Patterico's Pontifications

10/22/2014

Searching For A Reason To Live And Other Inquiries

Filed under: General — Dana @ 7:04 am



[guest post by Dana]

In light of their plight, how do these women find a reason that makes life still worth living? Below the flesh and bone, all the way down to the gut of the soul, what is there for them to grab hold of or is this simply the point when death becomes a welcome friend?

Further, does this impact your view on whether the U.S. should be more involved in the fight against ISIS or are these spoils of war just the natural result of an active evil that is not our obligation to stop because protecting our own is first priority? If you do see it as a further reason to become more involved, how so, and with what limits or contingencies? I’d be most interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

A young Yazidi woman forced into sex slavery by the Islamic State begged the West to bomb the brothel where she was being held after militants raped her 30 times in just a few hours, it is claimed.

The unidentified woman is understood to have been kept as a prisoner of the jihadists somewhere in western Iraq having been captured by ISIS during the Sinjar massacre in early August.

A group raising awareness of ISIS’ persecution of women in the vast swathes of the Middle East under its control said the woman had contacted Kurdish peshmerga fighters by telephone to plead for the brothel to be bombed to put the women held as sex slaves out of their misery.

She allegedly told the fighters she had been raped so frequently that she could no longer use the toilet, adding that the ordeal has been so harrowing that she plans to commit suicide even if freed.

Details of the woman’s brutal experience at the hands of the Islamic State emerged during an interview with Kurdish activists staging demonstrations in London to raise awareness of the plight of women in the Middle East.

During an interview with BBC World Service, a man identified as Karam described how a friend embedded with the peshmerga took a phone call from the Yazidi woman.

Describing the woman as crying on the phone, Karam quoted her as saying: ‘If you know where we are please bomb us… There is no life after this. I’m going to kill myself anyway – others have killed themselves this morning.’

‘I’ve been raped 30 times and it’s not even lunchtime. I can’t go to the toilet. Please bomb us,’ he claimed the woman added.

I realize both issues being considered in the post are complex and not easily addressed, but those are what I immediately began thinking about upon reading this and wanted to put it out there for your thoughts.

–Dana

34 Responses to “Searching For A Reason To Live And Other Inquiries”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (8e74ce)

  2. She wants the pain to stop. Plain and simple.

    felipe (b5e0f4)

  3. These men are barbarians and I can’t even come up with a term to describe the idiot European women who want to join them.

    Mike K (90dfdc)

  4. Republicans’ War on Women.

    Rodney King's Spirit (8b9b5a)

  5. I think most Americans would decide reports like this are a good reason to troops into Iraq. Congress should try to verify this report and since past events suggest it’s true, promptly vote on a resolution sending in troops to stop the militants and to help suffering people like this. In addition, if Congress were to act promptly, the news might reach these women and give them hope. I would rather give these women hope than bombs.

    However, I acknowledge President Obama won’t do either, both because he doesn’t want to put troops on the ground and because he’s indecisive about difficult decisions. Thus, I hope the military will recommend targeting the ISIL fighters who are raping these women … and if it happens to be targeted at the brothel, so be it.

    DRJ (a83b8b)

  6. .. and any twat-waffle who wants to leave the West to go to ISIS should be given a one way ticket and $500 spending money to make sure they get there. Just saying. Darwin works best when we push it along a bit.

    Rodney King's Spirit (8b9b5a)

  7. But let’s also remember that it’s possible not every woman there has lost hope, as this woman has.

    DRJ (a83b8b)

  8. Helen Roseveare was a missionary in the Belgian Congo, captured and abused, including being repeatedly raped. She came through that experience and was able to help other women who had been in similar experiences.
    I don’t know any more details than that, I don’t know if she ever wrote anything speaking directly to women in that situation. Her two best known books are “Give Us This Mountain”, and “He Gave Us a Valley”.
    Here are a few clips I was able to find quickly:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEHnGtNbC8M
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4QdQ0lpRyI

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  9. Don’t overlook the prospect of revenge and justice. She realizes that her life is already forfeit, much as the silly soldiers who surrendered to ISIS only to be stripped of their clothing, marched to a ditch and dispatched with machine bursts. She is asking that the brothel be bombed which may kill her, but it will also kill a fair number of Islamic “warriors” including the brothel keeper and his guards.

    bobathome (5ccbd8)

  10. First of all, these aren’t “brothels”. Brothels are businesses where men go to pay for voluntary sex from consenting adult females. These are rape rooms. I saw the same thing in Vietnam when the communists came to villages. In Saigon there were brothels and one single slap to a working girl would get your butt up on charges and rape? That was out of the question.

    Hoagie (4dfb34)

  11. I am bewildered as to why when America bombs terrorists people scream “we are creating more terrorists by bombing their country”, yet when terrorists execute civilians and soldiers, rape, mutilate and murder the wives, sisters, daughters and mothers of these people somehow that does not seem to create anti-terrorists.

    Hoagie (4dfb34)

  12. DRJ,

    What would be the plan regarding a specific plan to target ISIS as you are talking boots on the ground? How limited? What would signify a victory as well as defining a clear and precise objective? IOW, how does it not become an open-ended murky mission?

    Dana (ed38b0)

  13. Hoagie, I stand corrected. However, it is true that a Korean woman in a Japanese brothel in Rabaul prayed that she would be bombed by the Americans while she was entertaining a sailor because that would allow the authorities to notify her parents that she and her “husband” had died, and this would spare her parents the knowledge of her dishonor. Not that she had any choice in the matter. Perhaps what constitutes a “brothel” varies from one place to another?

    bobathome (5ccbd8)

  14. The world, the entire civilized world, needs to put a stop to the madness of fundamental Islam (note: not radical, but fundamental Islam; that religion needs its equivalent of Chistendom’s Reformation, complicated by its assinine assertion in the 9th century that there can not be, ever, a review of Islam’s tenets). It will take force in the short term to contain it, and a movement by brave Muslims to drag their religion into the modern era in the long term to change it.

    Those poor souls suffering now need relief if possible, and prayer. Lots of prayer…

    NeoCon_1 (ff7ff2)

  15. Well, NeoCon_1, I have heard such sentiments before by various people, some quite learned and influential, so you are in good company (or perhaps they are in good company).
    But many would view the Reformation not as changing anything basic in the original texts, but placing an emphasis on what was already accepted, an emphasis some would claim was more in keeping with the original intent.
    As I see it, there is no chance for an equivalent occurrence within Islam. There the problem is when you go back to the original, things get worse and the fundamentalists seem to be justified.

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  16. I do not have time to do it justice, and even if I did I doubt I have the abilities of expression.
    The book “Making Sense Out of Suffering” by Peter Kreeft is the best book on the topic I have seen (and I’ve read a number of them, but by no means all).
    It is the best, IMO, because he makes the point that it is not a theoretical question, but a very personal question; and he answers it in a way that emphasizes personal application. A brief hint of “the” answer, as I think a chapter title goes, is “Jesus: The Tears of God”.

    The bottom line of Job, as I read it, is that in the end Job sees God, and is satisfied, before he gets anything else restored. And that goes back to Kreeft’s book.

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  17. Dana,

    It will be a murky failure with Obama in charge and, frankly, with Obama’s military leaders in charge. If I were in charge, I would tell the military to do whatever is necessary to fix this and win, including the equivalent of Bush’s surge. But I’m a Jacksonian so I wouldn’t go there unless there was a specific mission and the willingness to do what it takes to win. The hard part is the mission. Would we go to help the Yazadhi? What about the Kurds? The rest of Iraq? I’d help the first two groups.

    DRJ (a83b8b)

  18. #16, Doc: The exaltation of suffering is fine for the survivors. Although the old saw “if it doesn’t kill you it will make you stronger” is obviously false if the damage is too great. Pol Pot killed the 25% of the population of Cambodia who could read. There is nothing to be learned from this except the cost of complacency. And it is irreversible. I do agree with you on your assessment of islam. It is a belief system that was designed for pirates and pillagers, plain and simple.

    bobathome (5ccbd8)

  19. Here’s my concern:

    If we’re only going when tempers are hot, due to the unspeakable evil, will our resolve last? In five years, will we cut and run again?

    Cutting and running the last time is one of the conditions that led to this poor soul being raped. It also squandered the gains of hundred of thousands of the best of America’s citizens, and thousands of American citizen lives.

    I was in favor of the Iraq war specifically because of Saddam’s human rights abuses. I wanted to see Iraq become a free republic with real elections and human rights. Then they could work on moderating the extreme differences among their people, just like we do here, without violence, and hopefully this would be the solution the rest of the middle east followed. That was going to take a very long time, if Japan, Germany, and Korea are any guide. Perhaps fifty years. I think that severe price should be openly discussed and accepted if we’re going to get into “nation building”. Do we have the resolve to be in Iraq for 50 years in order to cement Western civilization there? Do we even have the resolve to admit that this is what we want to do?

    I’m irritated at my sense the Iraqis squandered their gift, but that was not a surprise given the time they had.

    Dustin (801032)

  20. These women do not deserve this. To the extent (and it is a non-zero quantity) that we are enabling these male humans (they are not men) (and yes I realize I am dehumanizing them and I do so intentionally because their voluntary behavior removes them from that category of being) we deserve to be blamed for allowing it to continue. There’s an old saying I learned as a child (I don’t think it was from my parents, but they did not dispute it, perhaps not realizing I’d heard): Some, they jus’ need killin’.

    htom (9b625a)

  21. First of all, I do not believe the story.

    As an academic question, we should not bomb the brothel (or rape house if you wish) just on the lady’s sayso. She cannot make that decision either for us or for the others in that place. Putting her out of her misery and possibly avenging her is not a good enough reason. Roosevelt was urged to bomb the concentration camps. He was right not to, whatever his own reasons for declining were. That the camp prisoners were prisoners and not corpses indicated that they preferred their suffering to death.

    nk (dbc370)

  22. bob, I didn’t mean to exalt suffering, as it does seem to be the case at times that people almost applaud suffering for suffering’s sake
    but, given that suffering happens whether we exalt it or not, knowing how to live in the face of it is a necessity.

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  23. I do not think that this woman’s unimaginable suffering makes it more incumbent on us to attack ISIS. ISIS and other Islamic Supremacist groups are already horrible inhuman scum worthy only of death. I’d like to see them broken, learning anew to respect us. However, we should only be getting involved if we have a clear mission objective, and we plan on getting something for the US out of it, such as bases in Kurdistan.

    OmegaPaladin (a0e77e)

  24. The issue is not whether the begging to be bombed story is entirely verifiable or if it does or does not result in actual bombing. The issue is getting the stories of these barbaric practices against captured women out in the open any way possible–because they ARE happening. We won’t even mention forced female genital mutilation here. The liberals who think the war on women is all about free birth control and a campus rape “epidemic” in America need to be confronted daily with these horrific stories from the Islamic state. The narrative absolutely needs to include these stories. Platitudes about “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “where there’s life there’s hope” are not always so inspirational to the sufferers in situations like this. Yes, as others here have said, these are very personal judgments about how much agony a person is able to take, as opposed to when a life becomes utterly unlivable for an individual. I’d like to see some of our feminist friends at Slate and Huffpo and Kos, and The New Republic, etc. opine on this.

    elissa (5eab9d)

  25. The reason to not bomb the C-Camps in WWII was because bombing them would have like prolonged the war while killing the very people you are trying to help.

    In War, resources must be focused on eliminating the oppositions desire to fight by all means needed. Sadly this means civilians must die because they provide the support and resources for soldiers to fight on.

    Bombing factories, towns, railways lines, family homes of high command, etc is all good.

    Taking out a C Camp that was consuming German resources made no sense. All it did was steal resources from the German people in their very fight for survival.

    My view anyway.

    Rodney King's Spirit (8b9b5a)

  26. No disagreement from me, RKS.

    nk (dbc370)

  27. Dustin,

    Do you then belive that nation building is the priority or at the least, goes hand-in-hand with “degrading and destroying” ISIS, is that our priority as opposed to letting the region figure it out and to the victor goes the spoils? Specifically when does it move from not being our business to being our business – when we know of severe human rights violations taking place like in the pos? There are severe human rights violations taking place all over the world in a myriad of countries.. So, how do you pick and choose?

    Dana (8e74ce)

  28. I don’t know what to do now.
    But I think Iraq didn’t waste their opportunity by themselves, they had the help of Iran and others infiltrating to stir things up.
    Had the US been able to sustain a united front against terrorism perhaps things would have been different, perhaps Iran have been less eager to get involved and gone the route of Khadafy, perhaps Bush would have been able to deal more aggressively against Iran to punish their involvement.

    For the foreseeable future we just need to assume the Dems would rather play politics to the detriment of the country than to support even a justified war.
    Treasonous behavior.

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  29. MD, I’m searching for what makes it “justifiable”. There is, of course, an enormous emotional response to the plight of the woman in the post. But is that enough? There is an automatic response of a good and decent people to commit our troops to fight this scourge, to given innocent people an opportunity to just live their lives, and there is nobility in that. However, given Iraq and all the fallout, and subsequent lack of Iraqis seeming ability to get their act together after all the paving of the way that we did, it makes me have doubt. The unnamed mission we are currently in – the “degrade and destroy” one – seems open-ended, willy-nilly and without direction and objectives clearly defined.

    Dana (8e74ce)

  30. I would not be in favor of anything under this CIC, whether justified or not.

    There are plenty of pictures of crucified bodies and mass shootings of the captured, this is just an additional expected event. This is the land of Saddam’s sons rape rooms, remember.

    AFAIK, he missed easy opportunities to hit ISIS while they were crossing the desert, everything he does is a political calculation.
    If he would have been serious in hitting ISIS and supporting known allies in the Kurds, we would be in a much better position already, I think.

    I think those George W. Bush “Miss Me Yet” billboards would be very popular in some areas of the middle east right now.

    MD in Philly (f9371b)

  31. “… I can’t even come up with a term to describe the idiot European women who want to join them.
    Mike K (90dfdc) — 10/22/2014 @ 7:27 am”

    There are apparently a LOT of really, really STUPID American females who think it would be “exciting” to hook up with a jihadi overseas. I blame their parents for never explaining the REAL facts of life to them– ie, “In a lot of countries, (Yes, STILL! in the 21st Century!) women are chattel. Their functions are to make babies, keep house, cook, tend the garden, and mind the livestock. If her husband is dissatisfied with her efforts in any one of these areas, he can beat her, kill her, abandon her, maim her, sell her, starve her, … the list goes on. Oh, darling daughter, the “women’s rights” you take for granted in the USA are -NOT- universally recognized.”

    A_Nonny_Mouse (4db3e8)

  32. MD, I’m searching for what makes it “justifiable”.

    Dana (8e74ce) — 10/22/2014 @ 6:21 pm

    The lessons of:
    WWII?
    The World Trade bombing (the first one)?
    The World Trade bombing (the second one)?
    This American citizen who was just murdered by Muslim terrorists today?

    (the Obama administration urges restraint; if you click on the link, try not to throw up).

    Pons Asinorum (8ce71a)

  33. MD in Philly, good point, and well taken. If that be the case, then war and eventually decimation of either Islam or all-else is potential final outcome. Given that the fundamentalists are such a small number of the world-wide uslim population, I am hopeful for a different route, but agree that the issue resides in the true application of that barbaric religion.

    NeoCon_1 (ff7ff2)

  34. 25. Rodney King’s Spirit (8b9b5a) — 10/22/2014 @ 12:21 pm

    The reason to not bomb the C-Camps in WWII was because bombing them would have like prolonged the war while killing the very people you are trying to help.

    What they could have bombed wa sthe train tracks leading to the, This happened one time and Eichmann thought it was on purpose and vowed he would march people on foot.

    Also the crematoria, which they used to dispose of dead bodies (although after the July plot – by about Augist 1944 – the top Nazis understood the idea that dead bodies were very dangerous was scientific fraud perpetrated by the Schwartze Kappele.

    In War, resources must be focused on eliminating the oppositions desire to fight by all means needed. Sadly this means civilians must die because they provide the support and resources for soldiers to fight on. <

    After the war the Stretgic Bombinbg survey cioncluded this was nonsense. You couldn't eliminate the will to fight that way.

    Bombing factories, towns, railways lines, family homes of high command, etc is all good.

    Taking out a C Camp that was consuming German resources made no sense. All it did was steal resources from the German people in their very fight for survival.

    The idea is they cared about that.

    Bombing what the enemy devotes efforts to take or keep is what motivated the Battle of Khe Sanh – also now Kobani, Syria. The enemy is devoting resources to it. They’ll use it more resources trying to continue.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.0765 secs.