“Mustafa Hassan had only been in captivity for a few hours and was already planning his escape. After four days, he found his moment. While some of his fellow schoolboys distracted the religious teacher with questions, Hassan and a friend scaled a ladder on to the roof on the pretext of fetching water and raising a flag.
From there, they hopped on to the wall of the school, jumped down to the street and kept walking. Local people helped them get out of town. Soon they were back in this Kurdish-dominated town in northern Syria…
The kidnapping of 186 teenage boys in Syria on 30 May has gone largely unreported in the wider world, a curious omission given the outcry over the teenage girls in Nigeria. The abduction was no less sinister. The students needed to travel from the Kobani enclave on the Turkish border to Aleppo to take their exams, as required by Syria’s education system. The journey is perilous, but they reached Aleppo without incident. On the way home, however, a convoy of about 10 minibuses containing 186 boys aged 14-16 was stopped and taken to a religious school in Minbej, for training in the Qur’an and jihad. The vast majority are still there.”* The Young Turks hosts Ana Kasparian, Ben Mankiewicz (Turner Classic Movies), Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show), and John Iadarola (TYT University) break it down.
*Read more here from James Harkin / The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/26/186-kurdish-students-kidnapped-isis-syria
Comments
I find it very interesting how the reason immediately touched on in this video is that things are “so chaotic” in Syria.
1) Boko Haram goes on a year-long rampage, murdering hundreds of men and boys. Not much comment from Western media.
2) Boko Haram kidnaps 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Prior to this, their MO was to slaughter the men and boys and let the girls go. The Western media flips its sh1t, social media explodes, the First Lady posts a selfie demanding the girls’ return, and multiple foreign governments offer to assist or intervene.
3) 186 Syrian schoolboys are kidnapped. Not much comment from Western media.
There’s nothing “chaotic” about this.
Can we please finally just admit that we humans care more about the safety and wellbeing of girls/women than boys/men? Can we please finally just admit that we humans get more outraged at harms that befall girls/women than those that befall boys/men?
There’s no shame in it. In fact, there are valid and (IMO) morally neutral evolutionary reasons why we feel this way. As far as I’m concerned, the primary moral turpitude at play is not that we care more about women and girls, but that we are so loath to admit it that we will make up excuses and rationalizations so that our internal narrative conforms with the idea that we are at best egalitarian and at worst misogynists.
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