The kidnapped Nigerian girls are Christian. Why doesn’t our media say so?
Nigerian schoolgirls
by: Robin Harris
Gradually but explosively, what Boko Haram,
the Islamist terror group, has been doing in North East Nigeria has
penetrated the mainstream from the social media. On 14 April Boko Haram
(meaning ‘Western Education is Forbidden’) abducted more than 230 girls
from a boarding school. Most are still missing. Abubaka Shekau, Boko
Haram’s leader, obligingly gave a videoed explanation: ‘I abducted your
girls; there is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell –
he commands me to sell.’
The fact that these are girls, at least,
makes their plight of international political and media interest.
Feminism is an easy fall-back position for the foreign policy/human
rights community. For that, the girls and their parents may yet have
reason to be grateful. It allows the British Foreign Secretary to tweet
that ‘using girls as the spoils of war and the spoils of terrorism is
immoral’. But what neither the UK nor the US authorities is prepared to
draw attention to is that these girls – all or nearly all of them – are
Christians.
It is believed that at least 180 of the girls are Christian.
Boko Haram might, indeed, abduct Muslim
girls from school because it thought they should be back at home, to be
covered up, beaten, and to make the soup. But it would only dare to sell
Christians into slavery and prostitution. Not only are they Christian.
It is their Christianity which caused them to be victims.
These and other abductees were at schools
in the Christian enclave of Chibok in Borno State. The region is the
scene of systematic Islamist persecution and intimidation. Chibok,
itself, was regarded as safe, until Islamists arrived to burn down the
market, destroy houses, steal, kill, and abduct at will. Full, credible,
detailed accounts are available through the Christian on-line networks.
Yet commentators still seem content to
exercise self-censorship. The religious identity of the girls has not
been mentioned in the mainstream US or British media.
The words ‘poverty’, ‘corruption’, and
‘incompetence’ figure largely, and with some justice, in explanations of
what is dysfunctional in Nigeria. But the word “Christian’ is notable
by its absence in explaining what happened in Chibok.
Nigeria is, in truth, the scene of a brutal
religious war being fought by jihadists against Christians. But don’t
expect the White House or Downing Street, let alone Foggy Bottom or the
FCO, to own up to it.
source: The Spectator
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