasing some juice. I can’t wait to hear more. Happy you all are here. No doubt Vivv loves the company.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
Social Butterfly: That is how I feel. My concern is the women too.
I really don’t give a damn about men. Why can’t the men leave the women out of it, and just go fight the wars they create amongst themselves until they all kill each other off? Why? Because like the men in countries such as Congo, they use women as weapons of war, and to satisfy their sick animalistic behavior.
The Islamic State group is no different. One can only imagine what these captive Yazidi women are having to endure now. Yes, the Yazidi men are not exactly like the Muslim men – the Yazidi faith has borrowed from multiple traditions, including Christianity. But don’t make the mistake, that Yazidi women still don’t endure hardships. In 2007 an honor killing made national headlines when a young 17 year-old Yazidi girl fell in love with a muslim boy and was stoned to death by 8-9 male members of her family (with hundreds to a thousand men, including armed police, watching and doing nothing.), her dead body tied behind a car and dragged through the streets.
Still, for most women whatever lives they had before…whatever they had to face before…probably was nothing compared to what many of their lives look like now that they are in the hands of ISIS.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of women from the Yazidi religious minority have been taken captive by Sunni militants with “vicious plans,” an Iraqi official said Friday, further underscoring the dire plight of Iraq’s minorities at the hands of the Islamic State group.
Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, said hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35 are being held in schools in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. He said the ministry learned of the captives from their families.
“We think that the terrorists by now consider them slaves and they have vicious plans for them,” Amin told The Associated Press. “We think that these women are going to be used in demeaning ways by those terrorists to satisfy their animalistic urges in a way that contradicts all the human and Islamic values.”
The U.S. has confirmed that the Islamic State group has kidnapped and imprisoned Yazidi women so that they can be sold or married off to extremist fighters, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information came from classified intelligence reports. There was no solid estimate of the number of women victimized, the official said.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled when the Islamic State group earlier this month captured the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border. The Yazidis practice an ancient religion that the Sunni Muslim radicals consider heretical.
The extremist group’s capture of a string of towns and villages in the north has sent minority communities fleeing for their lives. The Islamic state views Yazidis and Shiite Muslims as apostates, and has demanded Christians either convert to Islam or pay a special tax.
About 50,000 Yazidis — half of them children, according to U.N. figures — fled to the mountains outside Sinjar where many of them remain, trapped and running out of food and water. Late Thursday, the U.S. military cargo jets dropped humanitarian aid to the mountains.
Amin’s comments were the first Iraqi government confirmation that some women were being held by the group. On Tuesday, Yazidi lawmaker Vian Dakheel made an emotional plea in parliament to the Iraqi government to save the Yazidi people, saying the “women have been sold in a slavery market.”
President Barack Obama said the humanitarian airdrops were made at the request of the Iraqi government as the Islamic State militant group tightened its grip on northern Iraq. In his remarks late Thursday, he mentioned “chilling reports” of fighters with the group “rounding up families, conducting mass executions, and enslaving Yazidi women.”
The U.N. Security Council issued a statement Friday condemning targeted attacks against Iraq’s minorities, adding that any widespread attacks against civilian populations based on ethnic, religious or political background may be considered a crime against humanity for which those responsible must be held accountable.
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Readers: If it weren’t for the sick men all around the world, women wouldn’t be slaves, forced to endure living in such daily horrific conditions and in fear of their lives.
I hate the saying that men are dogs because that is an insult to my favorite four-legged friends, but I do wish, like dogs, we could castrate the mother fuckers. And while we’re at it, take the dick too. Hell, if I thought I could call a genocide….no a “menocide” against men and get away with it, you can bet I would. Why not. There is an unspoken “Femocide” against women on this planet.
I never used to feel this way but after years of writing and highlighting the plight of women and witnessing what women around the world go through every day, as I sit here, so blessed, safe in my home…I am desperate for an answer…desperate for a way to end the abuse. And that sadly, is the only answer that has come from my “I am an eye-for-an-eye kind of girl” attitude.
When men continue to do the sick things they do, they need to suffer the consequences of their hideous acts of violence and hate. Don’t like it? Most men don’t when the tables are turned. In fact, most men are cowards when you take away their guns and knives.
No doubt Anonz has witnessed many a gutless men pleading for their lives. I HOPE he is never kind, and they endure a slow painful death like the lives of the women disgusting men have taken. Oh, how I wish there were a thousand men that embodied Anonz’s bravery, skill, and love for the women of this planet, so that they could annihilate the men as they have done to so many women. Unfortunately, all we have is one Anonz. And thank God we do. But my heart is heavy for him too as there is only so much one can endure when one has seen the atrocities that he has seen.
Anonz: Thank you for being a true Man of mettle and a Hero to so many women. Thank you for your love and courage and commitment. I am so thankful for the man that you are, and so grateful to you for all you do for women. Wherever you are, I HOPE you and your men are safe, and kicking ass big time if you are in the mix of it all. But mostly, I HOPE that you have a respite soon, as no doubt you need it.
Lastly, and once again for you thin-skinned pussy men out there who can’t handle harsh words thrown at you (ouch!)…who are just frothing at the mouth to call me a “man hater,” – I don’t hate men, I hate the things men do. What choice do you give me to feel any other way?
You men have it so easy. Oh, how we women wish it was just harsh words we had to endure everyday instead of harsh hands.
Well…what do you have to say? Blog me.
Nancy: Your nomination of Ann Coulter is noted and accepted.
Peace & Love…”Live, it, Give it.”
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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