The Yazidis—practitioners of an obscure monotheistic religion—came to the attention of the world last year when Islamic State (IS) began systematically murdering them. Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein argue that Jews must not be indifferent to the Yazidis’ plight:
[P]art of the memory of our collective experience is standing up for the helpless, rendered voiceless by evil-doers. . . .
At this moment, more than 300,000 Yazidis languish in refugee camps. While Western intervention led last summer to relief from the siege of Mt. Sinjar [in Kurdistan], where Yazidis were dying of hunger and thirst, military intervention disappeared soon after, leaving those still in the historic Yazidi areas exposed and vulnerable. The IS genocidal campaign, according the UN, went from village to village, wiping out the males and carting off the women and girls as wives, concubines, or just playthings for jihadists who treated them as trophies of war according to Sharia, often subjecting them to repeated rape and slavery. . . .
We never met any Yazidis. But isn’t that the point? The Nazis turned a blind eye to the sanctity of every human, reducing people to numbers, then ashes. As our eyes engage the first faint springtime stirrings of the earth to reassert life from nothingness, our moral vision ought to be enhanced. Should we not be able to find and protect the sacredness of humanity, even among those we have never met?
Read more on Algemeiner: http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/04/17/never-again-should-include-endangered-yazidis/