May The Spirit of Wilberforce Arise Amongst Us Once More

The Hard Truth--Charles Darwin

What Your Biology Teacher Didn’t Tell You 

Phil Moore ©
The Gospel Coalition (US)

Charles Darwin is a great British hero. That’s hardly surprising, since he was one of the most influential thinkers of the past 200 years. I happened to live opposite Darwin’s former lodgings when I was a student at Cambridge University, so I looked out each morning on a blue plaque hailing him as one of the greatest Britons who ever lived. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve that commemorative plaque, but I should point out that he wasn’t a British hero but a British villain. You don’t need to be a Bible-thumping evangelical to question whether Darwin’s thinking deserves to be given a bit more thought.

Whatever your views on origins and evolution, we can hopefully all agree that, at present, we give far too much honor to the British thinker who justified genocide.

Devaluation of Humans

Darwin didn’t hide his view that his evolutionary thinking applied to human races as well as to animal species. The full title of his seminal 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. He followed up more explicitly in The Descent of Man, where he spelled out his racial theory:

The Western nations of Europe . . . now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. . . . The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.

Thankfully, most British people today are embarrassed by the racist rhetoric that undergirded the late-Victorian British Empire. What’s astonishing is how little they understand that Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution provided the doctrine behind its white supremacism.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Slaves of Jonathan Edwards


Douglas Wilson
Blog & Mablog

Introduction

Some people might want to raise the question why I have chosen to write on slavery as much as I have. The reason is actually a pretty simple one: I wrote the other day about the functional authority of Scripture, and the issue of slavery gives us a wonderful opportunity to see just how committed to Scripture we actually are. Unfortunately, in too many cases, the answer comes back, “not very.”

Heroes and Monuments

We live in a toppling time. As the corrosion of critical theory has made its way through our history texts and city parks, the demands for removing so-called hurtful images and reminders have grown increasingly urgent. Whether we are talking about Columbus, or Robert E. Lee, or some other miscreant, the snowflakes have done a good job organizing their blizzard. As the expression goes, you should visit the Washington monument while you still can.

And of course, given that this is the moment that has seized the unbelievers, and given that great evangelical principle of “monkey see, monkey do,” the cries to revisit our heroes have also gone aloft in Christian circles. Whenever the zeitgeist gets a going, you can count on evangelicals to show up with their relevance kites.

And so it is that the issue has now come to the legacy of Jonathan Edwards. He was a monumental theologian, a revivalist, a foundational figure in North American evangelicalism, and . . . a slave owner.

The Slaves of Edwards

We don’t have a ton of information about the slaves of Jonathan Edwards, but we do know a few things about his ownership of a handful of slaves, as well as his attitude toward some other issues related to race and slavery, such as the slave trade.

Modern Slavery

Evil Stalks the Land

 CARLOS GARCIA

A debate on CNN over the truthfulness of a statement from the president on abortion got so heated that a Democrat guest stunned many with her bizarre defense of the controversial operation.

Former New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn launched into a yelling match with Rick Santorum, former U.S. senator, while Chris Cuomo moderated.
"Do you disagree that at the moment of conception, that child is human and alive?" Santorum asked.
Quinn absolutely denied that the baby was human and alive, while Cuomo made the distinction between the baby being human, and when the law acknowledges the personhood of the baby.

'That is not a human being inside of her!'

Santorum offered a hypothetical situation in order to undermine Quinn's contention that an unborn baby was the "property" of the woman and could do anything she wanted to it.
"Let's be clear here, Rick, with all of your distortions and horrible tales," Quinn said.
"You didn't answer my question," Santorum interrupted.

"I answered it numerous times!" replied Quinn. "When a woman gets pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her," she added. "It's part of her body.""Oh wow," responded Santorum, clearly shocked.

"And this is about a woman having full agency and control of her body and making decisions about her body and what is part of her body with medical professionals," she added.

"So the baby is property!" Santorum said, aghast.

Here's the video of the shocking debate:

CNN Contributor: 'When a Woman Gets Pregnant, That Is Not a Human Being Inside of Her'www.youtube.com

Cuomo went on to excoriate Santorum and scold him for defending the president and his pro-life position.

Guilt By Association

Injustice on Steroids

Being just and and practising justice is a divine attribute.  As it says in Deuteronomy:

For I will proclaim the name of the Lord;
    ascribe greatness to our God!
The Rock, his work is perfect,
    for all his ways are justice.
A God of faithfulness and without iniquity,
    just and upright is he.  [Deuteronomy 32: 3-4]

The opposite is also true: depraved humanity manifests injustice.  The more depraved, the more injustice. 

Few nations have reached the nadir of perversity and injustice achieved by North Korea.  One attribute in particular of the Kim tyranny illustrates this--namely, the law of "guilt-by-association". 

North Korea has long had a law of guilt-by-association, and punishes its people accordingly.  I cannot think of any other government that utilizes such a savage and cruel system.  When I was living in North Korea, if someone defected, it was inevitable that their family, including distant relatives, would be jailed and sent to a camp.  Because of this barbaric law, no one in North Korea ever thought about opposing the government through real action. 

So why do they need this system?  In North Korea, there is no one more aware of the absurdity and irrationality of the North Korean system than the diplomats themselves.  In this respect, the government is well aware that brainwashing diplomats and asking for their loyalty will be ineffective in reining them in.  Alternatively, the authorities use parents' love for their children as leverage.  As such, it is obligatory for North Korean diplomats to leave at least one of their children at home when going abroad.   Those children who stay at home are then looked after by relatives.  [Ji-min Kang, quoted in Ask a North Korean, edited by Daniel Tudor (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2017), p. 174f.]

For those of us privileged to live in relatively free societies with power divided and spread amongst a variety of powers such depravity is difficult to comprehend.  North Korea truly has become a nation of slaves--like Pharaoh holding Israel under the whip. 

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About The Breakup of the Union)

The UnRoeveling of America

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

INTRODUCTION:

The American Civil War was actually a war between distinct regions. It was a clash of cultures, a war between the several states. There were certain regions—the border states like Maryland—where the populations within the same territory were truly divided, and where it was not uncommon for one brother to fight for one side and another brother to fight for the other. What we have boiling on the stove now contains the makings of an actual civil conflict, where the disruption that happened in just the border states two centuries ago is happening all across the nation.

With the nomination for the Supreme Court that Trump is poised to make, everyone appears to understand that Roe is on the table. Nothing is certain in terms of specific outcomes, but I would like to argue that if Roe is on the table, then America is also.

MAP READING


Red/blue maps are now fairly common in electoral analysis, and when you look at them state by state, the whole thing can be made to look like a regional conflict. But this is actually a false appearance. That is because, thanks to the Electoral College, we vote by states, and the overwhelming majority of our states follow a winner-take-all system of allocation. The only two exceptions are Nebraska and Maine. This means that when you have swing states, where the election really could go this way or that way (51/49), the whole enchilada goes with the 51. In this kind of analysis, Minnesota and Oklahoma can come out the same color . . . which is misleading.

But if you look at the red and blue breakdown county by county, or even precinct by precinct, the picture changes dramatically. The map I posted here is telling—it is a county-by-county breakdown, but the colors are only apportioned when the presidential candidate won that county by twenty points or more. In other words, you are looking at territory where it wasn’t even close.

A HOUSE DIVIDED:

Now as some may have surmised, I am not a big Lincoln fan, but I do admire his ability to grasp the nature of an inconsistency. Here is a little something from his famous House Divided speech. 

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”

The reason this observation was cogent is that Lincoln was making an application to politics, taking as his illustration something that Jesus took from the realm of politics. 

“And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand” (Matt. 12:25).

Lincoln was talking about the momentous doctrine of chattel slavery, and he said that such an issue would be enough to tear the country apart. Now, in the present time, we are being torn apart by two issues that are every bit as important as that one.

Richard Davis--Missionary, Part II

Only Two Hundred Years Ago

Maori culture and civilization was a mixed bag.  The culture of cannibalism, utu (or revenge), and slavery benighted the Maori people.  However, missionaries who stayed the course, also observed positive aspects of Maori culture.

The missionaries wanted, above all, to expose the Maori tribes to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Gradually, as men and women repented of their sins and believed in the Son of God, examples of remarkable Christian faith began to emerge. 

But the scene documented by Davis below graphically underscores how the light, when it eventually began to shine, came as it were, through a debilitating darkness.  Amidst this darkness, the coming of the Gospel was like the light of Eärendil's star--a light which would shine when all other lights had gone out.

The Waitangi natives have returned from the Thames, where they had been to fight, and have killed the greater part of some poor people coming to Taiamai, under the protection of a chief who was absent when they met them.  They then transferred their fight to the place of the late Christian Rangi, to punish the misdemeanour of a young man.  They broke his arms, and beat him cruelly.  Then they butchered a poor slave girl in the most barbarous manner before the young man.  They first cut off one arm, and then the other.  They next cut deep gashes down her body, saying "I will have this part," "I will have that part to eat."  The merciless barbarians then cut off her legs while she was alive, and finally roasted and ate her.  They told the young man they had done this as a punishment for his crime.  My soul is filled with horror and dismay.  O Lord, in mercy interpose in behalf of these poor wretched heathen!  [John Coleman, ed., A Memoir of the Reverend Richard Davis (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1865), p.78.]

These events occurred early in 1826.  Davis had been living and working with his wife and family in the Bay of Islands for about eighteen months. 

Thank God those days have passed. 

Brave New World

The Difference Between Labour and Slavery

The Age of Technology--that is, our age--has removed so much drudgery from human existence that life is now a much more positive proposition than it was when it was considered cheap.  The age of calculating machines and information processing machines (which we call computers) has replaced much human mindless repetitive work.  

The Luddites amongst us argue that this is a bad thing.  Machines increasingly make man redundant.  Redundant men are unemployed men.  Endlessly efficient machines drive down the costs of human labour; under their realm, machines reduce man, at best, to a latter day serf, etc.

Yet this is not the historical view of technology and machines.  Western society increasingly became mechanized and machine-led so that mankind could come to be more and more  in God's image, more and more human.

Historian Lynn White put it this way:

The humanitarian technology that our modern world has inherited from the Middle Ages was not rooted in economic necessity; for this necessity is inherent in every society, yet has found inventive expression only in the Occident [that is, the West], nurtured in the activist or voluntarist tradition of Western theology.

It is ideas which make necessity conscious.  The labor-saving power-machines of the later Middle Ages were produced by the implicit theological assumption of the infinite worth of even the most degraded human personality, by an instinctive repugnance towards subjecting any man to a monotonous drudgery which seems less than human in that it requires the exercise neither of intelligence nor of choice.  [Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), p. 22.]

The Benedictine order made a distinction between toil and labour.

The End of Slavery Models How Abortion Could End

Pragmatic Cunning of the Abolitionists

The official end to British slaving came as a result of the Napoleonic wars.  Napoleon had been thwarted in his long-held ambition to cross the Channel and invade England.  So, he returned to Europe to continue the war against the British army on that continent.  As part of the struggle he instituted a trade war against Britain in 1806.

It is one of the curios of history that this move set in train a series of events which led to the end of Britain's involvement in the slave trade, and to outlawing slavery in Britain per se.  The irony is that this was an unintended outcome.  Yet it was one of the greatest "fruits" of the Napoleonic Wars.  The British abolished the slave trade in 1806-7.  This sequence of events provides a very useful case study in the greatest moral and humanitarian struggle of our day--the abolition of abortion.

The moral campaign against slavery had been boiling away for years but it was resisted by powerful commercial interests in England which earned money from involuntary human cargo.  Cracks in the British resolution to continue slaving began to appear as a result of the great Saint-Domingue slave revolt in 1791.  Appalling fighting in the Caribbean had thrown the atrocities and costs of slavery into sharp relief.  Consciences in Britain were pricked even further. Public opinion became more resolute against the slave trade, particularly now that its evils were more exposed and because of French interests in, and support of, the trade.  The French were using slaves to sustain their war effort.

This provided another argument to Wilberforce and the abolitionists.

Utilitarianism Versus Faithful Christians

The Sweet Sugar Trade a Bitter Poison

We are familiar with England in the eighteenth and nineteenth leading the charge against the slave trade.  William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect have been rightly celebrated for their lifelong labours in putting slavery to death.  

What we tend to overlook in these days, however, was how easily England got into the trade in the first place.  Benthamite utilitarianism was/is a godless philosophy.  It allowed calculation of principles and ethics on an abacus made up of human beings.  "The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number" was a convenient, soulless doctrine where the good of one's own always outweighed the good of "other" human beings.  It remains so to this day.

It was relatively easy, then, for England to accept the development of a slave trade--the evils of which reverberate to this day.  If utilitarianism provided the general moral justification, how did it all start?  What need drove it?   What led English ships to capture and enslave Africans and transport them elsewhere around the world into enforced labour?  Even as we write these words, the incredible  evil of such policies and practices strike us afresh.  We repeat, whilst nothing could justify it, what perceived need drove it?

Robert Tombs reminds us of how slavery came about on an industrial scale.

An Ancient Evil

Slavery is Growing in the West

We expect that "history" will record the early 21st century to be one which allowed international slavery to flourish.  Most of this new slavery manifested itself as people from less prosperous socio-economic regions and countries migrated illegally to more wealthy countries.  They were smuggled across national borders, or brought into countries under pretext, then forced to work as slaves.  

A recent headline in The Guardian claimed that slavery in the UK has increased by 300 percent.  It went on to clarify that this huge increase was due not to an explosion of slaving into the UK, but to better reporting.  In other words, this modern form of slavery has existed for some time, and is only now coming to be exposed.

Exceedingly Heavy Stones

Academic Celebrates Degeneracy

A Maori academic has come forth claiming that pre-European settlement, Maori were sexually degenerate and engaged in unGodly practices.  Nothing surprising there at all.  Naturally, however, this modern academic is also claiming that the degeneracy of Maori represents a long honoured, storied historical tradition, which means (queue the drumroll) that modern Maori can glory in such degenerate practices in our modern world.

For Maori who don't fit neatly into carefully constructed moulds of gender and sexuality the term takatāpui can be a relief.  Scholar Elizabeth Kerekere argues that pre-colonial Maori were sexually experimental people who openly accepted gender and sexual fluidity.  Anyone who didn't fit into heterosexuality was considered "takatāpui".  [NZ Herald]

What is startling here is Kerekere seems to think that she has achieved some sort of amazing discovery.  What she appears to have forgotten is that whilst pre-colonial Maori were cunning and  highly intelligent, they were also degenerate--pretty much like today's average secular atheist.

Kerekere, who identifies as lesbian, has spent five years writing her PhD and discovering new evidence takatāpui existed in pre-colonial society. It was released recently at Victoria University.

Five years is a long time spent researching and searching for something that one would have expected to have existed in spades.

The World According to Scientific Socialism

Depraved and Demonic

Stalin's Gulag would seem to be a most extreme example of man's inhumanity to man.  It strikes the historian or observer as inconceivable.  On, the other hand, arguably it was inevitable, given the general perversity of man coupled with a dictatorship in the grip of demonic powers.

Imagine a country filled with slave labour camps--filled in the sense of being all over the country, from Moscow through the empty steppes of the central and eastern USSR.  Beavering away were Moscovian communist bureaucrats laying down administrative rules and regulations addressing every minute aspect of camp life.  The making of rules was without end.  Prisoners were allocated food servings per day down to the precise number of grams of bread each prisoner was to receive, clothes (to last two years or longer), minimum hours of sleep, and so forth.  But, at the same time, the production targets of the labour camps were steadily increased.  So, local camp commanders and their officers cut corners on slave provisions and required longer working hours, shorter breaks and meal times, and so forth.

Anne Applebaum's Gulag comprehensively documents the demonic horror of the camps.  It is too long, too involved, and too complex to summarise adequately.  We will quote just one example:

Going Way, Way Back To The Present

Humanitarianism, Open Borders, And Slavery

In a modern country in 2017, how would you define slavery?  The definition would surely include someone being forced to work against their will--in other words, someone who does not have the option or opportunity to resign or quit and walk away.  It would apply to a person who has no access to the protection of the country's labour laws.  It would include those over whose heads dire consequences hang if they refuse to work or neglect to do what they are told.  It would cover those who are held against their will and forced to work.

Do such things exist in the OECD countries today?  You bet they do.  It's not just that they exist: in truth such things have multiplied to the point where, we are told, they are now endemic.  We have incidents reported occasionally in New Zealand.  People seeking work or student visas pay large sums of money to "agents" who process them through the system.  Then they turn upon their "clients" and demand services and work against their will, until they pay off their debts.  But their "remuneration" is little more than a meagre sum of money to keep them physically moving.

In New Zealand, when such circumstances come to light and are reported to the authorities, interdiction and state vengeance follow, provided the abuse can be proven.  But whilst such things remain underground they continue.  In the UK, we are now told, slavery operates in every large town and city in Britain.  Europe has become one of the fastest growing regions for slavery in the world.

The Death of Slavery in the Death of Christ

Only Christ Can Keep Slavery Dead

One of the most intriguing things in the history of the Church is how slavery was washed out of European culture--and did not gain entrance again until the eighteenth century.  It was one of the great downstream effects of the Gospel upon the Roman Empire.  Slavery, we recall, was up front and centre in the culture of that Empire.

Yet there is no direct denunciation of slavery in the New Testament corpus.  There were no prohibitions issued.  It's as if in the West no public condemnations of  cigarette smoking were ever issued, but somehow the entire practice disappeared over half a millennium.  Sarah Ruden writes:

. . . the early Christian church, without staging any actual campaign against slavery, in the course of the centuries weakened it until it all but disappeared from Europe.  Slavery was doomed simply because it jarred with Christian feeling--the same basic circumstance that doomed it in the modern West.  [Sarah Ruden,  Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined In His Own Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), p.168.]

It's rather hard to maintain the institution of slavery within the fellowship of a local Christian congregation where the slave may end up a ruling elder in the congregation and the slave-owner not.  It's rather hard to endorse and participate in the slave markets when you are sitting at table next day with slaves and serving them the elements of the Eucharist.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Huffington Puffington Post

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

So it is apparently time to have a little bit of fun with The Huffington Post.

I got a call a week or so ago from a HuffPo reporter, who interviewed me about the founding of Logos School, along with the founding of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. The interview was going along merrily, including the fact that Greg Gianforte, who a few years ago served with me on the ACCS board, is now a candidate for governor of the great state of Montana.

Let me interrupt this account to encourage all residents of Montana who read this to reason thusly with themselves: “Anybody who gets this kind of royal treatment from The Huffington Post is someone that I should really want in the governor’s chair. I and all my friends shall plan to vote accordingly.”

Anyway, back to the interview. As it proceeded, the reporter brought up Southern Slavery As It Was, and I saw the hatchet job forming before my eyes, along with the shape of the actual hatchet.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Repentance Made Vile

“Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19).

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Repentance is a gift that can be given to individuals, but it is not limited to that. When reformation and revival break out, and it the genuine article, it is because that same gift is being given to crowds. John the Baptist preached a message of repentance, and all of Judea turned out to hear him (Matt. 3:5). Jesus was exalted to the highest place in order that repentance might be given to Israel (Acts 5:31). In short, what God does in and for an individual heart is something He is fully capable of doing for an entire generation.Vile

There are two enemies of such repentance. One is the insolence that wants to continue to pursue the wickedness in question, whatever it is. Think Planned Parenthood, NAMBLA, and so on. The other is a disapproval of the open forms of wickedness, a disapproval that wants to manage its way away from the cliff edge by means of reasonable reforms. This is the approach that laments having to choose between Hillary and Trump in the coming election, but it never dawns on such a person to consider that we should repent of being the kind of nation that deserves to be saddled with such a choice.

But true repentance is a root and branch affair, and it is either happening or it isn’t. And when it happens, the “tell” is that the name of Jesus is being preached and exalted. There is no such thing as secular salvation. So for those who long to see true repentance given to our nation, both forms of avoiding it are equally problematic.

An unrepentant America necessarily has to see repentance as the adversary. But in order to see repentance as an adversary, it must be cast as some awful thing, some sort of wicked thing. Repentance itself must be made vile.

What could be more obviously good than repentance? How could it possibly be made vile? Let us not underestimate our adversaries. When lying is your native tongue, the sky appears to be the limit.

Lawful Christian Resistance, Part VII

Doctrines, Focus and Tactics: Lessons From Wilberforce

We have been considering the political and social philosophy of lawful Christian resistance to tyrannical government.  As persecution of Christians increases in the West--an inevitable outcome of militant secular and atheistic doctrines--this is something that Christians will have to bone up upon, fast.

There are some factors working to our advantage in this up-schooling process, however.  Firstly, there is plenty of instruction and counsel within the Scriptures on these matters.  Those professing Christians who revere the Bible as the very Word of the Living God will find much to teach, instruct and counsel them as they work through the issues.  Secondly, the history of the First Christendom--centred in Western Europe and then latterly in the modern  and post-modern Anglo-Saxon world--reflects a great deal of the principles of rule, government, law, justice, and freedoms derived from the Scriptures.  Thus, in general Western political history provides a work book of faithful Christian doctrines of the State and lawful government, on the one hand, and the opposite notions, on the other--together with their respective outworkings and consequences.

The watershed issue, however, which divides the Christian doctrine of government from all other political ideologies is this:

The Devil's Wind

Christians Used as ‘Form of Currency’ by ISIS as Mass Kidnappings Continue

Mary Chastain
Breitbart News

Christians in the Middle East still live in fear as the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) remains unchallenged in Iraq and Syria. Christian organizations are attempting to help Christians, but for many, it is too late.

“Christians have become a form [of] currency in this tragedy,” explained John Newton, spokesman for Aid to the Church in Need, to the Christian Post. “I know of one priest who was kidnapped for two months… they asked for a ransom of $120,000, which the family managed to raise and deliver… But hours later, the priest was killed and his body cut up, with pieces of him sent in a box to the family.”

Newton said it is hard for his charity and the others to keep track of the kidnapped priests. Militants kidnapped archbishops throughout 2013 as they tried to rescue two other kidnapped priests.  “No one knows who took the archbishops, nor what their fate was, but the two priests they were trying to free have since been executed,” said Newton.

Redemption in Action

‘Jewish Schindler’ Saves Dozens of Yazidis and Christians from Islamic State

by Donna Rachel Edmunds 

Breitbart London

A Canadian Jewish businessman has spearheaded efforts to rescue Iraqi Yazidi and Christian girls from slavery after the girls were captured by ISIS troops, using money donated privately by business contacts. The businessman has cited Oskar Schindler, who rescued Jewish children from the holocaust, as his inspiration.

Last summer the world looked on in horror as ISIS swept through north Iraq, home to Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and Yazidis. Hundreds of thousands fled before them, but thousands more starved to death in the desert, or were captured by Islamic forces. Girls in particular were bartered for in the markets, standing naked while men bought them as sex slaves.

But while most of the west turned off their TV sets, Canadian entrepreneur Steve Maman decided to take positive action. Making contacts in Iraq who could negotiate the release of the girls, Mr Maman raised thousands of Canadian dollars to finance a rescue operation, The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI).

Perverse and Diabolical

Sex Slavery and the Islamic State

by Mark Durie

Middle East Forum

Why does Islamic State's enslavement of women seem to appeal to potential recruits, and why is it not challenged more vigorously by mainstream Muslims? Jamie Walker, Middle East correspondent for The Australian, asked two critical questions in a recent article that discussed the involvement of two Australian citizens, Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, in Islamic State sex slavery. In 2014 Elomar purchased sex slaves, of whom four, all Yazidis, later escaped to a refugee camp, where the ABC caught up with them and interviewed them. Elomar had also boasted on Twitter that he had "1 of 7 Yehzidi slave girls for sale" at $2500 each.

Walker's questions were "why this debased appeal seems to be gaining traction with Islamic State's target audience, which increasingly includes women, and why it's not challenged more stridently in the public arena."

The Islamic State has given its own answer to the first question.