Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

One of the most terrifying aspects of Daesh's reign in eastern Syria and western Iraq has been this persecution of minorities, particularly the ancient Christian communities that predate Islam in that part of the world and other minorities like the Yazidis. I am going to especially focus on the appalling theology of rape', as The New York Times has called it, and enslavement that Daesh has practised against the Yazidi people in particular. But let's remember some of the other horrifying things that these people have done, particularly to the people of Iraq and eastern Syria.

I think all of us had forgotten the biblical names of Nineveh and Nimrud. I did not even know that there was a tomb of Jonah in Mosul. One of the first things that happened there when they got control of that area was that they blew up the ancient tomb of Jonah, which had existed in that city for thousands of years and which relates to all of our common Abrahamic religions. We all know what Daesh was doing in Palmyra. But it is particularly for the people of that part of the world that I want to express my outrage and support this resolution.

The New York Times, in reporting this particularly ugly activity against the Yazidi people, said:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the—

Daesh—

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—

his perverted attitude and misreading of his own great religion 'not only gave him the right to rape her—it condoned and encouraged it'. The New York Times said:

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution … The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.

The article said that more than 5,000 Yazidis were abducted the year before, and 3,100 were still being held, according to their community leaders. To handle them, Daesh had a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarised by ISIS Islamic courts, and the practice had become an established recruiting tool to lure crazy people from the kinds of societies where casual sex was taboo and dating was forbidden.

Like previous speakers, I am proud of the role that Australia has played. We have legislation acting against people who like to perpetrate the same activities here in Australia. We have passed five tranches of legislation, we have troops advising the people in that area so that the Iraqi forces can capture back and control Mosul. We have proposed—Tanya Plibersek, the Turkish government and even Hillary Clinton, who was unfortunately beaten—a no-fly zone in northern Syria which would have been the most effective way of protecting people from attack by both the Assad forces and by Daesh. Unfortunately it does not seem that that is going to happen now.

I agree with the mover of this motion that we have to pay tribute to Turkey, which has 2,700,000 refugees, to Lebanon, which has one million refugees, Jordan 655,000 and Iraq, in mainly the Kurdish zones, 230,000 people. We have to be consistent on this when these people try to do this in any part of the world, and that includes what the young Daesh and Hamas supporters are trying to do in Israel too—they would do the same to the Jews if they had the power to do it in that part of the world, but fortunately they are able to act very strongly against them. We have to be consistent all over the world, including here in Australia, to act against these people in a legal and measured way. (Time expired)

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