Religion is patriarchy, and patriarchy is female oppression. Always.
QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
[…] 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.
[…] 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.
Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran as “People of the Book.”
Maybe Bill Cosby was just practicing his religion.
Not much difference between these conservative so-called Muslim perverts and Trump’s lawyers, or the Duggar apologists, or any conservative so-called Xtian . . . if there is any difference at all. Scared men victimizing the weak and justifying it with lies.
As long as these patriarchal religions hold sway, mother earth is doomed. They are all terrorists. Distinctions between any of the “people of the book” is just a matter of degree.
If all of their predatory ways were not enforced by terrorism against women, who would buy their pitch for a nanosecond? A bunch of guys screech from the rooftops that men are the source of all life, but women much shut up because actually giving life makes us beasts unfit to participate in our own communities as adult citizens.
Telling people to do all sorts of subhuman things that benefit sociopathic rulers because they will be rewarded with eternal bliss after death has to be the best scam ever run in the history of scams. Only the dead know it was a lie, which makes organized resistance challenging.