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Canadian Jews and Friends of Yazidis held a vigil in downtown Toronto to raise awareness of the plight of the Yazidis of northern Iraq. Cries of “Never Again” rang out over the noise of traffic.
One year ago, ISIS launched a genocidal attack against the Yazidi people of northern Iraq. The killing and enslavement of women and children continues unabated to this day. Five thousand Yazidi men have been murdered. An estimated 7,000 women and girls were captured, raped repeatedly and sold as sex slaves.
Marking a year since the onslaught began, hundreds attended a vigil last Monday in the heart of downtown Toronto, at the corner of Bloor and Yonge Streets, in order to raise public awareness of a tragedy that is scarcely reported in the media and which is ignored by the UN and the world.
Passersby stopped in their tracks at the sight of a line of black-clad and hooded women, chained, walking silently back and forth. A group of Yazidi men, women and children held signs that told of their people’s suffering. Cries of “Never Again” rang out over the noise of traffic. Most were finding out for the first time of ISIS mass victimization of Yazidi civilians and of the murder, forcible displacement, enslavement and torture of an innocent and ancient people.
Like the Jewish people in the 1930s, they have been abandoned by the world. The killing and enslavement of women and children continues unabated to this day. There are roughly 430,000 living in refugee camps in northern Iraq and Turkey in unbearable living conditions. Founder of Israel Truth Week, Mark Vandermaas called ISIS “the new Nazis,” but this time they’re wearing black hoods instead of brown shirts.
According to a slave price list for children and women, circulated by the Islamic State, boys and girls between the ages of one and nine cost an IS terrorist $165.00 and thousands for outsiders. Girls from the age of 10 through their teens are sold for $124.00, while women over 20 are the cheapest.
“The girls get peddled like barrels of petrol,” said Zainab Bangura, the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict. “One girl can be sold and bought by five or six different men. Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom.”
“I am a child of Holocaust survivors, so I know what persecution is,” cried out Marsha Matheson, who, along with Rananah Gemeiner, a year ago founded Canadian Jews and Friends of Yazidis, the group that organized the vigil. “We will not stand by silently while Yazidi girls, slaves to ISIS, pray to be bombed to end their hell.”
“Our voices must be their voices,” Alan Herman, co-chair of Canadian Jewish Institute of Jewish Research, told the crowd. “Their plight must be our plight”.
Speaker after speaker urged Canadians to phone or email their political representatives to help with humanitarian aid, supply weapons to help the victims protect themselves and provide Canadian asylum for Yazidi refugees. Petitions to the government were signed by hundreds. They will be personally delivered to the political leadership.
“We are a peaceful nation,” said a young Yazidi man. “We are being killed because we are not Muslim, because we refuse to give up our land on Sinjar Mountain, because we refuse to give up our religion and culture. If you don’t help us it will soon be too late.”
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