Being freed doesn’t end the suffering for the kidnapped girls of Boko Haram
There are tragedies so deep, suffering so vast, that it’s hard to know what to say in the face of them. Certainly it’s hard to know what to do, even for those who try to help. Such is the case in the plight of the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, whose vale of tears does not end with their liberation.
These are young women and in many cases young girls who were initially subjected to the trauma of kidnapping.
Then they were raped over and over again, by many men or by men who called themselves their husbands.
Who were kept prisoner, harangued, indoctrinated, and often became pregnant and bore the children of their captors.
For them, even the process of being freed was devastating, violent and sometimes resulted in the death of some of the captives during the melee.
Now that they are free, they are further restricted—to special camps run by the Nigerian army—and ostracized from society.
Perhaps worst of all, their present treatment makes a certain amount of sense, because they had been brainwashed into Boko Haram’s ways at an early age and there is the possibility that a recent uptick in the number of female suicide bombers in Nigeria may be at the hands of some of the ex-Boko-Haram hostages. So the fear is that it’s very difficult to tell who among the ex-hostages would be the enemy and who would not.
It’s a terrible story of human suffering at the hands of a malignant force (Islamic terrorism of the Nigerian variety), and the efforts to alleviate the situation for the girls/women have been relatively futile:
Once a week, Halima and Hamsatu attend group therapy sessions in a tent that says “Safe Place for Women and Girls.”
There they are known as “the sisters” because of how close they’ve become. They gather in a circle on the floor with about a dozen other women. The counselor repeats a few lines during each meeting. Hamsatu and Halima wait quietly for them, wishing they were true.
“What has gone has gone.”
“You are safe now.”
“You are secure now.”
Maybe some day these girls/women will actually feel safe. I wouldn’t bet on it. Right now their stories seem even sadder than those of the three women kidnapped, tortured, raped, and psychologically abused by Ariel Castro, because for the most part they don’t have loving homes or society to return to and are considered to have been shamed by their rapes, as well as feared for their potential violence.
Why don’t they have loving homes to return to? All too often their families were murdered by Boko Haram, too.
[NOTE: As if that weren’t terrible enough, here’s another story about a group of children who were held by Boko Haram and by the time they were rescued they had forgotten their native tongue, their names, and their histories.]
Good thing is a peaceful religion, can you imagine how bad it would be if not??
Some well-meaning lefty friends of mine organize an annual “Walk to End Genocide.” (No, not a joke!) When they asked me for money the first year, I asked them if they’re going to use the money to hire mercenaries who will go and kill the Arab raiders of Darfur, Boko Haram, etc., etc., etc. When they looked at me in horror, I said “no money for you until you’re serious about ending genocide.” They haven’t asked since.
But-but-but, Michelle Obama tweeted about these girls! She used a special hashtag! To suggest that Michelle Obama didn’t solve the problem is just racist.
While I understand the need to make sarcastic remarks, and do so myself often enough, it breaks my heart that we can be anything but horrified by this. How low our society has fallen, that we are not all actively outraged by this. No hashtag is strong enough.
Thanks, y81.
Call this yet another example of failed leadership. The most powerful man in the world…
…
…
…did nothing about this. NOTHING.
We know that he disdains the use of American strength abroad. This is an example when strength could have done wonders, for a cause he apparently approves of. A strong American leader might well have addressed Boko Haram with a single well-placed phone call — something like “This is the President of the United States. We disapprove of you kidnapping young girls. Return them all to their homes, within the next 48 hours, or we will destroy you utterly. Any of you whom we do not reach, will live in fear of us for the rest of their lives… which will be a very short time indeed.”
Can you even imagine President Obama saying something like that, and meaning it, and following through with it? I can’t.
Maybe one day, one of these girls, grown to womanhood, will have the chance to say “Mr. Obama, where were you when we needed you?”
I expect, if Obama is asked by one of those women, he’ll use the apology generator Clinton used when the Rwanda unpleasantness was safely behind him.
Or he’ll note that they’re Christian and shrug.
Said it before, B.H. recruits a more than sufficient supply of sadistic psychopaths–generated by Islam and their tribal culture–to keep up their activities no matter their casualties.
So either we play whack-a-mole and the locals get massacred, or we destroy the Hausa as a people.
Some time back, Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club speculated if Islamist terror organizations would ever manage to put together a tactic or strategy to which the answer, the only answer, is so horrible we might not do it. Or might wait until too late.
Richar Aubrey,
It does seem that eventually the West, more specifically America, will have to go berserker on Islam; or as you note we will wait to our demise.
This is horrific and heart-breaking. This is truly evil, the way they were treated by Boko Haram.
I recall Obama claimed that these girls were the first thing he thought of each morning. Also claimed he had sent some US military in to help look for them – what happened with that?
“[NOTE: As if that weren’t terrible enough, here’s another story about a group of children who were held by Boko Haram and by the time they were rescued they had forgotten their native tongue, their names, and their histories.]”
This is a longstanding Islamic tradition. Recall the Turks used to require levies of young Christian boys from the subjugated dhimmis, convert them to Islam, and make them Janissaries; the Caliph’s elite and loyal slave army.
Islamic apologists/historical revisionists/liars will say that the Christian families “welcomed” this because it would improve their lives in some way. How? This same thing would happen to them. And they were taught to hate their families.
Surah 60:4 Al-Mumtahanah (She that is to be examined)
“There has already been for you an excellent pattern in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, “Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah . We have denied you, and there has appeared between us and you animosity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone” except for the saying of Abraham to his father, “I will surely ask forgiveness for you, but I have not [power to do] for you anything against Allah . Our Lord, upon You we have relied, and to You we have returned, and to You is the destination.”
In the Arabic when the Quran calls someone an “excellent pattern” that means Muslims are supposed to emulate that pattern. Which is why Salafists and Wahhabis pattern themselves on Muhammad, whom the Quran calls an “excellent pattern” without qualification, right down to dressing like a 7th century Arab and even going to the bathroom like him (really, it’s in the Sunnah).
Abraham is an “excellent pattern” when he told his family he disowned them and hated them because they did not believe in Allah. But note the qualification; Muslims are not to emulate his desire to ask forgiveness for his own relatives.
In case you don’t know, the “prophet” appropriated people like Abraham and even Alexander the Great and called them Muslims because Islam is according to the Quran the original religion.
Under the Turks having your child hauled away to become Janissaries could not possibly help the family because they were indoctrinated to hate their families. IS is doing the same with Christian children in Syria and Iraq. Other extremists are doing the same in places like Bangladesh. In Bangladesh the technique is different since unlike IS they can’t simply kidnap the children, so they resort to deceit. They tell impoverished Christian or more usually Hindu families that they can take their children to a mission school where they’ll be well fed and learn math, reading, writing, etc. The result is the same, though. They take them to a madrassa, forcibly convert them, indoctrinate them to hate their families, then send them back to wage jihad against them.
If Obama said that he would be Trump..
tibby: Take it up with Jonathan Swift or Charlie Chaplin.
“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” — Thomas Sowell
“This is truly evil, the way they were treated by Boko Haram.” Lizzy
They are simply following orders… Allah’s.
Thank you, Neo, for putting yet another face on evil in our present times.
Unless your culture had its passport stamped in Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, it probably shouldn’t be called a civilization. There’s no pleasant way to communicate that fact.
Richard Aubrey Says:
April 4th, 2016 at 4:06 pm…
Some time back, Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club speculated if Islamist terror organizations would ever manage to put together a tactic or strategy to which the answer, the only answer, is so horrible we might not do it. Or might wait until too late.
* * *
I didn’t find the article you refer to, but this one (from 2003, which is early indeed) comes close to making the same point:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/08/are-suicide-attacks-ultimate-weapon.html
“Suicide bombing is warfare’s least cost effective weapon because it puts any consideration of a negotiated settlement between the combatants out of the question. In economic terms, it destroys the Pareto optimal frontier and reduces conflict to a zero-sum game. …When faced with a fanatical enemy bent on killing everyone the battlefield choices are rapidly narrowed to either the acceptance of your own destruction or the total annihilation of the enemy. And it is the zero-sum game that Islam should fear. For the value of that game is the expected value that Islam will annihilate the world minus the expected value that the world will annihilate Islam. … And the eventual reaction of nuclear-armed Israel, Russia and India to the unlimited slaughter of their populations does not bear thinking upon. And it will not be surrender, but rather something else. That is the cost effectiveness of suicide bombing.”
I found it via this very interesting article exploring a number of plausible scenarios with the same burden – how bad does bad have to get, before something really bad is forced upon us?
http://markhumphrys.com/islamism.nightmares.html
“If the West was going to go down, if our very existence was under threat, if the barbarians threatened to destroy everything we have achieved over the last thousand years, would we use our nukes? I think we would have to, to survive, and the moral blame would lie with the aggressors.”
Aesop — the reference was to “The Three Conjectures”
That’s the magic search phrase.
blert.
I think they should be called “The Three Inevitable Conclusions” in that nothing visible seems to contradict them.
I suppose an example of the “too horrible” issue would be:
US troops facing Iran ground forces. As in the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians get a bunch of kids and give them each a plastic key[to heaven] and, this time, two hand grenades. Thousands of them. Instead of using them to clear mines, the kids are sent at US lines in masses.
Let them come in with their grenades…or kill them.
Kids. You know that slightly over half of our citizens and about 110% or our media would blame US troops for the atrocity. All the dem party. All of academia.
And then it’s some of the most horrible PTSD one could conceive for the troops.
Unless they held their fire and died.
In which case, slightly over half the population would say the Iranians were pretty slick, by golly.
My son’s experience in Rwanda suggests that some find healing years later, but not all, and never complete. There are specific ministries that take on this work, and they have trouble raising money. I have made my living working with human tragedy, but this one is beyond me. I could not do it.
Richard Aubrey: U.S. troops facing Iranians would not take static defensive positions, like the Iraqis, but would utilize their superior mobility. So deploying waves of 14 year old boys would not be a viable tactic. Additionally, such a tactic might work once, but after that, it would be easy to deploy non-lethal means (tear gas, rubber bullets) against troops so lightly armed.
y81. Not to pull MOS on you but mine were 11B10 and 71542. The latter was old style–now it would be 11Asomething or other–for Airborne Infantry Small Unit Commander.
So I’m not talking a tactical situation, but an example of something so horrible that we might not do it, or might not do it until too late. It might include nuking somebody.
However, use of tear gas is illegal. Neither tear gas nor rubber bullets get any sympathy or benefit of the doubt from slightly over half of our citizens, none of the dem party, none of academe, and none of the media.
However, to get to your point. Some places are so valuable they have to be defended on the ground from fixed positions. Maneuverability would only be useful to get a better shot at the attackers. Can you imagine the PR effect of, for example, mowing down a bunch of fourteen year old girls? Or tear gassing them?
Gas is only legal when used against US citizens–see Waco.