CNN's Don Lemon refreshingly devoted air time on Monday's CNN Tonight to an ongoing atrocity being committed by Islamic extremist group ISIS – their sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi girls and women. Lemon brought up the radicals' war crime during a segment with CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank [video available at CNN.com]:
DON LEMON: Let's move on and talk about these – I'm sure you've heard the audio of low-level ISIS fighters talking about slave-trading Yazidi women. It's very disturbing. We'll take a listen; and then, we'll talk about it. (clip of ISIS fighters talking in foreign language)
Even if they're joking – and they're talking about selling girls here – I mean, that's – it's horrible. What's going on here?
PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: It's absolutely repugnant. Not clear exactly what's going on in the video – but it's – it's very well documented by now that ISIS captured hundreds of Yazidi girls, and they've provided them to their fighters as – as sex slaves. And they boasted about this in – in online communications – their online magazine, 'Dabiq,' – saying to bring them back to the glorious Islamic days of the past. So, they're quite open that they're doing this – that they're providing their fighters with hundreds of sex slaves-
LEMON: Some of them as young as nine years old. Is that part of – is that a recruiting tool as well? I mean-
CRUICKSHANK: Well, I mean, that's absolutely atrocious, and there's – accounts of young girls as young as 11 being – being raped as well. But they're providing them to the fighters as a recruiting tool to, sort of, motivate them. And some of these young fighters are welcoming these – these new brides, but obviously abusing them in horrible ways.
On Friday, the MRC's Katie Yoder spotlighted how only a few media outlets have picked up on this glaring example of ISIS's homicidal campaign in Syria and Iraq.
Just over a month earlier, Lemon wondered if "liberals have failed" in addressing "the treatment of women; the treatment of gays...in the Muslim...world," as he discussed Bill Maher and Sam Harris's controversial remarks about Islam on Maher's HBO show.
