Splitting Hairs Over Precise Nomenclature

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing. [ISIL] has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities."
"[ISIL] has sought to erase the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community."
UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic : Paulo Pinheiro

"ISIL continues to deliberately target ethnic and religious communities though a range of abuses and crimes as part of its policy of suppression, expulsion or elimination of these communities, and to employ sexual violence as a tactic of war."

Yazidis flee Isil Credit: Rodi Said/Reuters

An almost universal consensus prevails, that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant mercilessly preys on and commits horrible abuses against religious and ethnic minorities, women and the LGBT community. ISIL's solution to those who like Yazidis, Christians and Shiites fail to follow its own fanatical view of Islam, is to impose torture on those hapless enough to fall into their hands, to enslave them and to commit mass slaughter.

The European parliament, the British parliament, the Australian parliament and the United State Congress have seen fit to label ISIL guilty of genocide.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars themselves fittingly adopted a resolution whose purpose was to declare that ISIL has committed genocide.The former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has minced no words to declare that what ISIL has mounted represents "a very clear case" of genocide.

And in Canada's Parliament? Foreign Minister Stephane Dion, from the height of his moral pillar of wisdom gropes about for excuses and mentions that Sweden has declined, as  has the Government of Canada, to name ISIL's reprehensible actions recognizable as genocide. The Government of Canada, insisted Mr. Dion, saw no incontrovertible evidence to claim that ISIL is guilty of genocide.

And then, oh dear, the following day the UN report was produced that provided solidly conclusive evidence of genocidal intent and action on the part of ISIL. Leaving the Liberal government flailing about to respond to demands from the opposition that Canada officially name the jihadis Islamist campaign to scourge Iraq and Syria of the presence of non-Sunni Muslims and ethnic and religious minorities for what it is.

Yazidi refugees, including several children, go about their lives in Nawrouz refugee camp, approximately 40 kilometres from the Syrian border with Iraq. Photo: UNICEF/Razan Rashidi

"We do not feel that politicians should be weighing in on this. Determinations of genocide need to be made in an objective responsible way." And the Government of Canada, said Justin Trudeau, has asked the UN Security Council "to make a determination on this". As doubtless China and Russia will be extremely pleased to do, to satisfy the punctiliously politically correct Liberal conscience of a prime minister who ordinarily vents subjectively on things he knows nothing about.