The recent horrifying New York Times exposé on the Islamic State's sex slavery system targeting Yazidi women was one of the top read articles on the paper's website over the last days, Stefan Ihrig, Fellow of Van Leer Jerusalem Institute wrote in The Huffington Post.

“We humans and we modern societies have a tremendous ability to compartmentalize what is going on in the world around us and to assign most of it to such a distance that it simply does not matter,” he notes.

The author then gives two examples of the dark tradition of ignorance. He tells about the massacres in the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s under Abdul Hamid II and that Germany close to the Ottoman Empire at the time was well-informed about those events. However, no great response was instigated by German society.

“But don't judge Germany of the 1890s all too quickly, the other Great Powers also did next to nothing to help the Armenians,” Stefan Ihrig stresses.  

The scholar also reminds of a German paper, which was the widely acknowledged mouthpiece of political Catholicism. The paper justified ignoring the Armenians, suggesting “the victims are not really Christians”, and thus German Christians were not obliged to bother themselves with this faraway tragedy. Following this, the author gives the example of the Holocaust:

“So, now we have more horrifying news about ISIS and we are outraged by ISIS' sex slave system. And we should be…Why? Because it is simply far too easy not to care about the Yazidis. Not only are they far away, the overwhelming majority of us just don't have any Yazidis in our circle of friends and neighbors.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, they are neither Christian, Jewish or Muslim and their belief system is just foreign in the most literal sense to us,” the author writes.

According to him, considering their history, at least the state of Israel and Armenia should, in some form, politically adopt the Yazidis.

“Like the Armenians and the Jews in the 1890s, during the Armenian Genocide and during the Shoah, the Yazidis, too, have no state of their own, no army and no powerful enough lobby anywhere. And precisely because they don't and because they are not "one of us," they matter so much and should matter more than the threatened destruction of the ruins of Palmyra,” he writes.