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| Still from the infamous video of the abducted Nigerian Christian schoolgirls, forced to convert to Islam by the Muslim group 'Boko Haram'. |
Robert Spencer discusses the importance of both the nickname and the official, and unpacks this very deliberate construct as follows:
Boko Haram means “Western education is sin,” or more literally, “Books bad.” The mainstream media has reported this as if the group were a bunch of Luddites with AK-47s – people who for some unexplained reason object to modern technology except for the weaponry. But actually the moniker “Boko Haram” is a specifically Islamic name, referring to the sinfulness of any system of education that is not based and centered upon the Qur’an and Islam.
And the actual name of the group is not Boko Haram at all; it is the 'Party of the People of the Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad'. Sunnah is accepted Islamic practice as derived from the Qur’an and Hadith; dawah is Islamic proselytizing; and jihad, of course, is (according to mainstream Islamic tradition) primarily warfare against unbelievers in order to establish the hegemony of Islamic law.
Clearly, then, the group’s focus and motivation is entirely Islamic – which is probably why the media never calls the group by its actual name: too much focus on Islam in connection with terrorism is, for the media, as verboten for today’s media as it would have been for Der Stürmer to run a piece favorable to Jews.
Mr. Spencer arrays several other key points to understanding Boko Haram:
The abduction of the schoolgirls is only the latest in a huge string of atrocities.
[They have] murdered over 2,500 people in the first three months of 2014 alone and torched numerous churches and Christian homes.
Muslim clerics recruit for them in mosques.
The British tabloid The Sun reported in late April that “Nigerian Muslim clerics living in the border towns of Cameroon and Nigeria are recruiting Boko Haram members in their mosques, the government of Cameroon has alleged.” It quoted StrategyPage, an American military news site:
"Cameroon is also concerned about pro-Boko Haram clerics from Nigeria quietly preaching and recruiting for Boko Haram in Cameroon mosques. Islamic conservative clergy are not unusual on either side of the border, but those who do not denounce Boko Haram are suspected of quietly recruiting young men to join the “jihad” (struggle) and fight (and often die) in Nigeria."
The taking of infidel women as sex slaves is justified in Islamic law. Spencer cites contemporary mainstream Islamic scholars (both male and female!) who openly advocate this view, which is based upon the Quran itself and the example of Muhammad.
Their leader has said: “The reason why I will kill you is you are infidels.” He is on record as stating:
The reason why I will kill you is you are infidels, you follow Democracy.…Whoever follows Democracy is an infidel. This is Shekau, this is why I’m in enmity with you….You are all infidels. What makes you infidels is Democracy and constitution and western education…I therefore call on brethren in Kano to rise up and replicate the Baga attack. All these infidels we are the ones killing them. We enjoy shedding their blood. The Qur’an must be supreme, we must establish Islam in this country.
US Muslim groups won’t move to excommunicate Boko Haram - The Daily Caller’s Neil Munro repeatedly asks Muslim leaders in the U.S. to offer Islamic counter-arguments to Boko Haram’s claims for Islamic justification for its actions, and they refuse to do so. This is because they can’t...
And this article:
Video:
Kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria being forced to recite the quran,
“They are Muslims now!” - See more at:
http://pamelageller.com/2014/05/video-kidnapped-schoolgirls-nigeria-forced-recite-quran-islam-forced-conversions.html/#sthash.CPaKmb6R.dpuf
Video:
Kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria being forced to recite the quran,
“They are Muslims now!” - See more at:
http://pamelageller.com/2014/05/video-kidnapped-schoolgirls-nigeria-forced-recite-quran-islam-forced-conversions.html/#sthash.CPaKmb6R.dpuf
Whitewashing Boko Haram
by Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Breitbart News — May 12, 2014
Boko Haram was created soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2002. One would think that twelve years would be enough time to come to understand a terrorist organization of the magnitude of Boko Haram; apparently not for the left-wing media and the administration.
Monday morning, just as video was being released worldwide by the terrorist group showing that the Christian girls they have kidnapped have been converted to Islam, the Daily Beast was reporting that the group is misunderstood and that its actions have nothing to do with the teachings of Mohammad. The author, Dean Obidallah, writes that it is "grotesquely irresponsible of the media" to suggest that Boko Haram has anything to do with Islam.
Given that this is the same Dean Obeidallah who used a TV appearance to publicly deride Mitt Romney's family for adopting a black child, it is tempting to dismiss the whole episode as hack journalism. Unfortunately, there is however a pattern to this "White Wash," one that is linked to the White House and the administration's policy on Boko Haram.
First there was the petition by MoveOn.org to prevent the US government from listing Boko Haram as a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Then there were the efforts by Hillary Clinton's State Department to do to same two years ago, which is highly significant, since in US law it is the State Department that makes the determination as to whether or not a given group should be formally given terrorist status.
Breitbart has reported how the removal of any reference to religion or Islam within US counterterrorism policy is a product of abstruse academic theories that place the blame for terrorism upon the governments that "oppress" the people and upon US foreign policy. This stretches the concept of victimhood to such a degree that the terrorist is no longer responsible for the violence he or she perpetrates, since the environment "forced" them to kill. Religion therefore has to be irrelevant according to this conceptualization which blames colonial US policies or the behavior of our allies. Incredibly this theory led to the purging and censorship by the White House of all counterterrorism training materials used by the DoD and DoJ in 2011. Mention of Islam when discussing al Qaeda or its affiliates became haram (that's "forbidden" to you infidels out there).
The topic of who and what Boko Haram is should, of course, be kept out of the hands of politicians and their partisan media allies. Stephen Ulph is one of the world's foremost experts on international terrorism, especially of the Islamist kind. The former editor of JANES Terrorism Security Monitor and founding editor of JANES Islamic Affairs Analyst, he was commissioned to write an 80-page analysis of Boko Haram for the Westminster Institite. Ulph goes to the source.
Here is Boko Haram's spokesman Abu Qaqa on who they are and what they want:
We wish to reiterate that our crusade is not for personal gain; it is meant to ensure the establishment of an Islamic state by liberating all Muslims from the excesses of the infidels... [T]he bottom line of our struggle is to set the Muslims free from enslavement. We only kill unbelievers.
Should that not be clear enough, Ulph also quotes numerous Boko Haram leaders as well, to include Abubakar Shekau himself:
This work that we are doing is not our work, it is Allah's work, we are doing Allah's work.
So if Boko Haram say they are doing the work of Allah, then that would seem to be definitive. As one survivor of the Holocaust once said when asked what the one true lesson of his experience had been: listen to what people say. When they repeatedly declare you inhuman and to be killed, you shouldn't ignore them.
Sebastian Gorka PhD is national security editor for Breitbart News.
