Boko Haram is still slaughtering people as if they were fleas or bedbugs. On Tuesday they murdered FIFTY NINE CHILDREN at a boarding school in Yobe state.
Gunmen from Islamist group Boko Haram shot or burned to death 59 pupils in a boarding school in north-east Nigeria overnight, a hospital official and security forces said on Tuesday.
“Some of the students’ bodies were burned to ashes,” police commissioner Sanusi Rufai said of the attack on the federal government college of Buni Yadi, a secondary school in Yobe state, near the state’s capital city of Damaturu.
Bala Ajiya, an official at the Specialist Hospital Damaturu, said the death toll had risen to 59. “Fresh bodies have been brought in. More bodies were discovered in the bush after the students who had escaped with bullet wounds died from their injuries,” he said.
Rufai, who had given an earlier estimate of 29 killed, said all those killed were boys. He said the school’s 24 buildings, including staff quarters, were completely burned to the ground.
So their name – Education Forbidden – is very literal.
Militants from Boko Haram, whose name means “western education is sinful” in the northern Hausa language, have frequently attacked schools in the past. A similar attack in June in the nearby village of Mamudo left 22 students dead.
They have killed more than 300 people this month, mostly civilians, including in two attacks last week that killed around 100 each, one in which militants razed a whole village and shot panicked residents as they tried to flee.
Killing as an end in itself. No shining path, no when the state has withered away, no nothing to lose but your chains; just murder murder murder murder.
Add the Pentecostalists and their promotion of murder and torture. Why do monotheists think that without religion there would be nothing but murder and mayhem? If I were the devil and really wanted to turn black to white and love to hate I would invent monotheism. Nothing more effectively destroys every good thing.
Did this actually happen, or are we being told of this “atrocity” in order to inflame public support for some sort of military action against Nigeria (which happens to have vast resources of natural gas, coal, bauxite, tantalite, gold, tin, iron ore, limestone, niobium, lead and zinc. As far as oil reserves go (from Wikipedia):
Nigeria’s proven oil reserves are estimated by the U.S. United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) at between 16 and 22 billion barrels (3.5×109 m3),[4] but other sources claim there could be as much as 35.3 billion barrels (5.61×109 m3). Its reserves make Nigeria the tenth most petroleum-rich nation, and by the far the most affluent in Africa. In mid-2001 its crude oil production was averaging around 2.2 million barrels (350,000 m³) per day.
Why should we care about human rights atrocities in Nigeria? Oh, yeah – it’s because Nigeria has lots of stuff that we want, and any premise for an invasion that will enable us to seize and control that stuff.
Remember that tearful account of a nurse who told of Iraqi soldiers breaking into a Kuwaiti hospital and snatching infants out of incubators, taking the incubators away, and leaving the infants to die on the cold floor? Everyone who heard her testimony was incensed, and the US public was, as a result, widely in favor of military action against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. This is the same Iraq whose leader, Saddam Hussein, our former best friend, was considering selling oil on their bourse in Euros and yen, instead of only US $ as the US mandated. Well, guess what? That “nurse” turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and she’d been coached in how to most effectively deliver her performance by PR company Hill & Knowlton, which performance was part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign that H&K was running for the Kuwaiti government. It was nothing but warmongering propaganda.
Call me callous and cynical, but whenever I hear these tug-at-your-heartstrings stories, I think of Nayirah and her testimony about the poor, mistreated, nonexistent Kuwaiti babies. And I wait for some evidence.
“Some of the students’ bodies were burned to ashes”
Does that mean we shouldn’t expect there to be any bodies there to count?
O noes! They’ve destroyed all the evidence! That means…what? If there’s no evidence, what can we conclude?
@ ^ Blanche Quizno : Three words for you – Bones and teeth.
I don’t think the whole body is consumed in these attacks. An appallling if not susprising atrocity indeed.
Okay I will call you callous and cynical then – and also I’ll add ridiculously hyperskeptical and arguably paranoid to that list. Because that’s how your comment seems to me.
I don’t see much reason to doubt this atrocity – your extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim would be?
I see no reason or evidence in what you say only your unsupported almost axiomatically dubious assertion there.
I do trust Ophelia Benson to know what she’s talking about and she certainly isn’t any sort of imperialist war-mongerer as your comments seem to be rudely implying.
We are talking about Boko Haram here – see :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram
(Please really, do read that and learn,Blanche Quizno, it does seem you need to!)
Now if you think they are somehow the good guys or anything other than the extremely nasty bunch of Jihadist scumbags we know that they are then you are lost! (/Obi-Wan Kenobi voice)
Yeesh, the pro-Islam club on FTB (that group of suppsoedly non-religious commenters here who for whatever twisted reasons of their own almost always take the Islamic side and make excuses for Islamists on many issues) sure does seem willfully blind to reality.
@Blanche Quizno:
Cut the denialism. The evidence in this particular case is all too clear. Here, for example, is the BBC on-site news crew’s visit to the burned school: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26338041 .
Some of the victim’s bodies were burned. Most of the dead died from gunshot wounds, and the confirmed death toll has been rising from the initially-reported 29 as the search of the area continues. Google News and other aggregators will refer you to primary sources showing pictures of the bodies of the dead, and interviews with a few of the 11 seriously-injured survivors.
The exact people responsible for the massacre may not be entirely clear. But claiming that “there’s no evidence” when there is is not acceptable.
Blanche isn’t cynical enough, as she has apparently not considered the possibility that Boko Haram did, indeed, murder dozens of children and, independently, this atrocity will be exploited by the “usual suspects” in order to grab Nigeria’s natural resources. I mean, you’re talking about the sort of people who are okay with faking an atrocity in order to start a war; do you really think those people would hesitate to exploit a genuine atrocity to get rich(er)? Or would those people’s reaction be more like, oh, Thank God we didn’t have to go to the trouble of faking an excuse! ?
There’s absolutely no doubt that this happened.
And please don’t invoke a quest for natural resources as juistification.
When Nato invaded Afganistan, those who were somewhat clueless claimed it was all about the oil…
And I supose that yesterday’s attack in Kunming, an attack that killed 29 people and wounded more than a 100 others, was all about cornering the rice market
Or something.
Like the Thuggee, these Boko Haram people need to be wiped out to the last of them. Their “religion” is an abomination of murder for pleasure. They are nothing but serial killers who receive a sexual charge from murdering children. They cannot be negotiated with — it’s impossible. They have made the decision to become savages, they should be treated as such.
I’m sure everyone here who has condemned my skeptical, wait-and-see attitude would have reacted identically if, right after Kuwaiti nurse Nayirah’s testimony before Congress in 1990 about the horrible Iraqi soldiers’ murders of tiny babies in a Kuwaiti hospital. I’m absolutely convinced you would be saying the same things if that were the topic, it had just been reported, and I was saying I didn’t buy it.
But in that case, the entire thing was fake. No Iraqi soldiers. No Kuwaiti hospital. No poor widdle babies taken out of their incubators and left to die on the cold floor (boo hoo hoo). It was all made up – and the very convincing “nurse” who provided the “eye-witness testimony” to Congress in 1990 turned out to be the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter, who had been extensively coached in how to perform by a marketing agency which was running the “Citizens for a Free Kuwait” public relations campaign for the Kuwaiti government.
Is it possible that you (pl) are not aware of all this? Here! Read about it! They DO this sort of thing! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony)
Sorry, folks, but once bitten, twice shy. I’m not the sort to pay much attention to the boy who cries wolf after that first alert. Fool me once, shame on you – fool me twice, shame on me. I’ll just sit this one out, if you don’t mind.
Wtf?
Boko Haram has been doing this (according to news reports from many many established, trusted, accredited news organizations) for several years. I’ve blogged about it repeatedly. This isn’t one person talking to a Congressional committee, it’s a long series of reported atrocities over a period of years. And who the hell is contemplating a military attack on Nigeria?
Oh and the part about your “skeptical, wait-and-see attitude” – wait for what? As I said, this has been widely reported for the past several years.
You know not all little boys are liars and eventually in that story there really was a wolf. The moral is not that you shouldn’t believe people who cry wolf – it’s that you shouldn’t cry wolf when there isn’t one, lest people not believe you when there is one. In the story the little boy was killed because there was a wolf but people, like yourself, didn’t believe him when he called for help. That’s why we don’t just dismiss claims, we check them.
Blanche Quizno @9
23 years ago a woman lied about something that happened in the Middle East so you don’t believe atrocities are happening in sub-Saharan Africa today. I’m having trouble seeing what didn’t happen a generation ago in Kuwait having anything to do with what’s happening in present-day Nigeria.
Blanche Quizno:
You are wrong.
A person making a statement unsupported by evidence is in no way equivalent to the situation here. I referred you to video of the burned school; you can readily find interviews with the survivors (not all in English, of course) and pictures of the dead from several independent sources. The same level of information is available for many other terrorist attacks that have occurred in Nigeria in the past several years.
So, again, cut out the denialism.
And also cut out the “I’m so much more awesome than everyone because I assert that everyone is always lying without any evidence” bullshit. You are being offensive and obnoxious and generating massive conspiracies rather than simply dealing with the amply-demonstrated reality that there a very large number of people have been murdered.
I am glad to see one of the leftwing Islam apologists finally take their denial to such a ridiculous extreme that they get the group beat down they deserve.
@ 14 Katherine Woo
I’m not sure which is more pathetic – your schadenfreude or your need for validation via argumentum ad populum.
Also – Katherine, I don’t think you have any actual reason to call Blanche Quizno a “leftwing Islam apologist.” I don’t know anything like enough about Blanche Q to say that, and I doubt that you do either. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) I don’t know what orientation this weird skepticism is based on; I can’t tell. It looks more bizarro-conspiratorial than left wing, to me.
I think the unanimous scorn for Blanche’s comments is based more on her apparent lack of awareness of Boko Haram than it is political; more because they’re goofy than because they’re politically misguided.
That’s certainly true in my case. The idea that anyone needs to “wait and see” what Boko Haram is really all about…oy.
Blanche does not come up with that sort of mentality out of nowhere.
1. She comes here to actively dismiss brutal Islamic fundamentalist crimes, with no effort whatsoever to follow up on the countless, widely-reported sources she could use confirm Boko Haram’s history of atrocities.
2. I know for a fact she is not as reserved with Christianity based on her pasts posts. She jumped right into condemning those awful witch persecutions in the same region without this flurry of ‘skepticism.’ The disparity is just glaring.
3. She just happens to use an obscure anecdote that involves the United States intervening in the Muslim world. That nurse’s testimony had literally no real impact on our decision to support the UN policy in the Gulf War. True or not, Saddam Hussein did invade Iraq and the UN resolutions against that were a response to that.
4. The way cubist immediately cheers her on with more leftist rhetoric.
All of that adds up to a “leftwing Islam apologist” in my book.
Too much certainty, with too little evidence. Quite like Blanche’s comment in that respect, actually.
There really are people who are more about paranoia than they are about either left or right.
Your comments would be more interesting if they were a little less formulaic, is all.