Once again, Islamist terrorists have zeroed in on what they regard as a mortal threat: girls going to school.
Now these men are threatening to sell into slavery the 300 Nigerian girls they have taken from their school. It’s part of their larger war against the West and modernity. In their twisted brand of Islam, a girl going to school to learn how to read and write and think for herself is an enemy.
In this, the terrorists of Boko Haram are brothers to the 9/11 hijackers — and their Taliban patrons, who also outlawed education for girls and chopped off the fingertips of Afghan women caught in the high crime of wearing nail polish.
The hostage-taking also confirms something we learned from the State Department’s most recent report on terror. While core al Qaeda may have been “degraded,” al Qaeda as a driving ideology has evolved and become more dispersed (and financially independent). We have cut off the beast’s head only to find others sprouting up in its place.
Today al Qaeda affiliates are attacking all over Africa, whether the target be a natural-gas plant in Algeria, a shopping center in Kenya or a World Cup party in Uganda. Some of these attacks killed Americans.
We kid ourselves if we pretend that groups such as Boko Haram are merely a local problem.
The 9/11 attacks originating from the mountains of Afghanistan ought to have taught us what happens when we downplay the death and mayhem that terrorists can inflict even from remote parts of the world. Any Islamist war on modernity will sooner or later target America.
So while we’re encouraged that the Obama administration is offering FBI agents, military personnel and other assistance, it’s not enough. The captive schoolgirls are a test of the world’s resolve and seriousness.
Either the world returns them safely to their families, or the terrorists who want to impose a grim Islamist future on one of Africa’s largest nations will be emboldened.
The Nigerian government, too, needs to be helped, encouraged or dragged into doing whatever it takes to rescue these girls. The protests are encouraging, suggesting the Nigerian people themselves are bent on not allowing a corrupt and ineffective government to get away with business as usual.
These terrified girls in Nigeria have become our girls.
And if we don’t regard them the same way we would 300 girls from Brooklyn or Chicago who had been abducted from their school by Islamist terrorists, the horrors we see in Africa today will become America’s horror tomorrow.
So bring these girls home — along with the heads of the evil men who took them.