In June 2015, ISIS burned 19 Yazidi girls alive in iron cages because they refused to sleep with the jihadists. These girls—innocent and full of hope for a life that was stolen from them—experienced a death so brutal, so cruel, and so inhuman that it is almost impossible to find the words to describe the horror. Their screams echo in the ears of those who have seen images of this atrocity, yet the world seems deaf to their agony. They howled in pain as their bodies were slowly consumed by flames, fighting for life with an unspeakable despair. And what happened at that moment? Hundreds stood by and watched. Hundreds who did nothing, who took no action to stop this barbaric spectacle. Hundreds who showed not the slightest movement of outrage as these young girls—just girls, like your daughter, your sister, or your friend—were driven into the flames. How can this happen? How can it be that people who share the same breath as we do commit such acts? Yes, perhaps in our society we sometimes burn books, but ISIS—and many who claim to act "in the name of faith" for the sake of their ideology—burn people! They abduct, enslave, torture, and kill—with a cynical smile on their lips, in the name of a perverted “divine mission.” They destroy lives, tear people from their roots, and obliterate everything that makes us human. Their cruelty knows no bounds, their mercilessness no pity. Have you ever seen a Yazidi retaliate for these horrific acts committed by ISIS? No? And you never will! For the victims are not the perpetrators who exact revenge for evil. Yet instead of the world loudly and clearly condemning these atrocities, we end up talking about "Quran burnings" as if that were an equivalent crime. Many act as if burning a book carries the same magnitude of inhumanity as burning living human beings. No, it is not equivalent—and many Muslims actually believe that it is justified to respond to a Quran burning with murder. And why? Because their ideology drives them to commit acts that utterly disregard every moral foundation. Where is our humanity when death is seen as the answer to an act that is rooted in freedom and freedom of expression? It is time for us to face this reality and reflect on what truly matters—the lives of people who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, or the blindly adhered-to ideologies that destroy the lives of those who dare to oppose them. #19YazidiGirls #YazidiGenocide