PJ MEDIA
by Richard Fernandez
August 10, 2014

Headlines have focused on the atrocities committed by ISIS on the northern Iraqi front. The leading stories seem almost expressly written by the Onion to make fun of political correctness. Crucified by the Caliphate monsters: Iraq descends into apocalypse as Islamic State fanatics seize towns and tell terrified Yazidi ‘Become Muslims by noon today… or we kill all of you’. Then there’s Islamic militants ‘buried alive Yazidi women and children in attack that killed 500′. Try topping: Anglican Vicar of Baghdad: ‘Child I baptized cut in half by ISIS’.

How about this lead paragraph? “BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of women from the Yazidi religious minority have been taken captive by Sunni militants with “vicious plans,” an Iraqi official said Friday, further underscoring the dire plight of Iraq’s minorities at the hands of the Islamic State group.” Vicious plans is the 21st century journalistic equivalent of the Victorian phrase, “a fate worse than death”.

This eyewitness account is pretty close to the best reportage, however. “On board Iraqi army helicopter delivering aid to the trapped Yazidis, Jonathan Krohn sees a hellish sight”.

Mount Sinjar stinks of death. The few Yazidis who have managed to escape its clutches can tell you why. “Dogs were eating the bodies of the dead,” said Haji Khedev Haydev, 65, who ran through the lines of Islamic State jihadists surrounding it.

On Sunday night, I became the first western journalist to reach the mountains where tens of thousands of Yazidis, a previously obscure Middle Eastern sect, have been taking refuge from the Islamic State forces that seized their largest town, Sinjar.

I was on board an Iraqi Army helicopter, and watched as hundreds of refugees ran towards it to receive one of the few deliveries of aid to make it to the mountain. The helicopter dropped water and food from its open gun bays to them as they waited below. General Ahmed Ithwany, who led the mission, told me: “It is death valley. Up to 70 per cent of them are dead.”

The story adds, almost superfluously, that ISIS is attempting to shoot down aid deliveries. They would do that, wouldn’t they? Yet all this time the world was assured there was nothing to worry about in the hundreds of radical mosques, the thousands of militants eagerly received into the West and creeping sharia law in its institutions.  The dangers, they were told, all lay in the Tea Party and elusive militia groups holed up in a cabin in the Ozarks……

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/08/10/a-ringside-seat-to-our-own-destruction/