ISIS’s Barbarity and Leftist Feminists’ Callous Heart When will Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein and other “feminists” hear the cries of the Islamic State’s rape victims? Joseph Klein
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261547/isiss-barbarity-and-leftist-feminists-callous-joseph-klein
ISIS’s brutality knows no bounds. Early medieval style beheadings, crucifixions, enslavement and rapes of women and young girls are ISIS’s calling cards. They have slaughtered or abducted thousands of civilians and have committed systematic genocide against Yazidis and Christians. Yet when reports of such acts of barbarism began to emerge in 2014, the progressive left either ignored the worst demonstrations of pure evil in our time or pooh-poohed them.
For example, the far left feminist Naomi Wolf, pretending to be an objective journalist, has demanded proof of ISIS transgressions. She questioned whether the videos of beheadings by ISIS jihadists were real. “So much about ISIS seems hyped/spun,” she said on her Facebook page in August 2014. In response to accounts of ISIS jihadists’ sexual exploitation of women, she bizarrely warned us to “remember the fake accounts of ‘the HUN’ raping Belgian women that drove everyone else into World War One.” Recall that Naomi Wolf has argued in the past that Muslim women veiling themselves are doing so as an expression of their own free choice.
The proof of ISIS’s barbarism is told both in staggering numbers and heart rendering first person accounts of women beaten and raped by the ISIS predators. An estimated 3,500 people are being held by ISIS as sexual slaves in Iraq alone, according to a United Nations report issued on January 19th by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the UN human rights office. “Those being held are predominantly women and children and come primarily from the Yezidi (sic) community, but a number are also from other ethnic and religious minority communities,” the report said.
In one example cited in the report, ISIS was said to have killed 19 women in Mosul last August “for refusing to have sex with its fighters.” Another example involved the abduction last June of 42 Yazidi women whom were reportedly being used as “sex slaves,” with some sold to ISIS fighters “for between USD500 and USD2,000.”
Even more horrific than the UN report’s factual recitation are the first-hand accounts of victims who were lucky enough to escape sexual enslavement. Several victims were quoted describing their experiences in captivity in a January 18th article appearing in the Daily Mail.
One 18-year-old woman, who was captured in the area of Mt. Sinjar on August 3, 2014 and held for 11 months, recalled that “The saddest thing I remember, during those terrible months, was this little girl, 12 years old. They raped her without mercy.”
A 22-year-old woman, who was captured on August 15, 2014 and held for 11 months, said that she “was forced to have sex up to six times per night. They always fastened my legs and arms when they raped me.” Another woman captured the same day recalled the beating of her 3 year old niece.
A 27-year-old pregnant woman recalled being beaten and forced to have sex with the sex slave masters to whom she had been sold even though she was pregnant at the time. “They raped me over and over again,” she said.
In account after account, we feel the suffering, pain and humiliation these women experienced during their brutal captivity by truly evil barbarians. And now the misogynist culture that permeates Muslim-majority countries and ISIS-controlled territories in the Middle East and elsewhere is beginning to debase our own culture. The recent incidences of rapes and assaults of women by Middle Eastern and North African refugees in Cologne, Germany and other European cities may be just the tip of the iceberg. And all that European leaders such as Cologne’s mayor can say is that European women will need to become more adaptive to the changing cultural norms. The mayor appeared to blame the victims for enticing their assailants, which is consistent with a key tenet of jihadist ideology.
Where is the feminist outrage over the jihadists’ ongoing war on women? There is none to speak of. Some would rather not talk about the issue at all or pass it off as less of a concern than Western disrespect of Muslim culture.
For example, a prominent feminist with the same first name as Ms. Wolf, Naomi Klein, appears oblivious to ISIS’s rape of “infidel” women and girls. All she seems to care about now is climate change, which she regards as the number one existential threat to civilization.
When Naomi Klein has spoken out about Islamic terrorism in the past, it was all in the context of making excuses for global jihad. In her writings, she has ignored the religious sources in the Koran and Hadith used to justify Islamists’ mass killings and rapes of “infidels,” which hearken back to the time of Prophet Muhammad himself. Instead, she blamed alleged American “racism” and America’s support for what she referred to as the “Zionist project.” In an article appearing in The Guardian back in August 2005, she asserted that “so-called Islamist terrorism was ‘home grown’ in the West…it’s not tolerance for multiculturalism that fuels terrorism; it’s tolerance for barbarism committed in our name.”
Naomi Klein’s 2004 article entitled “Bring Najaf to New York” was a paean to the “sacred” Shiite city of Najaf, which she claimed American soldiers were desecrating. She extolled Iranian-supported jihadist Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shiite militia leader with blood of U.S. soldiers on his hands. “Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers are not just another group of generic terrorists out to kill Americans,” Ms. Klein tried to assure the readers of her article in The Nation. They were noble resistance fighters against “foreign occupation.” The foreign occupiers meant only the United States, according to Ms. Klein, which is peculiar considering that Sadr’s militia, backed by Iran, was fighting against Iraqi forces as well as U.S. forces in the Battle of Najaf in August 2004. And she acknowledged that Sadr “would try to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran,” which would not have sat well with major portions of the Iraqi population who did not want to be dominated by Iran.
”It’s time to bring Najaf to New York,” Naomi Klein declared in observing preparations for the Republican National Convention and the accompanying protests against the Iraqi war occurring in New York in August 2004. “Najaf. It’s nowhere to be found,” she lamented as if she were searching for a Shangri-La-like utopia.
While mythologizing Najaf as a very special place whose presence she wished would be felt in New York, did Naomi Klein have any idea what life for women in Najaf was really like? Did she care? Evidently not. In reality, as a female Iraqi journalist living in Najaf pointed out, women in Najaf are not even acknowledged as human beings. “The pressure never lets up in Najaf, and it is applied to all women — Western and Arab, Muslim and non-Muslim, journalist or not,” the journalist Bushra Juhi explained in the article “Silence is the dress code for women.”
Phyllis Bennis, who works with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., is yet another example of a progressive left feminist who views the United States as more in the wrong than the jihadists. While acknowledging that ISIS has committed some horrible acts, she said during a C-Span interview in mid-July 2015 that such acts do not compare with “the numbers of people killed in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan.” Ms. Bennis is typical of the leftwing moral relativists who believe that wars to liberate peoples from brutally repressive regimes and to combat jihadists whom have committed deliberate mass slaughter and rape of civilians are worse than the deliberate mass slaughter and rape of civilians by the jihadists themselves.
Bennis condemned the U.S. led military action to destroy ISIS, such as it is, because, she said, it “puts us in the position of being the world’s oppressor to so many people around the world.” In Bennis’s mind, military efforts to rescue thousands of Yazidis and Kurds in danger of being massacred or raped, and conducting pinpoint assaults against ISIS leaders and infrastructure facilities, is tantamount to oppression.
We shouldn’t worry about ISIS as a threat to the homeland, Bennis assured her C-Span audience. “Unlike, Al Qaeda, their goal is not to come here… it’s a very specific and a very local struggle,” Bennis said.
Fast forward to November 13, 2015 – at least 130 innocent people massacred in ISIS-coordinated attacks in Paris, France. Bennis’s reaction was to question whether ISIS was actually involved and to then proceed with a rambling criticism of the whole war against terrorism, starting with the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attack.
Does Bennis still think ISIS is involved in only “a very local struggle” after both the Paris attacks and the San Bernardino massacres conducted by jihadists who pledged their allegiance to ISIS? We are still waiting for her to tell us.
In her C-Span interview, Bennis revealed the true anti-American mindset of today’s Western progressive left movement. “I don’t think of myself first as an American,” she said.
Western progressive leftists share with jihadists a hatred of America and its values. This pathological hatred has brought together strange bedfellows with radically different ideologies into what David Horowitz has called an “unholy alliance.” In the case of ISIS, while Western progressive leftists have not necessarily supported its brutal tactics in full lockstep, they have tended to downplay the seriousness of the global jihadist threat and to spend more time decrying the West’s military response as oppressive and imperialistic. Feminists have sacrificed their professed principles by attaching little importance to the jihadists’ barbaric war on women and even making excuses for the jihadists’ evil behavior.
Under the spell of political correctness, multiculturalism and moral relativism, empty-headed progressive leftists have served as the useful idiots of global jihad. If the jihadists have their way in the West, these useful idiots may be amongst the first to literally lose their heads.
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