RUTHFULLY YOURS

Give rap superstar Nicki Minaj credit for having not a sliver of shame.

After human-rights activists begged her not to sing at a Christmas show in the brutal African dictatorship of Angola for a reported $2 million, she flaunted her dealings with its regime. She posted photos of herself boarding a Gulfstream jet for Angola, another of her arriving, one of her in a sheer bodysuit prepping for the show, and one of her in concert with the caption Angola has my heart. And, obviously, the fat paycheck has her heart as well.

Minaj claims an interest in bettering people’s lives, and she and her managers have joined up with the Black Lives Matter movement. She even spent time last year lamenting to Rolling Stone that black celebrities are slow to speak out against injustice.

But Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, notes the hypocrisy in Minaj’s stance: “Minaj’s payday is all the more jarring given that she and her managers joined the chorus of the Black Lives Matter movement. It appears that when those black lives happen to be in Angola, their lives matter less than a paycheck from a dictator.”

Halvorssen’s watchdog group has been a singularly effective at tracking celebrities who cash in on dictator gigs. He has blown the whistle on Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Hilary Swank for cavorting with criminal regimes, whether it’s Qaddafi’s Libya (Beyoncé), Turkmenistan (Lopez), or Chechnya (Swank). When shamed by the Human Rights Foundation, all three singers apologized, and Beyoncé donated her fee to a charity in Haiti.

Let’s indulge optimism and hope for the sake of Western civilisation and, not least, for the wellbeing of coming generations of people born into Muslim societies that Islam can and does undergo a revolution. But I won’t hold my breath
Malcolm Turnbull, ASIO head Duncan Lewis, Sydney Mayor Clover Moore and Assistant Multiculturalism Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, among others, apparently believe that it is discordant, dangerous even, to be too critical of Islam. So here we have a diseased ideology which we have to tiptoe around lest its adherents become upset. What the heck is happening to our civilisation?

OK, am I going too far in calling it a diseased ideology? Well there must something of the like at work. How else is it possible to explain so much symptomatic violence, hateful preaching and sheer intolerance wherever there are Muslim populations? Surely large numbers of Muslims were not born that way. Of course they were not. They have been infected.

The fault does not lie with Muslims as people. It lies fairly and squarely with Islam, and we have to say so unashamedly, loudly and often. But what about the moderate Muslims, the hand-wringers whine, don’t we need them onside? Hmm! First a question: What do moderate Muslims believe?

My concise OED defines “moderate” as “not radical or excessively right or left-wing.” I therefore buy the siren cry that most Muslims are “moderate”. It does not alter the fact that they are moderate Muslims, a qualifier we never hear in regard to “moderate Christians” or “moderate Hindus”. The evidence is that there a world of difference. That is why we don’t hear about ‘Hinduophobia’. The difference goes to their belief systems.

“Some of those women and girls have had to watch 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old children bleed to death before their eyes, after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day.” — Mirza Ismail, chairman of the Yazidi Human Rights Organization-International.

“An office has been established by ISIS members in Antep [Turkey]; and at that office, women and children kidnapped by ISIS are sold for high amounts of money. Where are the ministers and law enforcement officers of this county who are talking about stability?” — Reyhan Yalcindag, prominent Kurdish human rights lawyer.

“Five thousand people have been taken as captives. Women and children are raped, and then sold. These must be considered crimes.” — Leyla Ferman, Co-President of the Yazidi Federation of Europe.

“Turkey has signed several international treaties, but it is the number one country when it comes to professional non-compliance with human rights treaties.” — Reyhan Yalcindag.

This month, the German television station, ARD (Consortium of Public Broadcasters in Germany), produced footage documenting the slave trade being conducted by the Islamic State (ISIS) through a liaison office in the province of Gaziantep (also known as Antep) in Turkey, near the border with Syria.

In August 2014, Islamic State jihadists attacked Sinjar, home to over 400,000 Yazidis. The United Nations confirmed that 5,000 men were executed, and as many as 7,000 women and girls made sex slaves.

While some have escaped or been ransomed back, thousands of Yazidis remain missing.