Welcome to H&C,,, where I aggregate news of interest. Primary topics include abuse with "the church", LGBTQI+ issues, cults - including anti-vaxxers, and the Dominionist and Theocratic movements. Also of concern is the anti-science movement with interest in those that promote garbage like homeopathy, chiropractic and the like. I am an atheist and anti-theist who believes religious mythos must be die and a strong supporter of SOCAS.
Warning:: if you choose to read the complete article, some of the photos attached are quite graphic. The Ashura ritual as depicted shows the absurdity of blind devotion. Case in point, this child,,,
Shocking images show young Muslim boys beating themselves with sharp blades as part of the holy Day of Ashura.
Every
year, Muslims all over the world take part in these bloody
self-flagellation ceremonies to mark the tenth day of the Islamic
calendar and to mourn the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam
Husayn, at the Battle of Karbala.
Sunni
Muslims celebrate it the date - which they refer to as the Day of
Atonement - as the day Israelites were freed from the Pharaoh of Egypt.
Sean Mandell does a superb job of detailing the "dire conditions" faced by LGBTQ individuals in "ISIS-controlled territory". Though dated from August, the situation has not changed.
For months, we’ve reported on the dire conditions faced by gay men
living in ISIS-controlled territory. The Islamic State has claimed to
have murdered more than 30 gay men since it rose to power. While many
have been unable to confirm these figures for various reasons, not least
of which being that ISIS often labels any dissident as a homosexual,
two gay men who lived in ISIS-controlled areas are speaking out for the
first time about the brutality and fear they and others faced living
under the draconian regime.
As ITV News reports,
Syrian refugee Subhi Nahas told of the fear that ruled him living in an
environment so hostile even his family proved a threat to his safety,,,
,,,
While Adnan remains in Iraq, Nahas has successfully made it to the
U.S. and now works with the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and
Migration, an organization specifically aiming to help LGBT refugees.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power underscored the importance
of addressing LGBT rights globally, making note that yesterday’s
meeting of the Security Council was the first time the committee had
discussed LGBT issues. Via The Independent:
“It is impossible not to take up the
struggle for their rights as our own as we have other great human rights
struggles,” she is reported to have told the meeting. “Today, we take a
small but important step in assuming that work. It must not be our last
step.”
So what about Islamic State’s
sexual enslavement of non-Muslims, particularly Yazidi girls? Given the
group’s policy coordination at the highest levels, are these practices
being carried out as an intentional repudiation of an international
“year of the woman” argument? Is the group seeking to refute efforts to
lionize Malala Yousufzai or champion women’s emancipation even in the
most traditional of villages?
Islamic State is attuned to the
interests of observant Muslim boys and girls around the world. As it
works to recruit young adults and teenagers throughout the West,
newspapers have reported, the group has demonstrated a remarkable sense
of the languages and challenges of modernity.
So there may also be an official
sense among Islamic State leaders that the practice of sexually
enslaving Yazidi women would likely disgust and outrage the West and
other Muslims. Yet it also challenges modern Muslim youth to think about
male sexual gratification in unambiguous warrior terms, and to view
Islamic State’s stark society as morally complete in its treatment of
others — a society which requires that they must give up “Western”
values to join.
The social context may be just as
important for understanding this new policy of sexual enslavement. One
thing learned from the study of the small religious movements that have
sprung up in the West over the past few centuries is the systematic
restructuring of sexual relations that leaders have often demanded at an
early point in the movement. This may involve group celibacy or
polygamy, the exclusive sexual rights of the leader, or free sexual
relations. It can often mean dissolution of prior marriages.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) has claimed responsibility for executing at least 30 people
accused of sodomy, the head of an international gay rights organization
told the U.N. Security Council on Monday.
The executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission,
Jessica Stern, said that courts established by ISIL claim to have
punished sodomy with stoning, firing squads, beheadings and by pushing
people from tall buildings.
"In addition to men perceived as gay, trans-identified people and
lesbians are among those who have been raped and killed," Stern said.
Stern, who addressed the issue at the council’s first-ever meeting on
LGBT rights, says fear of the group, which controls large swathes of
Iraq and Syria, has fueled violence by other armed groups and "private
actors" against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals.
"It's about time, 70 years after the creation of the U.N., that the
fate of LGBT persons who fear for their lives around the world is taking
center stage," said U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, who organized the
meeting on violence and discrimination against LGBT people with Chile’s
U.N. envoy, Cristian Barros Melet.
Stern called for specific strategies to combat LGBT attacks,
including U.N. action to relocate those most in need and bringing the
gay community into broader human rights and humanitarian initiatives.
According to a local source in Nineveh province, ISIS organization
threw nine civilians from a tall building on charges of homosexuality in
the city of Mosul.
The source said in an interview for IraqiNews.com, “gunmen belonging
to ISIS threw on Sunday nine civilians from the top of a high building
in the city of Mosul after being accused of homosexuality.”
The source, who asked anonymity, added: “ISIS militants rounded up a
number of citizens in the city to see the implementation of the judgment
of the so-called Shariah judge.”
"He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.
__
The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority
has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology
of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was
reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls
who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the
group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been
enshrined in the group’s core tenets.
The
trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent
infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held,
viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated
fleet of buses used to transport them.
A
total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery,
including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And
the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from
deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and
dating is forbidden.
A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual
issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last
month. Repeatedly, the ISIS
leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran
and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to
elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial,
even virtuous.
“Every
time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old
girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and
was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by
The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first
initial because of the shame associated with rape.
,,,
In
the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses was waiting to take them
to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other girls and young
women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It was there
in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya” for the first time.
“They
laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know
what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State
leader explained it meant slave.
“He
told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray
— “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because
you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as
we see fit.”
The
Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women
and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no
widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious
minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights
Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government
officials and other human rights workers.
The Islamic State (IS) group has executed more than 2,000 people in
and around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul since seizing it in June
2014, officials said August 7.
They "assassinated in cold blood...2,070 residents of Nineveh
for...not cooperating with them," Iraqi Defense Minister Khalid
al-Obaidi said in a video posted on the ministry's website.
Parliament speaker Salim al-Jaburi called the mass executions a
"historical crime of genocide," while Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi
claimed that the killings came in response to IS's recent losses to
government forces in Anbar Province.
The names of 2,070 people were posted on a list compiled by the
militant group, part of which was displayed on a wall of the local
health ministry branch, several Mosul residents said.
The list came with an order from IS, which has administered Mosul
since taking over last year, for the ministry staff to deliver death
certificates.
Media official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Mosul, Said
Mimousini, said on Monday, that ISIS executed 19 women in Mosul,
attributing the cause to refusing the practice of the so-called sexual
jihad.
Mimousini said that “ISIS executed 19 women in the city
of Mosul during the past two days,” claiming that, “the penalty decision
came on the background of the refusal to participate in the practice of
sexual jihad.”
A Yazidi mother has told how her four-year-old son was taken from her to join an ISIS terror training camp
where he was forced to learn passages from the Koran, Sharia Law and
even given a sword and taught how to behead his own mother.
Bohar
– not her real name - could do little but watch as her young son was
handed a sword by their captors, who told him 'this is to kill your
mother'.
Later,
he revealed they were training him to chop people's heads off, shoot
guns and hate his own people, at an age when most children around the
world are just learning to read.
Her son was
never forced to carry out the perverted act - but his mother is adamant
if her son had stayed he would have been forced to kill for ISIS.
In
an exclusive interview, Bohar, 35, told MailOnline: 'ISIS trained my
son to learn the Koran, how to speak Arabic, how to pray and how to use a
sword.’
Speaking
from a refugee camp in Dohuk, northern Iraq, Bohar said: 'They told him
that Yazidis are Kafir, Arabic for ‘non-believers’ and told him he had
to fight them.
‘This one time the ISIS man gave him a sword and said this is to kill your mother.'
Bohar,
her son Hamo, not his real name, and her three other children were
captured by ISIS last August, just south-east of Sinjar Mountain.
Unable
to flee, they were imprisoned with 2,000 other Yazidi, from where they
were shunted between prisons in Tal-Afar and Badush in Mosul - as evil
ISIS militants decided their fate.
'In Badush prison ISIS took my eldest daughter and my eldest son who is 12. They took them to Syria,' she said.
'Some friends [later] told me my daughter and son were taken to Raqqa, where I believe they still are,' she added.
According to a local source in Kirkuk province, ISIS executed seven
civilians on Sunday on charges of “collaborating” with the Iraqi
government southwest of Kirkuk.
The source said that “ISIS
elements implemented a new crime against civilians; they executed seven
people on charges of spying with the Iraqi government and reporting ISIS
locations in the districts of Sharqat and Hawija (55 km southwest of
Kirkuk),” noting that, “the execution was carried out in the center of
Sharqat.”
Militants of ISIS executed four drivers north of Mosul, on charges of
smuggling Iraqi citizens to areas beyond the group’s control, local
sources said on Sunday.
“The drivers were helping Iraqi
families to reach the cities of the Kurdistan Region, before being
caught and executed by Daesh (IS),” a source in Mosul said on the
condition of anonymity.
“The four drivers were from the
Sharqata sub-district north of Mosul. They were executed on charges of
smuggling civilians to outside Mosul,” the source reported.
This picture shows the moment a small boy has a gash cut in his head as part of a Shi'ite Muslim Ashura ritual.
The tradition, which commemorates the death of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson, is seen by some Shi'ite Muslims as away of washing away their sins.
The Day of Ashura is a national holiday in some Muslim countries, with thousands taking part in annual rituals which include people whipping and cutting themselves with chains and knives.
In the last years of the twentieth century, two weapons changed the way that America fights air wars: smart bombs (bombs that “see” a target using a television camera or a radiation sensor, or that head for a programmed location) and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). Smart bombs came into their own in the first Gulf War. Reconnaissance UAVs proved their worth in Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, and offensive UAVs began firing missiles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere a few years later.
The American public got its first look at smart bombs on January 17, 1991. Iraq had invaded Kuwait five months earlier, and President George H. Bush had put together a UN-backed coalition to force its withdrawal. Iraq had the world’s fourth-largest army, at 955,000 men, and it faced a coalition force only two-thirds that size. America’s last experience of a real war had been the long disaster of Vietnam—nineteen years from start to finish, 58,000 American dead, and 153,000 wounded—and even experienced military officers feared that the Gulf War might be a reprise of Vietnam.
Gen. Edward Meyer, a former Army chief of staff, predicted that America would suffer ten thousand to thirty thousand casualties in driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein was counting on exactly that and reportedly told U.S. ambassador April Glaspie, “Americans cannot stand 10,000 dead.”
Americans watched the war in their living rooms. Tomahawk cruise missiles flew by journalists’ Baghdad hotel windows and blew up government buildings. One after another, American fighter planes “plinked” Iraqi tanks with Maverick missiles, and CNN replayed the video clips: the pilot locked the missile’s sensor onto the tank’s image, pushed a button, and the missile did the rest. By the time the coalition’s ground attack began in mid-February, the Iraqi army had already been seriously degraded. One Iraqi general said, “During the Iran war, my tank was my friend because I could sleep in it and know I was safe. . . . During this war my tank became my enemy. . . . [N]one of my troops would get near a tank at night because they just kept blowing up.” Although only 8 percent of the bombs dropped were smart bombs, they did 75 percent of the damage.
