Responding to the Mass Islamist Psychosis

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing."
"[ISIL] sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment."
"ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities."
"Girls as young as nine were raped, as were pregnant women. Most of those interviewed reported violent daily rapes by their fighter-owners."
Paulo Pinheiro, commission chairman, UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Geneva

Signatories to the Genocide Convention are obliged to "prevent and punish" perpetrators of the crime of genocide. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has launched what can only be considered a genocidal war against ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria. Their particular focus on the Yazidis, an ethnic tribal group whose worship of an obscure religion with ancient roots and with some distant relationship to the far more numerous Kurds has led to mass murder, rape and enslavement.

Rodi Said / Reuters -- Displaced Yazidis walking from the plateau below Mount Sinjar to escape ISIL/2014

The plight of the Yazidis has been a wrenching exercise in helplessness. Women and children taken as slaves, sold and bartered, raped and tortured. Those men, youth and the elderly who were unable to escape the onslaught of the Islamic State when they first invaded Sinjar city and surrounding towns, saw those who could, escape up Mount Sinjar only to die from cold, exhaustion, lack of food and water and medical attention until they were finally rescued by Kurdish militias.

Mass graves containing the remains of Yazidis have been discovered, part of the evidence that has resulted in the United Nations declaring ISIL guilty of genocidal intention and succeeding to a barbaric degree in their intent to destroy an entire people. In 2014, Russia and China successfully blocked a UN Security Council resolution meant to enable referring ISIL's crimes to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.

The United Nations could theoretically invoke Chapter VII to embark on a mission where a UN-sanctioned coalition would invade Syria and/or Iraq to destroy ISIL, restoring security to the areas they considered their Islamist caliphate. They could try, but with the knowledge that both Russia and China would veto the initiative. The reason for their veto clear enough, since each of those countries visualize that enabling such a solution to challenge ISIL would create a precedent that neither are anxious to open future opportunities toward that might at some time target them.

Still, the reality is that, given to bloody butchery and wholesale atrocities, the more dreadful they are the more likely they are to be carried out by ISIL for shock value in attracting new recruits even while the rest of the world is shocked and traumatized by the inhumanity of methods desecrating the concept of the preciousness of human life. ISIL has proven that direct confrontation by a coalition prepared to commit to their destruction is the only course forward.

But then the matter of the wholesale dysfunction in Iraq and Syria is complicated by the sectarian hatreds unleashed by Syria's civil war and Iraq's sectarian inability to share governance with its major population sectors. And the obvious fact that the Syrian regime uses tactics and techniques just as dreadful and destructive of human rights as do the jihadists, yet the difference is seen as viewing ISIL as a terrorist group, while recognizing the Syria of Bashar al Assad as a legitimate government however deadly tyrannical.

But it is the tyranny of Assad that has driven the dislocation of half the population of Syria, sending millions beyond Syria's borders to become refugees living in squalid camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, hoping to some day return to Syria. Those no longer seeing hope for a return to a destroyed homeland have migrated dangerously with the aid of human smugglers into Europe to inundate the continent with Syrian refugees and opportunistic economic migrants from Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

By not making the effort to collectively take the initiative to put a halt to the bloody assaults killing perceived enemies in Iraq and Syria by Islamic State, the Syrian regime, al-Qaeda-linked Nusra and other jihadist groups, Europe is inviting by default more floods of refugees to inundate its shores and its resources. But then, there is that conundrum again, that a concerted effort by a collective of military groups like NATO will always come up against both UN vetoes (China and Russia) and physical opposition (Russia).

Moreover, the countries that have responded so magnanimously in embracing the presence of refugees and haven seekers, have failed to discriminate toward the types of refugees that are really in dire need of aid; Yazidis, fleeing Christians, Muslim gays, Sunni women and children. Instead, accepting the presence of young Muslim men prepared to bring with them customs and traditions inimical to those of the accepting countries. Infiltrated by the cunning casualness of ISIL fighters.