IN a recent piece on The Huffington Post, Charlotte Alfred wrote that, “on the night of April 14, 2014, hundreds of schoolgirls at the Chibok Boarding School in Nigeria awoke to the sound of gunfire. They saw men in camouflage approaching and thought soldiers were coming to save them from a militant attack.”
Instead, to their horror, the schoolgirls—more than 270 of them—found themselves in the slimy paws of the Islamist group Boko Haram, which announced that it would sell the girls into slavery once it is tired of them. The West erupted in outrage, but that was six months ago. In the days following the attack, 57 girls escaped on their own; none of the rest have escaped since.
A Nigerian officer said he knew where the girls were held; he was ignored. A few months ago, United States surveillance spotted what may have been the girls; nothing came out of it. An Australian cleric brokered a deal to free the girls, but it fell apart three times. He claimed that Nigerian officials had almost certainly sabotaged it, and accused them of funding Boko Haram. Why? Because they believed in its leader’s cause of fundamentalist child sex slavery—or he gets girls for them.
It’s almost certainly the latter, as I knew a Nigerian at Harvard who walked around with an ivory-handled cane, which he didn’t need and which he only used as a fashion statement. He had the temerity to stand up in the Massachussetts Institute of Technology auditorium one night to question novelist V.S. Naipaul’s integrity as a critic of Third World Islamic countries because he wrote and spoke in impeccable English. The Nigerian himself spoke with a British accent. Naipaul answered that his brilliant gifts of thinking and expression had been painstakingly acquired and that, having descended so far down the tree where the Nigerian people were still dangling, he would not reverse his evolution by going back up it. The auditorium erupted in laughter. The Nigerian fled; f—— monkey.
Nigeria initially refused international help, but the US sent 80 special-force units in May. Canada, France, Israel and the United Kingdom also sent their special forces. Six weeks later the Pentagon announced a pullback. Meanwhile, the town from which the girls were taken continues to confront the threat of an attack from Boko Haram, which has taken five more towns. The group has kidnapped three more groups of girls and killed 2,100 people. The dead included parents of the kidnapped girls, so that puts them out of their anxiety.
After they were ordered to fight Boko Haram, 600 Nigerian soldiers fled to Cameroon. The Nigerian army called it a special maneuver; we call it throwing the fight. The one thing the Nigerian military is good at is violating human rights. Evidence has emerged that countless civilians have been falsely accused of having links to Boko Haram and tortured—and butchered, when they did not cough up the money for their release.
Meanwhile the Nigerian government has paid a white-trash Washington public-relations firm $1.2 million to put a good face on a really ugly situation. This is why, our alliance with America notwithstanding, we cannot risk having Washington broker any peace with China; we are bound to be sold downriver.
Despite its infinitely superior firepower, the West will not rescue the girls or punish Boko Haram for two reasons: 1) Nigeria has oil contracts with the West; and 2) the girls are black.