The death toll from a series of bombings and mortar shells that ripped through a northern Iraqi district overnight may reach 500 people, al-Jazeera television reported Wednesday.From NPR: General Calls Attack on Yazidis "Ethnic Cleansing"
... BBC reported earlier that there had been rising tensions between Yazidis and Muslims in the area north-west of Mosul. The latest tensions concerned the reported stoning in April by Yazidis of a girl from their community who had converted to Islam.
The attacks stirred angry reactions and accusations. [Iraqi] President Jalal Talabani called the act "another episode of the annihilation war that religious terrorism has waged against the Iraqi people."
"This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will, almost genocide," U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told CNN. Mixon said the Yazidis — the Kurdish sect that was targeted — live in a very remote part of Ninevah province where there is little security and has been no need for military forces. However, the Yazidis are sometimes targeted by Muslim extremists, who consider the Yazidis to be infidels.From Voltaire:
"What to say to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of Heaven by slitting your throat?"We can only imagine what kind of filth wants to kill themselves and 500 human beings over the difference between which imaginary friend they each worship, and which particular implements they use.
500 people! Killed over a theological row. This is genocide, but it is not ethnic cleansing: this is a religious killing. This is barbarity that only a belief in stone age superstition can explain--and that it is stone age is illustrated by the barbaric killing that set it off.
It's impossible to get inside the head of someone who would want to do that (either to stone someone for worshipping a different imaginary friend, or to want to blow oneself up and take down 500 other human beings at the same time); someone who would take the opportunity of the removal of a dictator not to work for a better world (or even for their own chance at happiness on this earth, which the removal of a dictator once offered), but instead to dredge up hatred and to kill himself and in the name of stone age barbarism and a rotten, man-hating superstition.
Ladies and gentlemen, in what's been declared Islam Awareness Week, we are once again counting the cost of Islamic intolerance. It's a cost that is being counted in human bodies.
3 comments:
"What to say to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of Heaven by slitting your throat?"
Great quote.
This captures something important.
A couple of days ago I had a go at Berend for condemning islam. It annoyed me that a christian would say that, but at the time I didn't understand why. I think I now know, and the quote from Voltaire captures it.
It is not that christians today pose a threat to others in the same way muslim fundamentalists do.
It is that both religions cite god as an absolute authority, and many members of each religion use that authority to harm others in varying ways.
Berend was criticising the beating of wives. I strongly suspect that where that happens in the muslim community it is in good part due to the belief in the absolute authority of their deity and, therefore, a belief in the right to operate according to the rules of that religion whatever the law says. In other words, muslim men who beat their wives use the absolute authority of their god to trample on the rights of others.
Now christians don't generally beat their wives or become terrorists, but many cite their god as an absolute authority and believe this gives the values they take from bible to be intrinsically superior to the values of others. This justifies suppression of others rights, not (usually) in the form of terrorism but in other ways like forbidding trade at Easter or banning certain kinds of expression and attacking the homosexual minority.
What troubled me about Berend's comment was not that he himself is beating his wife, but that as a christian he may well believe in the same idea that leads muslims to do horrible things: the absolute authority of god and the right to suppress the rights of others as a result.
To paraphrase Voltaire: "What to say to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of Heaven by preventing you from buying beer on Sunday?"
Great commentary there Pedter.
Makes my daily postings at No Minister on Islam Awareness Week seem somewhat tame.
But the death toll for the kurds must have risen overnight. It was just 200 when i posted.
My, the Islamofacists are busy.
...but that as a Christian he may well believe in the same idea that leads Muslims to do horrible things.
I remember speaking to a Baptist type of person about the destruction of the giant statues at Bamyan and he couldn't deny that he thought destroying them was a good thing from a Christian perspective. They were idols after all.
Yet I don’t think that Christians believe in 72 virgins and those innocents who get killed in the bombings get a free pass to heaven. I'm being specific here yet it seems to be a matter of degree. What motivates the suicide bomber and his masters is a human thing and Christians are humans too, I guess, as are atheists. If you believe that the innocent will be rewarded and that the guilty will get their just desserts and that life on Earth is just a fleeting thing then it all seems logical. There seems to be very little thought given to those left behind such as the maimed, widowed and orphaned though. It is the will of Allah that some must suffer.
We all have a serious problem on our hands. Western societies are fracturing under the burden of multi-culturism. Check out this scholarly study. The fracturing in some ways is a good thing for the individual as it relieves him of the burden of being oppressed by the collective and he can retreat to his house is my castle mentality for the short term. All over the Western world people are avoiding their diverse neighbours and retreating from social and civic life. There can be no collective focus on defeating the enemy as in the old days. No will to victory backed by the rock solid notion that your culture is supreme. We have been divided and may one day be ruled by the barbaric moralists we are too weak to resist.
It's a pity as the solution was quite simple. If everything is the will of Allah then so is the destruction that can be brought to bear on the enemy the will of Allah. Intensely destructive high altitude bombing of troublesome regions such as parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq could be portrayed as Allah's lightening bolts from heaven punishing them for their sins. This is genuinely showing respect for their beliefs and that should be pointed out and possibly celebrated - it's not a war crime if it's the will of Allah. Rewarding them with aid and reconstruction and allowing them to immigrate to our lands would give entirely the wrong message I would have thought. Even though fewer people would perish, as trouble would be nipped in the bud, this sort of action is almost unthinkable now and all we can hope for is that some day they will come to their senses.
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