Judgments

     Christ told us to “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Christians are supposed to take that stricture to heart and live by it: to condemn behavior rather than persons. The rationale, of course, is that no man can truly be condemned except by God, and He waits until the end of life to do so.

     But it’s hard. Especially in light of stories like this one:

     “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God. … He said that raping me is his prayer to God.”

     These extraordinary statements come from girls who were kept as sex slaves by jihadis of the Islamic State, as reported in a lengthy and revealing New York Times piece that was published Thursday.

     Not only does the piece illustrate the horrifying ordeal that Yazidi and other non-Muslim women endure at the hands of the Islamic State when they are forced into sexual slavery, but — most surprisingly — the article explains in detail how these monsters believe they are pleasing their bloodthirsty god by destroying these girls.

     Reported the Times’ Rukmini Callimachi:

     In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

     Reflect on that for a moment before continuing on.

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     With all the domestic troubles the United States suffers today, it’s hard to make room in one’s thoughts for seemingly distant evils such as ISIS, Iran, HAMAS, and Islam generally. But of course, just because we spare them no thought doesn’t mean they’re not out there destroying the lives and lands they afflict today. They’re potentially just as threatening to us here at home. They become more so by dint of our refusal to think about them.

     ISIS isn’t currently top o’ the heap for Islamic threats; that honor goes to rapidly nuclearizing Iran. Yet it possesses a significance that Americans would be advised not to overlook. That significance stems from its wholehearted embrace of evil – an evil the Qur’an explicitly ratifies, even encourages, in its text:

     And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then one of those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline to injustice. [Qur’an, Sura 4, Verse 3]

     “That your right hand possesses” is the Quranic phrase that denotes slaves taken as captives in jihad:

     This term includes the slave girls and slaves in general those who are under control of a free Muslim. As a rule, the only channel of producing this segment of society is Jihad in the cause of Allah....

     At last, a Muslim has the right to have sex with a slave girl since she is "in the possession of his right hand". Then, if she has a child, it becomes Haram to sell her, and when her master dies, she becomes free.

     Note that such slaves possess no rights against their owner. They may not refuse to be “married” to him. Note also that slavery is still practiced, more or less openly, in Islam-dominated lands – and I don’t mean just the swatch of land currently controlled by ISIS.

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     The Nuremberg Trials, a wholly unique exercise of jurisprudence in the history of post-Westphalian nation-states, were founded on a premise that had never before been articulated and acted upon: There is a law higher than any law made by a nation-state, and everyone is expected to know it. That premise was used to disallow claims by the Nazis that came before the tribunals that what they did was only what was required of them by Third Reich law.

     Twelve Nazis were condemned to death by those tribunals:

• Martin Bormann, Nazi Party secretary
• Hans Frank, Governor of occupied Poland
• Wilhelm Frick, Reich Minister of the Interior
• Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe commander and original head of the Gestapo
• Alfred Jodl, commander of the Wehrmacht
• Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Reich Chief of Security
• Wilhelm Keitel, Reich Defense Minister
• Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Ambassador Plenipotentiary
• Alfred Rosenberg, Reich racial theorist.
• Fritz Sauckel, head of the Reich slave labor program
• Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Chancellor of Austria
• Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Sturmer

     Not one of those twelve could be proved ever to have taken a life by his own hand. Yet they had collaborated in the construction and operation of one of the greatest instruments of death the world had ever seen, whether as its planners, its executives, or its ideologists. They had lent their intellects and efforts to it willingly. The Tribunal’s verdicts were based on the premise above: i.e., that they could not have been unaware that what they were doing was absolutely wrong, despite any “laws” to the contrary.

     For a villain who has wholly surrendered his will to evil, death is the only proper sentence. Consider this passage from Perelandra:

     Then he remembers—as one remembers an island of consciousness preceded and followed by long anesthesia—going forward to meet the Un-man for what seemed the thousandth time and knowing clearly that he could not fight much more. He remembers seeing the Enemy for a moment looking not like Weston but like a mandrill, and realising almost at once that this was delirium. He wavered. Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever had in our world came over him—a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotions and its object. Bleeding and trembling with weariness as he was, he felt that nothing was beyond his power, and when he flung himself upon the living Death, the eternal Surd in the universal mathematic, he was astonished, and yet (on a deeper level) not astonished at all, at his own strength. His arms seemed to move quicker than his thought. His hands taught him terrible things. He felt its ribs break, he heard its jaw-bone crack. The whole creature seemed to be cracking and splitting under his blows. His own pains, where it tore him, somehow failed to matter. He felt that he could so fight, so hate with a perfect hatred, for a whole year.

     Thus judged the tribunals of Nuremberg...and thus must be our judgment upon ISIS and all others who cleave to the conviction that “Allah” wills their subjugation and abuse of “the unbeliever.”

     Perhaps the following expresses the concept most succinctly:

     I, for one, would sleep soundly afterward.