Globe Trot: ISIS abuse victims include Christians and Yazidis

ISIS: The graphic detail of yesterday’s must-read story in The New York Times, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape,” is a disturbing look at the—strangely and really just astonishingly overlooked—crimes against humanity visited on Yazidi women and girls.

A fuller examination of ISIS’s awful practices would have included atrocities against Christians, rather than downplaying them as the Times story did. Also, as justly provocative as the headline is, the term “theology” is loaded, part of a narrative to label as “extremist” all serious religious devotion, not simply the adherence that leads to mass rapes.

Today I spoke, as I’ve been doing, with a health official in Iraqi Kurdistan who is supervising trauma counseling and medical attention for more than 700 women and girls abused by ISIS. He said they include Yazidis, Christians, Turkmen, and Kurds. He is seeing 20-30 new cases per week in his one city and said the medical situation is critical: “I am really always afraid of collapse.” More to come on this.

CUBA:Today the American flag rose over the U.S. embassy in Havana for the first time since 1961.

KOREA: Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the armistice that divided the Korean Peninsula—and the legacy of the first Christian missionaries in the 1800s could not look more different from North to South Korea.

SOUTH SUDAN: President Barack Obama’s “aggressive, threatening” style may do more harm than good in South Sudan negotiations, considering that both sides are already at the negotiating table.

WEEKEND LISTEN: In a lengthy interview, Gimli the Dwarf says we have “lost our moral compass completely” and highlighted the runaway train of Islamic terror: “People are being enslaved and killed because they are Christians. And your country and my country are doing nothing about it.”

NOTE: I’m bowled over by all the well-wishing and welcome upon the return of Globe Trot. Wow. Thank you for your support and interest in what’s going on in the world.

Also a reader offered this correction to the Monday item on the “French fighter” found in Germany:

The plane in question is P47 Thunderbolt, an American plane that wasn’t a jet. The French were occupied during WWII (apart from Vichy France) and didn’t have any jets—their technology was light-years behind the Germans. Only the Germans had jets (ME 262, AR 234, etc.).