Selective Outrage

Even a casual observer of politics and popular

culture would notice that liberals are an angry lot and usually angry about a lot of things at the same time: Saving the planet, social justice, income inequality, the “war on women,” charter schools, racial profiling and the list goes on into infinity. If it isn’t meryl Streep testifying to Congress about the dangers of alar (there weren’t any), it’s Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon protesting for the Sandinistas, for Ralph Nader, against Ralph Nader, with Cindy Sheehan and Jane Fonda  about the invasion of Iraq, against Governor Scott Walker and for Occupy Wall Street. Liberals rant and rave and storm about until, sometimes, their opinions collide with each other, which brings us to Boko Haram.

The kidnapping of 276 girls in Nigeria is rightly judged an abominable act, compounded by the threat of Boko Haram’s psychotic leader, Abubakar Sharam, to sell the girls into slavery and a life of prostitution, misery, abuse, disease and early death.  All civilized people should be shocked by this outrageous crime and everything should be done to find the girls and rescue them before it’s too late, but this situation also shines an unflattering light on liberals, who, I suspect, aren’t aware of it:

·         Non-intervention in other countries’ affairs has been a hallmark of liberal theology since the Vietnam War.  The aforesaid Ms. Sarandon and Ms. Fonda bitched about the invasion of Grenada and American support for the Contras in Nicaragua, liberals protested the deployment of American forces  to Saudi Arabia in 1990 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Code Pink protested at George Bush’s ranch over the Global war On Terror.  However, as with the protests against apartheid in South Africa, the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines, the invasion of Haiti to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power and the bombing of Libya in 2011, liberals who demand American military intervention in Nigeria (#BringBackOurGirls) demonstrate that non-intervention as a principle is rather flexible when it concerns one of their pet causes, in this case, two causes: Feminism and Africa.  Thus Sheila Jackson-Lee can wave $12 in cash at the gate of the Nigerian Embassy, angrily referencing the price Boko Haram would accept for one of their victims, insists on a powerful and immediate American military response and doesn’t grasp the hypocrisy – they’re girls, they’re black, so anything is justified.

·         Abubakar Sharam’s threat, “Allah commands me to sell them,” referring to the girls he kidnapped at gunpoint, underscores that he is a psychotic Muslim thug leading an army of psychotic Muslim thugs, a stereotypical representative of the militant Islam that has waged war on Western civilization for the past forty years and the very reason we have been at war since 9/11, yet haven’t liberals like John Kerry, Dick Durbin, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Priest-King himself accused the United States of a baseless anti-Islamic hatred?  Did not Priest-King begin his reign by apologizing to the Muslim world for American “mistakes”? (A gentleman was arrested in London last week merely for quoting Winston Churchill’s remarks on Islam, the authorities charging him with making “insensitive remarks,” this in the city that was savagely bombed by Muslim terrorists in July 2005.) Demanding that the U.S. military should forcibly rescue his captives ought to bring a blush to liberals’ cheeks but they’re apparently unaware of the contradiction.

·         Many of the kidnapped girls are Christians, a fact omitted in most of the mainstream media coverage of this event.  Militant Islam has persecuted Christians for 1400 years but especially since the 1970’s – Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, East Timor, South Sudan, everywhere in the Muslim world – have we seen a committed, vengeful, robust campaign of anti-Christian hate, compassing the full range of human depravity: Kidnapping, rape and slavery are just the latest manifestations.  Usually, the Left mocks and insults Christianity, blaming the Church for every ill in the world but now liberal commentators and politicians, Michelle Obama included, urge the immediate rescue of these innocent girls, confirming what we already knew to be the truth: Christians are overwhelmingly the victims of Muslim violence and prejudice, not the other way around.

It is reported that two of the girls have died of snakebite, that another girl has escaped and that about 100 girls have been forcibly converted to Islam and exploited on Youtube.  As the days roll by and no substantive action is taken, it becomes less and less likely that the girls will ever be recovered and one of the issues that will have to be confronted in the aftermath of this tragic episode is the utter futility of liberalism as expressed in foreign policy. The fact is that we should intervene in the affairs of other countries when it is in our national interest to do so.  We fight militant Islam because it threatens us, because it is a crude, violent and repressive ideology that seeks to enslave the world and to destroy whatever it cannot enslave.  Muslims attack and kill and kidnap and torture and rape and enslave Christians because they hate their very existence and if these facts contravene every principle of liberalism known to Man, then so be it, because what is more important: Dealing with the world the way naïve liberals want it to be or dealing with the world the way it really is?