“If this isn’t genocide, I really don’t know why we bother to have international treaties and conventions.”
With this grim statement, Kurdistan Regional Government Representative to the United States Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman opened a Sept. 10 panel at the Washington, D.C.Heritage Foundation to discuss the horror inflicted on Iraq by the Islamic State.
Fellow panelist Hudson Institute religious freedom expert Nina Shea described in detail a “religious genocide directed against the various religious groups that do not conform to ISIS’ vision of Sunni Islam” – factions such as Christians. Heritage national security expertSteve Bucci agreed, saying that his findings during an extensive study of the Islamic State provided the “clearest example of genocide that I have ever read or seen since World War II’s Nazis.” “We should not be afraid of using that word,” Rahman said, of the term “genocide.” While she acknowledged lawmaker concerns regarding the political drawbacks to utilizing such strong wording, she adamantly declared, “We should call a spade a spade.”
Shea spoke about the Islamic State’s rise in the context of Saudi education’s intolerance of the religious other that has created “immeasurable damage throughout the Sunni world with this brainwashing and these directives of hatred.” She referenced Quran 9:29’s traditional three choices for Christians and other monotheists subjugated by Islamic conquest: death, conversion to Islam or payment of the humiliating jizya poll tax, and pointed out that with ISIS, the latter option is a “bogus kind of arrangement, because the tax keeps rising.”