Angelina Jolie Calls For ‘Strong Response’ To Rapey Islamic State

Angelina Jolie
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for A&E Network

Hollywood star and humanitarian activist Angelina Jolie has issued a call for a “strong response” to Islamic State (IS). Speaking in Westminster, London, she highlighted the radical Sunni Islamist group’s deliberately calculated use of mass rape as “a centrepoint of their terror.”

Appearing before the House of Lords select committee on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Jolie spoke alongside the former Foreign Secretary and Conservative Party leader William Hague. She said:

“The most aggressive terrorist group in the world today knows what we know, knows that [rape] is a very effective weapon and they are using it as a centrepoint of their terror and their way of destroying communities and families, and attacking and dehumanising.

“This terrorist group we are dealing with in Syria and Iraq is absolutely using rape. They are dictating it as policy. This is beyond something we have seen before… they are saying, ‘You should do this, this is the way to build a society, we ask you to rape.'”

In the face of the IS mass rape policy, Jolie urged ” we really have to have a very strong response at this time to this particular group.”

Jolie, who praised the British government for taking the lead, is not new to the issue. She has campaigned against rape as a weapon of war for some time, reports The Daily Telegraph. She wrote, produced and directed the 2011 film “In The Land of Blood and Honey” which, among other things, spoke of mass rapes committed during the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

In addition, Hague and Jolie co-founded the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, a campaign group which supports war zone rape victims aiming “to replace the culture of impunity for sexual violence committed in conflict with one of deterrence.” Hague told the select committee the star’s international celebrity helped bring the issue to global attention.

In giving her evidence Jolie spoke of her experiences, saying:

“For over ten years I had been visiting the field and meeting with families and survivors of sexual violence who felt for so long that their voices simply didn’t matter – they weren’t heard and they carried a great shame.

“I remember distinctly meeting this little girl, who was very young – probably about seven or eight – and she was rocking backwards and forwards and staring at the wall and tears were streaming down her face because she had been brutally raped multiple times.

“You couldn’t talk to her, you couldn’t touch her. I felt absolutely helpless and didn’t know what to do for her.

“More recently I met a 13-year-old girl in Iraq who had been kept in a room with many other girls and they were taken out in twos, brought to this very dirty room with this dirty couch and raped repeatedly.

“But they told me what was even worse than the physical violence was that they then had to stand in rooms and watch their friends be sold and to hear men arguing what they were worth – $40, $50. What was the price of them? What was their value?”

This is not the first time Jolie has spoken about the need to confront ISIS. As Breitbart previously reported, in January this year she visited northern Iraq using the opportunity to urge world leaders to take action against IS.

In a Big Hollywood piece written after Jolie told Vanity Fair she was “open” to running for office one day, Christian Toto wrote about how “she does the dirty work” explaining:

“Leonardo DiCaprio rails against fossil fuels, and then leaves a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint in his wake. Jolie appears more eager to back up her words with actions. She’s gained respect for her humanitarian efforts in Africa, and she looks genuinely concerned and plugged in during her visits to impoverished communities. So far, she has visited more than 30 countries on behalf of the UN, risking her life at times in the process. She also backs up her actions with her checkbook.”

Follow Sarkis Zeronian on Twitter: or e-mail to: szeronian@breitbart.com

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