Fresh from posting a video of the Jordanian pilot being burned to death (WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIDEO) comes news from the UN that Islamic State routinely sells children into sexual slavery, crucifies them, buries them alive, uses them as suicide bombers, and recruits them as child soldiers.

It is nearly beyond belief.

I say nearly because we are becoming inured to IS savagery. But it's important that a record be made because, like the Holocaust, future generations will scarcely believe such barbarism occurred.

New York Times:

Islamic State militants are selling abducted Iraqi children at markets as sex slaves, and killing other youth, including by crucifixion or burying them alive, a United Nations watchdog said on Wednesday.

Iraqi boys aged under 18 are increasingly being used by the militant group as suicide bombers, bomb makers, informants or human shields to protect facilities against U.S.-led air strikes, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said.

"We are really deeply concerned at torture and murder of those children, especially those belonging to minorities, but not only from minorities," committee expert Renate Winter told a news briefing. "The scope of the problem is huge."

Children from the Yazidi sect or Christian communities, but also Shi'ites and Sunnis, have been victims, she said.

"We have had reports of children, especially children who are mentally challenged, who have been used as suicide bombers, most probably without them even understanding," Winter told Reuters. "There was a video placed (online) that showed children at a very young age, approximately eight years of age and younger, to be trained already to become child soldiers."

J. Christian Adams writes of the IS as a "Death Cult":

What is exploding in the Middle East is a death cult filled with adults who have never morally evolved past the strange child who plucks the wings off of flies.  It is a death cult from the Middle Ages.

When Saint Pope John Paul II and his successor Francis speak relentlessly of a “culture of life,” many only hear the issue of abortion.  But we are seeing through the barbarity of ISIS that a culture of life means much more.   It is a linear promise that extends from arguments for life in the United States to moral barriers to the ISIS barbarity.

Some say that the actions of ISIS are in literal accord with the teachings of Islam.  Others, including the last two presidents, aggressively disagree.  I am no Islamic scholar, but if the teachings of Islam can support the barbarity against the innocent by ISIS in the slightest way, the world is in for a wicked future.

Yet when Obama makes the obligatory condemnation of ISIS barbarity, it is reminiscent of President Jimmy Carter making the obligatory condemnation of the Soviet Union.  The words are there, but little else.

The Jewish people have endured what happens when a death cult acquires the means of mass extermination.  After this unique horror ended, the Jewish people were given a homeland, surrounded by enemies unwilling to accept their presence.  It forever puzzles me that wherever the Jewish people may be found, wicked and bloodthirsty people seek to do them harm.

The steady stream of videos showing the innocent being burned alive or their heads sliced off with a hunting knife is nothing less than a Satanic bloodlust.  It is no accident that these murderers have graduated to fire.  Expect more of the same until the civilized world gathers itself to oppose them in effective ways.

It took 6years of bungling by European powers before they finally confronted the Nazi Death Cult. Even then, their hearts were not initially in the fight. Now, the former #2 at the CIA told CBS news that it will take 100,000 ground troops to defeat IS. He hastened to add that the will to use that number of troops “simply does not exist” in the west.

Yesterday, coalition air forces conducted 17 missions against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria. The day before, the number was 14. Compare that to the 100's of sorties per day flown by America alone at the outset of the Iraq War. Bottom line: We are not serious about confronting this threat. More than what they do to their hostages, more than what they do to children, the biggest threat of Islamic State is their systematic attack on 2,000 years of civilization - its tenets, its norms, its principles. It's been a bloody road over the last two milenia to reach the point where children are fiercely protected and allowed a childhood. Islamic State is upending that paradigm and, by their actions, proclaim that children are to be exploited for sex, for propaganda, and for killing.