"...this is a form of psychological warfare. I interviewed countless women and girls who told me how repeatedly the fighters told them that they did not deserve to live...because they practice a religion other than Islam--and that because they are unbelievers, whatever the fighters do to them is justified."
That is a quote from a New York Times interactive, online discussion from today about sexual slavery conducted by ISIS.
The conglomerate ought to recognize its own thinking about how it treats its targets from that description, which could be universally applied to the thinking of every oppressive group in the world about the group(s) that it oppresses.
That's the address for the discussion.
"The Islamic State justifies the enslavement and systemic rape of female captives through self-serving appeals to obscure interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence that have long since been rejected by the vast majority of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims."
That's another quote from the article.
It's also a description that could be applied to the vicious, antiquated misogyny of the entertainment industry, which is intertwined with corporate media, and whose collective ability to manipulate public perception and the fates of politicians has poisoned the world since 2010.
The last century should have proven that when barbaric beliefs meet technology, catastrophe happens that reverberates forever.
"Forms of coercive labor on the informal or sub-state levels persist, for example, the use of debt bondage among migrant laborers in the Persian Gulf, but they are driven by economic factors instead of any interpretation of religious doctrine."
Slavery has always had the same purposes; those purposes haven't changed since the beginning of the human species.
"Many jihadists took the phones of...people they massacred or enslaved and called their family members...to taunt them. Many of them spoke to relatives of the women they were raping, to humiliate them and further traumatize them."
That's how the conglomerate has treated every relative that I have and every person whom I have met since 2010 who hasn't abused me.
"Many women who we work with are being abused verbally and emotionally by relatives who nevertheless are blaming them for their rapes..."
What about all the women whom the conglomerate blames for being raped, calls liars, accusing of liking or deserving to be sexually assaulted?
"An added layer of complication was that many of the wives, who had presumably married the fighter willingly, were seething at his sexual relationship with the slave--they were essentially jealous. And they punished the...slaves in whatever way they could."
This should all sound familiar to the conglomerate, which ought to stop its grimly laughable distortion of the word innovative.
"The Islamic State claims that it is re-instituting the practice of slavery, because it was part of the way Islam was practiced during the time of the Prophet Mohamed."
"Many journalists had written excellent articles in 2014 and early 2015, but the media hadn't dwelt on it to the degree that was warranted. (We) worked for a year to try to interest the media in a story that was largely met by suspicion and incredulity."
The media refused to think about what was happening because it was too busy promoting sexual abuse to care. It has not stopped promoting sexual abuse; other sections of the first page of New York Times's website are promoting sexual abuse today.
I hope that refugees aren't being sexually harassed and voyeuristically videotaped in showers and bathrooms in the countries where they are supposed to have asylum.
Everything in quotes is from the interactive discussion.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, March 17, 2016 @ 4:00 p.m.
