The Murder of Samira Saleh Ali al-Naimi
Samira al-Naimi
Remember last Wednesday? What were you up to then? I was selling outdoor gear made in China to wealthy folks here in North Carolina. I ate at a nice restaurant for dinner. I looked people in the eye as I spoke to them. It was a good day.
What were you doing last week on September 17th?
While most of us here in America were likely going about our relatively peaceful lives a brave woman with a husband and three children was forced from her home by a police force and secreted away to a location no one can yet ascertain. At least no one who is talking. This wasn't just any old police force.
Oh...I forgot did I mention this was in Mosul? Mosul is in Iraq and it is where a large number of sincerely angry and misled individuals are attempting to establish a new caliphate. You have heard of them as ISIS. It stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. A caliphate is a word that should offer most of us a quick snapshot of old Middle East history that we learned in college.
A Caliphate, historically speaking is a Muslim oriented political/religious state. The Caliphate we have mostly heard about refers to one that existed from 632-1258. I honestly don't know much about what life was like as the successors or Kaliphs tended to their kingdom. But how did we get from there to here?
Which begs the question. Do we evolve? Do we learn? Do we grow? For me we retrend backwards or rise above depending upon our conditions. Islam is no worse or better than Christianity...at certain temperatures. Take away people's rights, try to control them, give them grinding poverty, hand them too much control-and any religious/political power is time proven to become genocidal, given the chance.
It's not what religions do. It's what PEOPLE do. Throw in a solid dose of literal groupthink and even an intelligent person can believe that for a better life to be had, that peaceful people will become a threat. The easiest criterium upon which to judge others as standing in the way of your freedom is religion. And if you can't prove that they are different enough than you, make something up.
Samira Salih al-Nuaimi wasn't making anything up. She bravely posted on her Facebook page words that spoke the truth about what ISIS was doing in the region.
“Samira Saleh Ali al-Naimi, an Iraqi human rights attorney, was kidnapped, tortured and executed by Da3esh in Mosul for “apostasy” after she denounced the movement’s destruction of shrines and called them “acts of barbarism”. She defended political and underprivileged prisoners free of charge and was also outspoken against the American presence in Iraq
And last week she was dragged from her home. The next time her family heard about her it was when they were contacted to collect her body. There were signs of torture.
And the police that took her? ISIS has formed a new police force in Mosul. To us here in the West, just imagine if your local church formed up a "police" unit and informed all people from other churches that they could convert or be killed. See, this isn't about Islam at all. And people in the West need to grasp this. This is about what PEOPLE do when they feel hopeless. You can have all the money in the world or be penniless. But hopelessness for a true and real spiritual connection is what drives materially based behavior where you seek to control the actions and thoughts of other people around you. When you have peace, you don't want to take from others. I would love it if the media talked about that instead of the red herring of Islam.
We can use the name of Islam only in the sloppiest ways to describe this group. We should start to describe all extremist groups, regardless of religious affiliation, as people who are without peace. Because until we call it what it is and foster societies which value the spiritual (as opposed to the religious) and cooperation, then we will continue to see horrendous murders that will appear to run unabated. We can't stop violence with violence. Only love ends violence in the long term.
Samira died because she did the right thing. She posted on her FB account her personal feelings of how ISIS is unjust. Who was she? Samira Salih al-Nuaimi worked professionally as a fighter. But it wasn't with guns or violence. She worked for the poor, zeroing in on poverty rights. She worked on rights for detainees. She was outspoken enough to speak her mind. And how is it that a group of men bristling with guns must murder a defenseless woman? To me that shows just how weakened they truly are. When something as simple as words threaten someone else's sense of righteousness, it exposes to the outside viewer how the righteous do not have strong beliefs at all. Their lives are based upon a thinly felt sense of belonging. This is why they are so easily threatened. Because their stated beliefs are actually only believable as long as the fever pitch lasts. In a real way their violent furor exists only to support their radical sense of emptiness. How empty do you have to be, to cut off someone's head just because they spoke against you? That isn't strength. It's a show of strength, due to weakness. When conviction must be powered by murder it is exposed as the weakness of a person motivated by a heart that nothing can fill. At least not as long as the killers begin looking at why they truly are doing what they are doing.
I referred to her as defenseless. But when you think about it Samira was more powerful than any of those men. With words and peaceful action, she threatened the stability of an entire caliphate.
But do I wish that someone had been able to walk into the Sharia Court where she was declared guilty of Apostasy, and force her captors to see the wrongs they were doing? Yes. I wish that more attention was being given in the media to inspire people to defend women during this time of ISIS. In recent weeks there have been numerous murders of prominent human rights workers who were targeted because of their gender. I have yet to hear Obama or the mainstream media name this as one of the reasons we are attempting to curb and force ISIS into submission.
To me it should be one of the primary reasons. Below from this Source:
"Al-Nuaimi's death is the latest in a string of attacks by the militant group to silence female activists and politicians. In July in the nearby town of Sderat, militants broke into the house of a female candidate in the last provincial council elections, killed her and abducted her husband, the U.N. said. On the same day, another female politician was abducted from her home in eastern Mosul; she remains missing.
Hanaa Edwer, a prominent Iraqi human rights activist, said at least five female political activists have been killed in recent weeks by the Islamic State group in Mosul, including al-Nuaimi, who Edwer said was also running for a seat on the provincial council.
"But it is not just women being targeted," Edwer said. "They will kill anyone with a voice. It is terrifying.""
It is terrifying. What is also terrifying to me is that as long as we flex our muscles and try to just make them stop, it will continue. It terrifies me that no one is asking deeper questions about what motivates people to join causes like ISIS. The conversations never include spirituality, only religiosity. They talk about "is this really Islam?" There is an underlying issue here that, as long as it is overlooked, is the real fuel on this fire.
My prayers go out to her family. I don't know them obviously. But when you get past the headlines and the acronyms and the postulations one thing remains that I didn't see a single article speak about. Her family. A husband and three children must attempt to move on with their lives and make sense out of the loss of their mother. To the world Samira is currently a talking point, a representation, a symbol. But to her family she was a mom and a wife and a future they thought that they would have together.