If I read this report correctly (from a pro-Kurdish Syrian media source), ISIS fighters stoned four married women to death for adultery not because they had previously committed adultery, but because the fighters forced the women to commit adultery by raping them in their homes, and then killing them for the crime.
The ISIS-led Sharia Court issued a decision to publicly execute the four women, without mentioning any details about the men with whom the victims have supposedly committed adultery.
“The four women were stoned to death on Thursday in front of a large crowd of people in central Mosul,” Zarari reported.
Speaking to ARA News in Mosul, media activist Abdullah al-Malla said: “The four women were most likely exposed to sexual abuse at the hands of ISIS militants before being driven out of their homes and transferred to the Sharia Court.”
“The statement of the Sharia Court regarding the case of those four women has avoided mentioning the men who have been involved in the alleged adultery,” the source said. “Apparently, the victims have been raped by ISIS jihadis and then stoned to death on charges of committing adultery.”
Now this story was also reported by the Independent and news.com.au, who support the claim of rape rather than adultery:
ISLAMIC State raped four Iraqi women before stoning them to death for ‘committing adultery’, according to local news reports.
The jihadis arrested the victims after they claimed to have caught them in the act.
At an ISIS-led sharia court they were sentenced to death by stoning, without the court mentioning any details of the men they had reportedly had sex with.
We have to take this with a grain of salt because details are hazy, but given ISIS’s history of wholesale sex slavery and rape, it is not out of the question. And if the women did commit adultery, their adulterous male partners are supposed to be executed as well, but we have no indication of that.
If this is true, it just compounds the barbarity of this group, and incidents like this can certainly not be laid at the door of “colonialism.” After all, the women were judged and found guilty by a sharia court. It’s like forcing someone to shoot somebody else, and then stoning them to death for murder.
sub
There is no foreign policy or use of reason and diplomacy to deal with scourge and end it. Our government’s denial of the threat and motive will continue to sanction this kind of atrocity. Individual lives don’t matter and the U.N. will not even acknowledge it.
> It’s like forcing someone to shoot
> somebody else,
> and then stoning them to death for murder.
More like being stabbed and then sentenced to death for bleeding.
Yes. I don’t think the murder analogy works either. Murder (under “normal” circumstances) is a crime, being raped is not.
Anyway, incredibly tragic story.
Maybe ISIS doesn’t understand satire. “Just a flesh wound.” must be what they think they hear from their victims.
re “It’s like forcing someone to shoot somebody else, and then stoning them to death for murder.”
Not exactly, however.
cuz human men can shoot human women or women can shoot men. And then, further, be murdered for doing so.
Likely w ISIS and FLIP / REVERSE, however ? that is, with human women raping human men ? And then those men being stoned to death ? That isn’t gonna happen. Is it ? Really ?
.Only. with a seemingly endless (over All the World over All of Time) ‘acceptance’ of woman – loathing is this = what is being reported here = ‘able’ to occur.
I don’t get it. It is of absolutely NO wonderment to me whatsoever anymore as to why I .now. always wish to remain a hermitess, a recluse.
Blue
I do not even want to travel anywhere.
I did. I used to want to. India, in particular. And to Costa Rica. And to the savannas and animals of Africa. But now ?
Not anymore. I see and hear, every single day, nearly over all of Asia, nearly over all of Africa, nearly over all of the South and Central Americas and within my own Northern Hemispheric backyard .this sort of. behavior. Against girls and women.
So why would I go out and about and i) risk it anywhere other than at where my entire body can feel .and be. — day to day — safe to exist or ii) want to ?
Blue
I think you’d be in no more danger in most of Costa Rica than you are in most of the States.
More or less on-topic, there was a recent BBC4 program about TV programs about the Crusades, looking at the different ways the Crusades have been covered over the years.
His main conclusion was that in reality the Crusades were a far bigger deal in the west than in the east, and that westerners tend to exaggerate their importance.
He didn’t mention the corollary, that present-day third world ruling classes tend to bang on about the crusades largely in order to distract attention away from their own corruption and incompetence.
This sort of thing has been going on in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan or Pakistan for a long time. I recall a case of a woman raped in front of several witnesses. Alas, female witnesses, who only count as half a witness. You need 4 full witnesses to prove rape in sharia, but not to prove adultery. The victim was executed.
That was in 1984.
It’s happened often since.
However much the details in this current incident are hazy, ISIS has clearly been committing crimes that send us reeling in their barbarity and lack of humanity.
And I am still left wondering: Why?
What is it that is driving these ISIS members to such levels of depravity?
Sure we can point to how they are interpreting their holy text as justification for many atrocities.
But that doesn’t seem to really get to the bottom of it, since the text is often interpreted differently, much more peaceably, by many Muslims. So we are still left explaining why one set of people, ISIS, is driven to interpret the text to justify
the most sinister acts possible.
That’s not to say ISIS is only bringing their own desires to scripture, and not taking any from scripture. Certainly there must be a feed-back loop from desires to interpretation which results in new desires, so new desires are drawn from scriptural commands…but there is still
non-scriptural elements in there to understand this phenomenon. And why ISIS are drawn to producing the type of mayhem they do still strikes me as puzzling.
Lord of the Flies.
There are various lines in their holy texts which are used as guidance. i expect some are a matter of interpretation (always interpreted in an especially barbaric way).
Anyway, the relevant matter here are guidelines about a married woman committing adultery. In this instance the woman is to be stoned.
My hunch, which is mine, is that the rapes were discovered, and in order to put to right the souls of the rapers the victims were declared adulterers, and then stoned.
They are evil people, but they go beyond evil to complete depravity because of their religion.
Probably the same reasons as Nazis committed atrocities. Humans have a very dark side.
Diana,
I know, in some sense, humans have a dark side.
But these people are doing things I just can’t even access in my brain. It’s hard to imagine WANTING to do the types of things they do to other human beings – and not just having no conscience about the acts, delighting in them.
Surely they can’t all be naturally psychopaths, yet it’s like they’ve all been turned into serial killers.
That crossed my mind too.
Atrocities in wartime are not new.
The difference is that *most* regimes – even the Nazis – had a sense of shame and usually tried to cover them up. ISIS are so completely deranged they boast about them.
cr
Though I suppose we should bear in mind PCC’s comment “We have to take this with a grain of salt because details are hazy”
It’s possible the women were raped by non-ISIS, or even having affairs and denounced to the ‘authorities’. Whichever way, their judicial murder is obscene.
I just suppose that if we’re going to blow ISIS to shreds (would that it were so simple), we should be doing it for well-confirmed reasons. Of which there are more than enough.
cr
Yes but the dark side is facilitated by righteous thinking – traditional religion or else extreme ideologies (which in my mind are the secular version of religion, a hangover of philosophy – which is context free, abstracting and looks for absolute laws that never apply to humans cos we’re such an utterly messy lot in our social interactions, different group interests, and different individual experiences and problem solving).
Where u have something that actually boils down to metaphysics because it doesnt do a careful survey of the situation to look at what Most Likely is the case you get the historical and traditionalist outcome – domination oriented traditionalist religious and tribal nationalist style outcomes.
And another thing philosophy assumes. It assumes different groups and different cultures and societies ultimately have the same morality. Well no they don’t. I mean a successful traditionalist morality tends to push a group to reproduce more and fight outsiders to the group – in preindustrial times when there were no technological fixes to increase food production, provide clean water and basic health and disease prevention to slash infant mortality in particular, and regulate population other than by disease and war. Morality today has to be about explicitly humane objectives – better material outcomes and minimum of subordination or exploitation for the most people in terms of what is feasible in given circumstances. Im also a believer that a society has to have territory to function as a cultural unit (Ie to be self sustaining reproductively and therefore also Economically) unit or at least be bound by laws of intermarriage and commitment to a cause (to support each other economically, and in terms of family care). So territorial societies have to think in terms of survival of the community within it too – just not be aggressive about it.
There have been equally unfair sentences in Saudi Arabia. One I recall is a woman sentenced to prison time plus 50 lashes for adultery. Her crime? She went out without a male relative and was raped. Oh, and she was SINGLE. However, the rape resulted in pregnancy, and single women don’t get pregnant.
It is normal for rape victims in Saudi to be convicted of a crime as they have often broken the law by being out without a male relative. Therefore, rape is rarely reported and SA can say the bags are protecting the women.
i expect she provoked him; drawing attention to her wanton femaleness by wearing a burka…
Wasn’t there a Saudi cleric in the recent past who wanted to ban pregnant women from going out in public because the pregnancy was a sign of their sin and uncleanliness?
i’m sorry about my last post; it reads as too flippant,when i was trying to express anger at the sick ridiculousness of the ‘logic’.
i apologise unreservedly if anyone feels i may be making light of rape.
I read it exactly as you intended it, neil. Nothing wrong with black humor–see Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, George Carlin, etc., etc.
I don’t know that one, though it sounds 100% plausible. I do know of an extremely popular imam who raped his 5-year-old daughter to death, but was released after a few months after paying “blood money.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-preacher-who-raped-and-tortured-his-five-year-old-daughter-to-death-is-released-after-paying-8480440.html
How can there possibly so many human monsters in the world in the 21st century?
Yes, I find Saudi Arabia even more disturbing because they are a nation that has existed for so long. Of course, ISIS most likely exists because of Saudi Arabia, as does most of the extremism we see today.
Exactly – it’s the Wahhabism spread from SA that DAESH is using. There’s virtually no difference in their sentencing practices for many things, and SA is a respected nation state that leads a Human Rights committee at the UN.
Here’s a comparison of some of SA’s vs DAESH’s punishments: http://www.heatherhastie.com/suemesaudi/
I do not exclude a future in which ISIS becomes something like Saudi Arabia, with embassies and strategic partnerships with Western countries.
Wow, talk about your “problem of evil” …
Like something out of “The Grand Inquisitor” from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
Some thoughts on this.
Their is nothing here but life without reason.
Sharia law is not a law of/for humanity it is a law for the maintenance of power. Most of it delusional based and with that,
a mind locked in some ancient time is not a mind we should cower too, ever.
And on the extremely rare occasions in which adulterous male partners are convicted, there is actually a different type of stoning for men. Traditionally, if a victim of a stoning sentence can free themself before dying, they are allowed back into society. Not surprisingly, then, male victims of stonings are buried only up to their waists, while females are buried up to their necks.
I hate these Reports ,it puts me in such a rage it ruins my Day, how i would love to ruin their Day instead.
My understanding is that the Salafists don’t like to be called ‘Wahhabists’, even though al Wahhabi is considered to be a historical precursor. They have turned many formerly easy-going & tolerant areas into clenched theocratic ghettos in India & SE Asia because civil society is willing to accommodate many religious crochets whereas religious demands upon civil societies have a built-in ratchet.