RUTHFULLY YOURS

They were butchered because they were non-Muslims and considered too old to be used for sex or sold as sexual slaves by Islamic State. Meanwhile, their daughters and younger sisters were raped, often many times a day. And then, like other stolen loot and war booty, they were listed on social media for sale. The going price was nominal, frequently no more than a packet of cigarettes, and the Islamic State thugs that bought them were promised a great bargain. “Brothers,” proclaimed one such ad, “you won’t be disappointed!”

Like the Christians and Jews throughout the Middle East, the Yazidi people are treated as infidels, devil-worshippers, polytheists and non-persons, lacking any rights or even any status as human beings. Instead, they are being exterminated and subjected to ethnic cleansing. Masses of people whose faith and residence in their ancestral homelands goes back 2000 years are being systematically expunged from the earth.

But don’t expect that they will receive any help from Barak Obama — or Malcolm Turnbull, who thinks, according to his publicist, Mark Kenny, in the Fairfax press, that “unpalatable types including hardliners” can be persuaded to strike a deal in, as Australia’s leader explains it, “a spirit of compromise and in a spirit of pragmatism”. The only time a plainly bored and disinterested Obama showed any emotion at his G20 press conference in Turkey was when it was suggested he show some special consideration for non-Muslims in terms of offering them refuge from the monstrous forces that want to kill, rape, and enslave them. As The Age reports

During an hour-long press conference in Turkey in which he repeatedly forced to defend his administration’s strategy to counter the threat from IS, the only time Mr Obama appeared angry was when he rejected these suggestions.

According to Obama, it is Muslims who face the greatest threat in the Middle-East — and Muslims who should be re-settled in America and the West. “We don’t discriminate against people because of their faith,” proclaimed Obama, indicating that the Yazidi, Christians, and other non-Muslims being killed or enslaved are to be treated no different than their persecutors.

Islamic State has made no secret of its attitude or intentions regarding these non-Muslim people, all of whose religions pre-dates Islam by many centuries. Christians and Jews have been targeted for decades, but IS shifted systematic persecution into a higher gear in February when it lined up 21 Coptic Christians on the beach at Tripoli (below) and beheaded them for a propaganda video to send “a message signed with blood to the nation of the cross”, that message being “we are coming to destroy Christians everywhere”.

As for the unfortunate and harmless Yazidi, the extreme hatred of ISIS towards them became clear in August, 2014, when the Islamists overran their territory in Sinjar and began a program of extermination that even the United Nations admitted was genocide. Thousands died, many from bullets to the back of the head — a technique the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen  would have admired for its speed, economy and efficiency. Other Yazidis were simply thrown off cliffs while their mothers, wives and daughters were passed around to be raped.

Given such systematic and explicit programs of atrocity, it is grotesque in the extreme to claim that it is somehow unfair or discriminatory for Australia to give priority to non-Muslim refugees from Syria, as the ABC and others have done.

When this current conflict is over it will be possible for Muslims to return to their homes, as many Lebanese did after their civil war in the 1970s. No such possibility will ever exist for the Yazidis or Syria’s Christians. They now have no prospects in what were once their ancestral homelands. If not given refuge elsewhere they will be doomed.

If Australia does not step up to the mark and reach out to these people we will make ourselves party to the systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing being carried out by Islamic State and the Muslim nations that are its paymasters and mentors.