The New York Times recently revealed a devastating report stating that hundreds of girls as young as 11 have been raped and impregnated by members of Boko Haram. The radical Islamist sect has long targeted girls, including the 300 mostly Christian schoolgirls they kidnapped last year. These are actions of evil too terrible to imagine much less personally endure.
Popular Christian writer Ann Voskamp recently visited refugees in Northern Iraq who had fled ISIS. She noticed 5 and 7-year old girls among the families, but no 9-year-olds. The reason for what she saw was that ISIS sells 9-year-old girls in slave bazaars. Voskamp wrote, “They are categorized. Stripped, shipped naked, examined and distributed. They are sold and passed around like meat and livestock.” Many are kept in large stark rooms indefinitely and just wait there each day to be selected at a moments notice to face the most cruel and inhumane treatment we can imagine.
One UN representative confirmed that females are sold as sexual slaves for $43. The price rises to $172 for the youngest between ages 1–9. There was one report of a girl was “married” more than 20 times, each time forced to undergo surgery to “restore” her virginity.
It is well known that ISIS has institutionalized sexual violence and the brutalization of women as a central aspect of their ideology and operations. They do it for a variety of reasons. Their goals are to totally destabilize and demoralize a community, to placate other insurgent groups, increase their own numbers or to fund their own terrorist campaigns.
But recently there have been comments made by some leaders in the U.S. congress, and by the President himself, about what is the most serious issue in this present hour. It was not the wickedness that so many are today facing around the world. Instead, their crisis of choice is climate control. Interesting.
And while nobody in their right mind would make light of such a problem, if it exists on any serious level, I wonder what would be the number one crisis to the women, young girls and family members that are being brutalized every day as just described? I wonder if the current 1/8 of an inch rise in the ocean levels per year is a major concern to 10-year old child being sold as a sex slave in Iraq or Nigeria. I wonder how much a father and husband who sees his wife and daughters kidnapped and enslaved worries about the reported half of one degree temperature increase per ‘decade’? And I wonder how much a teen who has been intentionally infected with AIDS and impregnated by a terrorist thinks about the ozone layer or the global use of fossil fuels?
Again, it would be foolish and irresponsible to ignore any real probable’s concerning the environment since that can impact us all. But to focus primarily on these very slowly moving tends, that may or may not continue down the road, above the large scale human suffering as taking place around the globe seems somehow somewhat misguided and beyond insensitive.
Pray for those suffering things that many of us cannot fathom or perhaps care not to. Pray for the world leaders that have the ability to speak out, apply pressure and even use force to alleviate the suffering of helpless and innocent woman and children. Especially pray that, in the midst of these unspeakable horrors, that some might even come to know Christ as Savior. And pray that Christians in these terrible places may somehow share the love of God and the salvation that is in Christ alone. And do all of this knowing that, in the final analysis, the world’s greatest overall problem will always be rejecting God’s salvation through Christ and facing eternal suffering and separation from Him!
"And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!" Luke 12:5
Bill Breckenridge
Click here to read an interesting article on politics and climate change.
No comments:
Post a Comment