Last Monday, a German woman and former member of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) group was given a 10-year prison sentence by a Munich court for letting a Yazidi girl enslaved in Iraq die of thirst.
According to Iraq Solidarity News,
The defendant was “found guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity through enslavement, attempted murder and aiding and abetting the war crime of attempted murder by omission, and membership in a foreign terrorist organisation,” according to a statement released by the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The landmark case was one of the first trials in the world in which an ISIS member was convicted of war crimes against the Yazidis, a religious and ethnic minority persecuted and enslaved by ISIS in Iraq and in Syria.
An estimated 10,000 Yazidi people were killed in northern Iraq in the mass atrocities. About 7,000 Yazidi women and girls, some as young as nine, were enslaved and forcibly transferred to locations in Iraq and eastern Syria, notes Iraq Solidarity News.
It is hard for me to fathom that these crimes against humanity occurred on such an unimaginable, massive scale against one group of people because of their religious beliefs in the 21st century. It brings to mind the atrocities against Muslims during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and the Nazis targeting Jewish people (and other “undesirables”) during WWII.
Where did all this hate come from?
Is it a sense of entitlement + blind passion for one’s religion that makes one want to be “pure” – and thus expecting everyone around to be the same? Plus a good dose of assholery that makes one think they are better and above the law than anyone who doesn’t follow their interpretation of whatever religion the perpetrator of violence chose?
There are fundamentalists of varying extremes in every branch of religion, whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and whatever else -ism there is out there.’
I don’t begrudge anyone practicing their religious beliefs, be it privately at home or in a sanctuary with fellow worshippers; if it gives their life meaning and purpose, good for them.
But when religious leaders and followers use the name of their Almighty to justify and condone violence against others because of their contempt of others who don’t share their beliefs, when they want to be the morality police and shove religion down people’s throats through imposing a theocracy over their fellow citizens…well, I sure as hell don’t want anything to do with them or their beliefs. Do you?
Witch trials, wars, genocide…how many of those were done in the name of God to “cleanse the world of evil” throughout the centuries? It’s sick.
The German defendant and her ISIS spouse “purchased” a Yazidi woman and her 5-year old child, as household “slaves” in Mosul in 2015. Mother and child were held captive for about six weeks and “subjected to almost daily beatings which the defendant often instigated,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in a statement.
I’m glad some measure of justice has come for the mother of her late child. Is 10 years enough punishment for six weeks of sheer terror and a dead child? The husband is facing trial end of November as well. The mother will never get her daughter back and goodness knows what abuses and terror both had to endure.
One can only hope that those responsible for crimes against humanity will have their day in court, be held accountable, and punished to the fullest extent of the law. And not just everyday citizens like the German defendant and her spouse who enslaved and abused a family and killed a child through neglect, but people in positions of power, too. Hold all of them accountable for the world to see.
Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.
~ Voltaire
Sources