A tale of two sieges: what have Yazidis in Iraq got that Palestinians in Gaza have not?
On the 14th August 2014 Stop the War published an article which said that the threat to the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar had never been.
That article has been deleted but you can find an archive of it here.
There was no hunting of the thousands to a trapped death. The water had not run out. The US air strikes that broke the siege and saved them were an illegitimate act of war.
It was, said Stop the War, the ‘false story’ of a ‘Yazidi crisis.’
And why had it not happened?
Because if it had happened, the contrast to the siege of Gaza would have been less acute. There is no other evidence in the Stop the War piece than that.
It is a strange view that says none shall suffer unless they are the victims of your convenience. It is a strange humanitarian who thinks the case for Gaza is made stronger by denying the deaths of Yazidis, and Kurds and Christians and Muslims at the hands of Islamic State.
And it takes a Stop the War writer to borrow the experience of Palestinians living through the siege of Gaza, and to turn that loss to the cause of denying mass murder.
What an insult to Palestine it is to do so. What an insult to the people of Gaza.
Because yes, the Yazidis died: up to 5,000 Yazidi men in Sinjar, more on the flight to the mountains, of dehydration and in the brothels of Islamic State.
We have the records of the seven year old girls sold into sexual slavery. We are finding the graves of their mothers still.
The UN has evidence to say that it is genocide – conversion or death; conversion and death; starvation or a mass grave – the questions that attend the deliberate destruction of a race.
On the day after the air strikes started, ten thousand fled. The deadlock around Mount Sinjar was broken. Together, the Kurdish fighters of the PKK and YPG opened the way for 35,000 of the estimated 50,000 trapped to escape. US drops of 100,000 dropped meal rations and 35,000 gallons of air lifted water sustained thousands more.
Apologise for that? Apologise for Sinjar? Deny genocide?
The hell we will. It takes a Stop the War writer to do that.
Jenny Foreigner
The real Stop the War 