1. #BringBack OurChristians
Bring Back Our Christians
Last
spring, Boko Haram, a jihadist group fighting to establish an Islamist state in
Nigeria, kidnapped hundreds of girls from a public school in the city of
Chibok. The kidnapping led to a worldwide hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls.
Media celebrities signed up; political leaders, too, such as British Prime
Minister David Cameron. American First Lady Michelle Obama famously tweeted a
photo from the White House.
Three
months have passed. Boko Haram has not released the girls, but the hashtag is
no longer trending. The media has moved on to other stories. In fact, Boko
Haram appears to miss the attention. This week, the group released a video to remind the
world it’s still around.
The
video features the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau ridiculing the West’s
campaign to free the girls and demanding, instead, that Nigeria’s President,
Goodluck Jonathan, release members of Boko Haram currently in prison. “You go
around saying ‘Bring Back Our Girls,’” he mocks. “Bring Back Our Army.” For
good measure, he repeats gleefully into the camera, “Kill, Kill, Kill, Kill
Christians!”
The
video is worth watching for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a nice lesson in
the limits of social media. Feel-good hashtag campaigns, on their own,
accomplish precisely nothing. To refer without irony to “the promise of the
hashtag,” as a State Department spokesperson recently did in the context of the
Ukraine crisis, is an embarrassment. Groups like Boko Haram will laugh off such
trivialities or, indeed, co-opt them for their own purposes. So will other,
more sovereign, opponents.
I
don’t suggest the West should send commandos to Nigeria to free the girls, even
assuming we could find them. Invading countries has a way of backfiring. In
fact, we may not be capable of very much in this situation, unfortunately. But
one thing’s for sure. Juvenile, self-regarding tweets–the foreign-policy
version of selfies–will only make the West seem effete and, well, laughable.
Second,
Shekau’s call to “Kill Christians” clarifies something important. As as a
result of the Chibok kidnapping, the West sees Boko Haram as anti-women. But
that’s a relatively minor part of the story. Boko Haram is not principally
anti-women, but anti-Christian. The group has been carrying out atrocities
against Christians for years. It’s just that the West has not found the story
important. Indeed, Chibok itself is a largely Christian city, and most of the
kidnapped schoolgirls are Christians. That’s a major reason why Boko Haram
abducted them in the first place.
The
media and Western human rights advocates have a hard time seeing Christians as
sympathetic victims. Even when they acknowledge that Christians are suffering,
they feel they somehow have to apologize for raising the subject. (Nicholas
Kristof’s recent column
for the New York Times is a good example). This bias prevents clear
understanding, though. “Bring Back Our Girls?” How about, “Bring Back Our
Christians?”
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