After his first week representing the U.S. at the United Nations General Assembly, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said the world is united against the Islamic State group in large part because of its atrocities against women.
Johnson said that the kidnapping and rape of girls and women of other religions by fighters from the group — also referred to as ISIS or ISIL — headlined a U.N. forum this week on gender-based violence.
“It’s horrific. It’s barbaric. It’s simply evil,” said Johnson. “One of the points I made in the forum — this is all too often invisible. The other point I made is we often sanitize it. We’re all guilty of it, because who wants to talk about these things?”
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Johnson said the world needs to know what coalition forces are finding after driving ISIS out.
“The fighters who took over Mosul Dam found two women. They were bound, they were naked. They’d been raped repeatedly as a spoil of war. Nobody wants to face that horror. We want to turn our face away from it, but we can’t. We have to face that reality and we need to address it and try to prevent it,” said Johnson.
He said that’s why all countries, especially Arab nations, need to speak out against violence to women and extremist religious doctrines. He said they also need to stop funding the Islamic State group.
“This barbarity, this evil, is literally uniting the world,” said Johnson. “I mean, I can report that back from New York, the world is united against this.”
Johnson said these are crimes against humanity that can’t wait for an international tribunal’s verdict, and that the group needs to be defeated on the battlefield.
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