The slow-motion genocide in progress on Mount Sinjar.
The refugees are facing extreme temperatures and have little water, let alone food.
Britain was forced to abort a second airdrop of humanitarian aid to the Yazidis on Monday, over fears about hitting the people below, a military spokesman said.
Another attempt to deliver desperately needed food and water to the refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar is likely to take place within the next 24 hours.
Never be The Wrong Kind of Person. People who are The Wrong Kind of Person may find themselves dying of dehydration on Mount Sinjar or in the New Orleans Superdome.
Where is the international outrage about this and where are the demonstrations by all those anti-war groups always so quick to spring into action when a conflict involves Israelis?
ISIS are utterly inhuman.
@Decker: Perhaps their inhumanity is the reason. We don’t demonstrate against volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, because those mass killers won’t pay any attention to outrage and demonstrations. Neither will ISIS, as far as anyone can tell. Or if they do, they will most likely take it as a sign that they are doing something right.
Israelis, on the other hand, do care about international opinion. So expressing outrage could actually have some effect.
@Decker,
You must not have read a newspaper, watched a TV news broadcast or heard a radio news show in the last couple of months. In the ones I’ve read, watched & heard there has been universal condemnation of, and disgust at, the actions of ISIS/IS. From Government ministers/spokespeople, from political leaders, from opposition parties, from media commentators, from BTL commenters and radio show callers.
The key difference with the situation in Israel/Palestine is the positions taken by our governments and much of the media. Which if you think about it for a minute or two might help you figure out what the demonstrations were all about and who they were aimed at.
ISIS is a love child from the 2003 Iraq War… you can guess its parents, they are both westerners.
And some people are arguing for MORE western warfare to ‘solve’ the problem.
Others are just implying war is what they want, dancing coyly round the subject, don’t-mention-the-war style, talking only of the evil that is ISIS.
Yes, ISIS is evil. But it’s not alone in that regard. The US has been continuously at war with Iraq for 25 years, variously killing, maiming and executing Iraqis using drones and bombs in blood-curdling ways at different times over that period.
It has to stop. No more drones. No more bombs.
Stop the War
Actually ISIS is just the latest incarnation of the minority Sunni Saddam Hussein regime that spent decades systematically oppressing the majority Shia.
The de-Baathification of the government and demobilizing of the army brought the majority Shia population into power, allowing systematic oppression of the Sunnis. This caused the Sunnis, most of which left the army with their weapons and training intact, to to join the Sunni led Al-Qaeda and related organizations, to form militia ,and withdrawal toward the west where they joined the original majority Sunni forces fighting against Assad in Syria.
Over time the character of the resistance in Syria would change as more Shia fighters arrived from Iran and Lebanon and the Shia resistance forces started to fight the Sunni resistance forces. Caught in a bloody stalemate with nationalist Syrian forces and taking casualties from better equipped and trained Iranian forces they moved back to Iraq where the divided and outgunned Iraqi forces fled before now experienced Sunni organization flying the banner of ISIS.
This is far more accurately characterized as the continuation of a Sunni versus Shia war that goes back centuries. Granted the false and foolish invasion of Iraq didn’t make the conflict any simpler. Nor did it help stabilize things. But the US intervention didn’t cause the original divide.
Exi5tentialist – as one who has strongly opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and who agrees in general with your take on the situation, I have to say I support taking limited “kinetic action” (they do like their euphemisms, don’t they) for the narrowly defined purpose of somewhat upping the chance of survival of the Yazidis trapped on the mountain.
One of the things I’m waiting for in this crisis is for some preacher or other overly religious type to find out the Yazidis are believed by some to be Satan worshippers, and use that fact to attack Obama. Then he can be a Muslimofascisotsatanisocialist.
Tim @ 7:
It’s already happened Tim. Google Bryan Fischer… Poe’s Law…
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bryan-fischer-agrees-isis-yazidis-are-devil-worshippers-says-thats-why-obama-defends-them