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Why ISIS must be stopped ASAP

#1
Magical Realist Online
I looked at some articles with that title. There were the usual reasons: they are destroying ancient antiquities, they are using chemical weapons, they are a terrorist threat to the West. But for me the biggest reason is in what these thugs do to women. Thousands of women and girls kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. I saw one interview with a girl who desribed her horrific ordeal. She was basically strapped to a bed for 3 months while dozens of men raped her everyday! This suffering must stop. It is the lowest and most vile violation of human rights one can imagine. It's not like women over there aren't already viewed as possessions to be used and abused. But now they're being treated like animals. We need to move in and stamp out ISIS permanently. There is no excuse for letting this unimaginable torture of innocent women and girls go on another day!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWn6ed9u8s8
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#2
C C Offline
The greater tragedy is that it's not just ISIS, but a global pandemic. With especially extreme levels involving hundreds of thousands of women and children that have been degraded and mutilated in the Congo:

"Men singly or in gangs rape women and girls of all ages. (Recorded victims range in age from 2 months to 83 years.) Men also cut off women's nipples or breasts, mutilate or cut off external genitalia, and eviscerate living pregnant women to remove and kill fetuses. After rape, men commonly insert foreign objects into the vagina: sticks, sand, rocks, knives, burning wood or charcoal, or molten plastic made by melting shopping bags. Killing the rape victim by firing a handgun or rifle inserted in the vagina is a common practice; some victims have survived. Rapists have blinded many women, apparently to prevent identification, and left countless others to die in the forest after chopping off their arms and/or legs. Soldiers also abduct women, and especially girls as young as 10 or 11, as captive 'wives.' Some escaped women and girls report being chained to trees for months, released only to be gang-raped, day after day. Many report witnessing the death of other captive women and girls, murdered as disciplinary examples or abandoned in the forest when they were no longer 'serviceable.'" --Mass Rape in the Congo: A Crime Against Society

Arguably a slightly less degree of sexual violence transpiring in South Africa and other countries of the continent. [Do measurements and comparisons for this kind of horror really matter?]

Ironically, Nordic countries that pioneered early sex education / liberation, and have been applauded for gender equality, account for the highest percentages of sexual violence in Europe: One-third of EU women affected

Historically, the American military has had "post-frontier era" stains on its character like the My Lai Massacre:

"Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps. Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machine-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed." --Sam Harris from The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Japanese forces, of course, seized vast numbers of sex slaves in the countries it occupied during WW II:

"By the end of World War II, the Japanese military had comfort stations in all their occupied territories, 'manned' by women abducted or recruited under false pretenses. Some were prepubescent. The women’s living arrangements varied, depending on who ran their station and the soldiers who came through. Most worked in cubicles that had curtains for doors and were just big enough for two people to lie down. One woman in a Taiwan station reported that on Saturdays, so many soldiers came that 'the ends of the queues were sometimes invisible… Each woman had to serve 20 to 30 soldiers a day. We were already very weak, but going without good food and being forced to serve so many men left some of us half dead.' Officially, the women were to receive part of what soldiers paid, but that too varied. Regardless, the cost of clothes and toiletries came out of their meager earnings. Indeed, the women were treated as prisoners. They were rarely allowed out of their stations, and then only under guard. Sometimes a crazed or drunk soldier beat or tortured them, even hacking off a breast or burning their genitals." http://www.historynet.com/korean-comfort...slaves.htm

Rape and sex slavery was similarly approved as a demoralizing agent during the Bosnian War and genocide, where large numbers of women were kept in captured hotels and other facilities to service troops of the opposing side:

"During the Bosnian War, and the Bosnian genocide, the violence assumed a gender-targeted form through the use of rape. While men from all ethnic groups committed rape, the great majority of rapes were perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) and Serb paramilitary units, who used genocidal rape as an instrument of terror as part of their programme of ethnic cleansing. Estimates of the total number of women raped during the war vary. The European Union estimates a total of 20,000, while the Bosnian Interior Ministry claims 50,000. The UN Commission of Experts identified 1,600 cases of rape, while experts connected to UNHRC provided evidence of 12,000 rapes. Other estimates range from 12,000 to 50,000."

There's also a smaller but very significant number of men being systematically raped in these cultures, conflicts, collapses of order, etc. Most go unreported, due to not only the usual stigma which rape receives but additional factors:

". . . they face social alienation. In a region where a man is naturally considered as the head of family, and where homosexuality remains a taboo, a sodomised man loses his place in society. They are mocked and rejected. “The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man. Those men in the bush made you their wife.’ ” one of the men interviewed by the New York Times said. Hence the nickname 'bush wives'." http://www.afrik-news.com/article16039.html

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/...ape-of-men

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/...congo.html
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#3
Magical Realist Online
It's hard to believe that human beings can sink to such perversity and cruelty. I mean even allowing for the mob mentality and the consequential anonymity that comes from being in a marauding gang, there's simply no empathic bridge to understand how this sort of psychopathy arises in otherwise decent and civilized males. With serial killers we can always fall back on a diseased brain. They were just insane. But with otherwise normal soldiers and villagers? There's no rationalization for such a total suspension of empathy and respect in such monsters. I suppose it has to do with the hatred for the "other" that is stirred up in wartime. The systematic genocidal dehumanization of whole ethnicities and nationalities by the conquering regime. But what happens when this is all over with? How do these men sleep at night years later, when they have to reactivate all the normal values of becoming a functioning member of society again? Maybe they don't. Maybe memories of what they became out there on those dark nights haunt them for the rest of their lives, till they end up committing suicide. I'd certainly like to think so, with my somewhat naive and idealistic justice narrative.
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#4
elte Offline
There builds in the fighters a feeling of extreme competition that outlets itself additionally in over the top horniness.  They are already lowering their moral guard in engaging in a process sanctioned by their "side" as acceptable for "the righteous cause."  Once the moral doors are broken down, it isn't hard to engage in extraneous activity (like rape) to the actual fighting.
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#5
C C Offline
(May 12, 2016 09:36 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] But what happens when this is all over with? How do these men sleep at night years later, when they have to reactivate all the normal values of becoming a functioning member of society again? Maybe they don't. Maybe memories of what they became out there on those dark nights haunt them for the rest of their lives, till they end up committing suicide. I'd certainly like to think so, with my somewhat naive and idealistic justice narrative.


In the film "The Act of Killing", Anwar Congo and a few others do occasionally express something resembling remorse or of having tormented thoughts over the years. While others still seemed unscathed by the slayings and torture of circa a million people in Indonesia decades ago. Perhaps due to feeling that they're absolved by some aura of that communist purge / intimidation having been government sanctioned, or maybe they were just the natural born psychopaths, sadists, and homicidal maniacs among those original death squads and gangs.

I vaguely remember a clip of an actual television interview inserted into the film where the hostess seemed to be addressing the dated topic of the '65-'66 massacres as cheerfully as Kathy Lee and Regis on that long-bygone American morning talk show. Maybe reflecting a general apathy or feeling of the Indonesian public that the killings / torture were a justified response of that era; though the survivors and descendants of the victims would have hardly felt so dispassionate if they still weren't afraid to speak in front of cameras.

The movie meanders into some really weird, grotesque / surreal scenes, but as Joshua Oppenheimer claims: "the film is essentially not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which genocide has, paradoxically, been effaced [yet] celebrated – in order to keep the survivors terrified, the public brainwashed, and the perpetrators able to live with themselves [...] It never pretends to be an exhaustive account of the events of 1965. It seeks to understand the impact of the killing and terror today, on individuals and institutions."
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#6
Ben the Donkey Offline
It isn't about the human cost for me. There are 6 billion or so people in the world, I find it difficult to get emotional about a few thousand.
People have been killed in the name of one ideal or another since time immemorial (literally).

But when it comes to the destruction on historical artifacts in the middle east, I tend to get a little teary. 
If you destroy a thousand year old Mosque, I'll rip one arm off and drop you in the ocean for the sharks to snack on.
No doubt, guilt, or second thoughts, whatsoever.
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