The true motives behind Islamic State’s use of sexual slavery

Another look at ISIS's "theology of rape",,,

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 true motives behind Islamic State’s use of sexual slavery

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape - The New York Times

"He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.

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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.
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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.

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape - The New York Times

See also:

The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think

Sen. Jeff Sessions: Confederate Flag Represents "Fabulous Accomplishments"

Recently a friend posted the following in response to the attached:

Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republican party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as a change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new principles, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions — nothing less than an open declaration of war — for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans. Especially is this true in the cotton-growing States, where, in many localities, the slave outnumbers the white population ten to one.

It was his response to, “This is a huge part of who we are and the left is continually seeking, in a host of different ways, it seems to me, I don’t want to be too paranoid about this, but they seek to delegitimize the fabulous accomplishments of our country." In which he asks, "What fucking fabulous accomplishments? Fighting to keep other human beings enslaved?"

I was curious and found the document his cite comes from.  It was a letter from Stephen F. Hale, then a Commissioner from the State of Alabama to Ketucky Governor Beriah Magoffin dated December 27, 1860. Here is a bit more:

If the policy of the Republicans is carried out, according to the programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate — all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life; or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the country.

Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed,,,

Sad thing is, this is just one of many such documents that highlight "the fabulous accomplishments of our country."

Sen. Jeff Sessions: Confederate Flag Represents "Fabulous Accomplishments"

Why Does David Barton's History Of The Fight For Racial Equality Always End In The Mid-1960s? | Right Wing Watch

As we have noted before, David Barton's telling of the history of the fight for racial equality in America always mysteriously seems to stop right around the mid-1960s, right before the rise of the GOP's "Southern Strategy." Barton has written books and produced DVDs that claim to "set the record straight" on the role that both major political parties played in ending slavery, passing civil rights laws, and pushing for equality but his materials always portray Democrats are the enemies of black equality and conveniently never seem to make it beyond 1964.

On his radio program today, Barton sought to answer a question for a listener who wondered why, today, the Democrats are believed to be the party that fought to end slavery and for civil rights while the Republicans are believed to be the party that opposed such things.

The simple answer is "the Southern Strategy" and the fundamental shift that took place politically in the wake of civil rights gains when Democrats lost the support of white Southern voters as the party began to support civil rights in the 1960s and the GOP sought to win the support of those disaffected voters by appealing to them on contentious racial issues:


Why Does David Barton's History Of The Fight For Racial Equality Always End In The Mid-1960s? | Right Wing Watch

Costco, Wal-Mart Linked to Human Trafficking and Slavery Through Supplier CP Foods (COST, WMT)

The Guardian's investigation discovered that Thailand-based CP Foods, the world's largest shrimp and prawn farmer, purchases fishmeal (inedible "trash fish") from fishing boats manned by slaves to feed its farm-raised shrimps. CP Foods' shrimps are then sold to Costco, Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Tesco, and many other major supermarkets across the world in frozen or pre-cooked form.

Many of the enslaved men, from Myanmar and Cambodia, were lured to the slave ships by brokers who had promised to help them find work in Thailand's factories or construction sites. Instead, they were sold for as little as £250 ($424) each to boat captains. The slaves were reportedly chained, beaten, dosed with methamphetamines to keep going, and even executed at sea, according to the investigation.

What's even more horrifying is that CP Foods potentially acknowledged that slave labor was part of its supply chain. CP Foods' managing UK director, Bob Miller, admitted that the company knew that there were "issues with regard to the [raw] material that comes in."

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Thailand currently ranks 24th on the list of top offenders worldwide (calculated by percentage of population), with an estimated 473,000 slaves within its borders. India ranks fourth on that list, with nearly 14 million slaves -- considerably more than China, which still has nearly 3 million. But slavery is not restricted to developing and emerging markets -- there are actually 60,000 slaves in the U.S. and another 80,000 in Japan.

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But companies and corrupt governments are only half of the problem. Consumer demand for cheap products in developed nations has driven large companies overseas in a never-ending quest for low-cost labor. That "Wal-Mart mentality" lowers marketwide price expectations for goods and forces retailers to sell their products at the lowest possible margins. Although consumers benefit from this practice, it's unsustainable without the use of extensive outsourcing to politically unstable regions.

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Despite a long-standing policy restricting its vendors from using prison labor, one of Wal-Mart's main produce vendors, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Martori Farms, was found to be using female prisoners at its farms in 2011. In 2012, The Huffington Post reported that Wal-Mart was using prison laborers to strip serial numbers and UPC bar codes from returned and excess goods, which were then sold to after-market retailers.

Costco, Wal-Mart Linked to Human Trafficking and Slavery Through Supplier CP Foods (COST, WMT)

See also: Demanufacturing Wal-Mart: Profiting From Prison Labor 

 Wondering if this practice is still going on?

One thing you can say about Wal-Mart chain stores: at every link in the chain, someone is being exploited, from head to tail. The public knows next to nothing about the exploitation which takes place at the tail end of the business cycle -- something called "demanufacturing."

Every year, Wal-Mart has to dispose of millions of dollars worth of customer returns, buy-backs, over-stocks, shelf-pulls, scratch-and-dent, and excess inventories. The giant retailer sells this merchandise to liquidators, who scrub the products of any Wal-Mart serial numbers, UPC bar codes -- and then resell them to after-market retailers, who re-sell them to the public.

The workers used to strip these Wal-Mart products clean are often prisoner laborers, under a program made possible by the federal government. In effect, the liquidators are partially subsidized by federal taxpayers, who provide the 'demanufacturing' facilities, and cheap, captive labor -- usually female prisoners. This form of corporate welfare allows salvage companies to offer Wal-Mart a low price for their cast-off products.

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The federal law that makes this prison labor possible, the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP) was created by Congress in 1979 "to establish employment opportunities for inmates that approximate private-sector work... to place inmates in a realistic work environment, pay them the prevailing local wage for similar work, and enable them to acquire marketable skills..."

Texas Textbook Activist Insists Civil Rights Successes Led to ‘Burning and Looting,’ Slavery Was a Minor Cause of Civil War | TFN Insider

This comment I think sums it up well, "Just when we thought it was safe to go back in the classroom…"

Another sign that the social studies textbook adoption in Texas this year is going to be messy: A political activist who helped write new curriculum standards for the state’s public schools in 2009 is insisting that new textbooks under consideration this year should promote his revisionist views on issues such as slavery and the Civil War, the civil rights movement and church-state separation.

North Texas activist Bill Ames insisted in 2009 that the state’s previous social studies curriculum standards included an “overrepresentation of minorities” and had a leftist bias. He then served throughout the rest of the year on a state panel charged with drafting new curriculum standards for the high school U.S. history course. Don McLeroy, R-College Station, a State Board of Education (SBOE) member at the time, had insisted that the Texas Education Agency place Ames on the curriculum panel.

Although fellow curriculum panel members appear to have rejected many of Ames’ demands as they drafted the new standards, Ames was pleased when SBOE members heavily revised the draft document. He now praises the state’s social studies standards, but even the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has called the state’s U.S. history standards a “politicized distortion of history” with “misrepresentations at every turn.”


Texas Textbook Activist Insists Civil Rights Successes Led to ‘Burning and Looting,’ Slavery Was a Minor Cause of Civil War | TFN Insider

The Real Thomas Jefferson - NYTimes.com

 Definitely makes one go hmm,,,learned something new,,,

 Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.

There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.

But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.

The Real Thomas Jefferson - NYTimes.com