Sympathy for the Devil: Equivocation on Boko Haram

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Boko Haram, Borno State, Christian persecution, Faith J. H. McDonnell, FTO designation, Jihad, Johnnie Carson, Jubilee Campaign, Justice for Jos, moral equivalence, Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, Sharia, U.S. State Dept., USCIRF

Victims of Boko Haram Violence in Maiduguri, northern Nigeria
(Photo credit: PMNews Nigeria)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

The “Islamist apologist choir” described in Cinnamon Stillwell’s recent story “Profs on Boston Bombing” doesn’t sing solely on behalf of Chechnya and Cambridge. Some of that choir’s most dreadful caterwauling today is in support of Nigeria’s yet-undesignated terrorists, Boko Haram. The choir stalls are located in the U.S. State Department, which not only refuses to designate the jihadists as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), but maligns and defames Boko Haram’s Christian victims, as well.

Boko Haram’s latest attack, killing at least 42, took place on Tuesday, May 7, in the already battle-worn town of Bama, in Nigeria’s northeast Borno State. Borno, one of 12 states under Sharia, has suffered heavy losses under the Islamists. Some believe that Boko Haram has taken over northern Borno State much as Islamists took over northern Mali. At least 277 had been killed by Boko Haram in Borno State in 2013 before this attack.  According to an AP story the Tuesday event involved “coordinated attacks by Islamic extremists armed with heavy machine guns” in multiple locations around Bama. The jihadists also raided a federal prison, freeing 105 inmates.

Military spokesman Lt. Colonel Sagir Musa told AP that “some 200 fighters in buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns attacked the barracks of the 202 Battalion of Nigeria’s beleaguered army.” Musa, who said two soldiers and 10 insurgents died in the attack, revealed that the attackers “came in army uniform pretending to be soldiers.” The Islamists killed 14 prison guards. They also attacked and razed a police station, a police barracks, a magistrate’s court, and local government offices, according to Lt. Col. Musa. Bama police commander Sagir Abubakar reported that at least 22 police officers, three children and a woman were killed in the attacks.

Boko Haram frequently attacks Nigeria’s police and military forces. In 2012 as documented by the Facts on Nigeria Violence website, there were at least 67 attacks, almost exclusively by Boko Haram, against military barracks, police stations, prisons, and other government facilities, as well as against individual soldiers, policemen, and civil servants. But Boko Haram’s main targets are northern Nigeria’s Christians and churches.

The official name of Boko Haram, Jamā’a Ahl al-sunnah li-da’wa wa al-jihād, can be translated “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” Its goal is to establish a pure Islamic state in northern Nigeria, removing the Christian presence – either by conversion, expulsion, or extermination. Boko Haram appears to prefer the third option. According to the World Watch Monitor (WWM) report on global Christian persecution, Nigeria had a higher death toll from anti-Christian persecution and violence than the rest of the world combined. WWM concluded that Nigeria is “the most violent place on earth for Christians.”

In a recent Front Page Magazine article, Daniel Greenfield exposed the unfortunate moral equivalence found in the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) 2013 report on Nigeria. While much of the report is very good and condemns Boko Haram, impunity, and the forced imposition of Sharia, USCIRF appears to have developed the same pathological impulse that afflicts the rest of the federal government, to never blame Islam. As a result, portions of the report mischaracterize certain acts of violence by both Boko Haram and other Islamists targeting Christians, and criticize northern Nigerian Christian leaders for calling the situation what it is: persecution.

USCIRF’s egregious observations and recommendations are actually State Department policy. For instance, USCIRF parrots former Asst. Sec. of State for Africa, Johnnie Carson, who declared in a Congressional hearing, “It is important to note that religion is not the primary driver behind extremist violence in Nigeria” and that “the Nigerian government must effectively engage communities vulnerable to extremist violence by addressing the underlying political and socio-economic problems in the North.” USCIRF reports that “The U.S. government consistently has urged the Nigerian government to expand its strategy against Boko Haram from solely a military solution to addressing problems of economic and political marginalization in the north,” says USCIRF, “arguing that Boko Haram’s motivations are not religious but socio-economic.”

Responding to Carson’s testimony at a House Subcommittee on Africa hearing in July 2012, Subcommittee Chairman, U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), remonstrated that poverty alone does not drive people to violence. And in any case, Boko Haram is well funded by outside Islamists. “Heavy machine guns” and “buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns” are just the latest examples to show that Boko Haram is not just a motley crew of impoverished, marginalized local Muslims. In February 2013 it was revealed that hundreds of Boko Haram members had trained for months in terrorist camps in northern Mali with the local “Ansar Dine” al Qaeda of Mali. Their former chef, explained that he cooked for over 200 Nigerians who had “arrived in Timbuktu in April 2012 in about 300 cars, after al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) swept into the city.”

In its 2013 Nigeria briefing, human rights group Justice for Jos +, a project of Jubilee Campaign USA, remarked, “Ironically, in northern Nigeria, it is Christians who are totally disenfranchised politically, economically, and socially in their own states and by their own ethnic groups due to their religious identity.” This is worse than just “political marginalization,” Mr. Carson! Justice for Jos + continues, “Christians are regarded as inferior to Muslims and suffer ongoing, systematic and comprehensive discrimination even by local and (Sharia) state governments.”

As in many Islam-dominated regions, the northern Nigerian Sharia state governments require permits to construct new churches or repair old ones. But churches are disappearing from the northern Nigerian landscape because the permits are not granted and the existing churches are being demolished or burned in anti-Christian riots and Boko Haram attacks. “The Muslim community is so determined to prevent Christians from having churches to meet in, that when selling land to Christians they commonly include the proviso ‘Not to be used for a bar, a brothel, or a church’ on official deeds,” Justice for Jos + reveals.

Thanks to pressure from the U.S. State Department, Nigeria’s Christian President appears more concerned with demonstrating that he is not biased in favor of his fellow Christians than seeing justice done for those who have suffered (even to the point of considering offering amnesty to Boko Haram). The State Department has pressured President Jonathan to give more federal resources and create a special ministry for “northern affairs.” Justice for Jos+ reports that at the same that federal resources have provided the northern states with “millions in public funds on forced mass weddings for widows, pilgrimages to Mecca, rams for sacrifice at Islamic celebrations, and payments to terrorists’ families,” there has been no compensation to the families of Christian victims.

In their many publicly released statements and videos, Boko Haram has never declared poverty and marginalization to be a motive for their actions. On the contrary, they state clearly that their actions are a “jihad (Holy War).” They said that “Christians in Nigeria should accept Islam, that is true religion, or they will never have peace,” and that they “do not have any agenda” other than working to establish an Islamic Kingdom like during the time of Prophet Mohammed.”

Could this be the reason why, in the disapproving words of the USCIRF report, “a number of prominent Nigerian Christian leaders . . . believe that Boko Haram has a significant sectarian dimension, and in particular, seeks to eradicate Christian communities in central and northern Nigeria”? USCIRF, again echoing the State Department policy worries, “This chasm in perspective is a serious concern. If Nigeria’s most prominent Christian leaders view the ongoing violence as sectarian, the faithful communities who follow their lead may also embrace this view, adversely affecting tolerance and respect across religions.” This is offensive not just in casting the Christian community as the villain of the piece, but in its lack of acknowledgement of the unbelievable restraint that Christians have shown in the face of the slaughter of their family, friends, and co-religionists.

In April 2012, former Asst. Secretary Carson told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the US would soon open a consulate in Kano, one of the full-Sharia northern states, to join the U.S. Embassy in Abuja and the existing consulate in Lagos. Three months earlier, Boko Haram had carried out numerous simultaneous attacks on the security agencies in Kano – police stations, army barracks, intelligence headquarters – leaving some 200 dead. What a great place to build a new U.S. consulate. Kano is about 200 miles from Abuja. About half as far as Benghazi is from Tripoli.

This blog post originally appeared on Front Page Magazine as an article and is reposted with permission.

Tell State Dept: Nafie Not Welcome

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Act for Sudan, Blue Nile State, Darfur, diplomacy, Faith J. H. McDonnell, genocide, ghost houses, Greta Van Susteren, Jihad, moral equivalence, Nafie Ali Nafie, Nuba Mountains, President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, State Department, Sudan, torture, U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, victims of torture

Nafie Ali Nafie, Khartoum chief negotiator and torturer. (Photo credit: Act for Sudan)

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

Last week I wrote an article for Front Page Magazine (and reposted on this blog) about the Obama Administration inviting Dr. Nafie Ali Nafie, the Advisor to ICC-indicted war criminal Sudanese president Omar al Bashir to Washington for “high-level” diplomatic talks. Since that time, outrage has been growing about the inappropriateness and downright offensiveness of this invitation. But the Obama Administration appears to not care what the human rights community thinks of this unthinkable visit.

News of the invitation to Dr. Nafie and his delegation was met with instant protest by Sudan human rights activists and others. U.S. Representative Frank Wolf wrote to President Obama, asking him to rescind the invitation. Fox News show host Greta Van Susteren, who frequently speaks about the current genocide in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State, has also added her voice to the outrage over Nafie’s visit. And the Act for Sudan alliance, of which IRD is a founding member, is protesting the Nafie visit through a social media campaign.

In addition to representing a genocidal regime, Nafie is detestable in his own right, as the creator of Sudan’s torture chambers known as Ghost Houses, and behind-the-scenes architect of genocide in South Sudan/Nuba Mountains, Darfur, and now again in Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State. The Act for Sudan website features the testimonies from Nafie’s victims, and even a short (3:40 min.) video about Nafie from Operation Broken Silence, “Ghost Houses and War Criminals.”

The State Department knows all of this, of course, and yet it has not been swayed. A Khartoum-based Sudanese newspaper, The Citizen, on May 5 reported that “Diplomatic sources unveiled to The Citizen yesterday that the United States administration is determined to complete the Washington meeting in two weeks, despite the fierce opposition.”

Here’s how you can register your protest about the visit of Nafie Ali Nafie:

Act for Sudan is urging concerned citizens to ask Secretary of State John Kerry to rescind the invitation to the Sudanese delegation. On the Act for Sudan website is a prepared letter to Kerry warning that the invitation “undermines established U. S. policy and violates President Obama’s promise to bar perpetrators of serious human rights violations from entry to this country.” It adds that the invitation is an “affront to the victims and vulnerable people in Sudan.” The social media campaign also provides suggested Twitter and Facebook messages. Please add your voice to the campaign today!

Obama Administration to Welcome Genocidal Sudanese Leaders for Talks

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Act for Sudan, Blue Nile State, Darfur, diplomacy, Faith J. H. McDonnell, genocide, ghost houses, ICC indicted war criminal, Islamism, Jihad, Khartoum, moral equivalence, Nafie Ali Nafie, National Congress Party, NCP, Nuba Mountains, Obama, Obama Administration, Omar al-Bashir, South Sudan, State Department, Sudan, terrorism, torture

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

In a makeshift shelter of plastic tarps in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, an American linguist, Deborah Martin, interviewed dozens of Darfurian refugees. The year was 2006, and some two thousand Darfurians had fled the Islamist Sudanese regime’s genocidal war against them and walked over 900 miles to the Nuba Mountains. At that time, just after the signing of the 2005 North/South peace agreement, the area now once again a killing field of the Islamist regime was relatively safe.

One young Darfuri woman told Martin she had witnessed the rest of her family, including her 80 year-old grandmother, “sliced up like meat” by the Janjaweed (Arab militia). Other refugees had similarly horrific tales. And common among all the testimonies were four names – either whispered in terror or spat out in defiance. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Vice President Ali Osman Taha, Arab Janjaweed militia leader Musa Hilal, and former Chief of National Intelligence and Security Services/presidential advisor Nafie Ali Nafie – these were the men they held responsible for the Darfur genocide, and for the regime’s atrocities far beyond Darfur.

Today, the Obama Administration has invited Dr. Nafie Ali Nafie and other high-level officials from Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) to Washington, DC. State Department spokeswoman Hilary Renner defended the visit as the opportunity for a “candid discussion on the conflicts and humanitarian crises within Sudan.” But in the Sudanese press, the NCP crowed that the invitation is a call “for the development of relationships between Sudan and the U.S.” Nafie assured his fellow hardliners that he was not going to the U.S. in order to discuss Sudan issues, saying that the regime knew what it was doing in that regard. Writing of the visit Rabbi David Kaufman, founder and co-chair of “Help Nuba,” said it was similar to inviting Heinrich Himmler to the U.S. to discuss the “humanitarian crisis” during the Holocaust.

Nafie eschewed training in plant genetics (he studied at UC Riverside, receiving a Ph.D. in 1980, thank you, USA!) for training in terrorism. According to the Sudan Tribune, Nafie travelled to Tehran in 1981 “on the apparent pretext of conducting further studies in the field of agriculture.” During the 1980’s, he also spent time in Afghanistan and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon where he gained the expertise and contacts to develop Sudan’s own security apparatus, import weapons, and establish secret desert training camps. The Sudan Tribune says that it is also believe that during this time, Nafie coordinated with his former Iranian mentors “to supply arms to those opposing the American and French presence in Somalia.”

As Chief of National Intelligence and Security Services for Omar al-Bashir’s National Islamic Front regime, Nafie perfected the art of torture. Sudanese Online says, “Dr. Nafie is by far the most brutal security official the Sudan has ever seen.” And the Sudan Tribune explains that he is notorious for the creation of Sudan’s “ghost houses” (buyut al-ashbah), unofficial detention and torture chambers run by Sudan’s security services.

Typical ghost house treatment was given to Nafie’s old colleague from the University of Khartoum, science professor and human rights activist, Farouk Mohammed Ibrahim. Ibrahim was arrested and taken blindfolded to a Khartoum ghost house where he was held for 12 days with no charges. According to his statement seeking redress from the Sudanese government, Ibrahim revealed he “was subjected to interrogations about courses taught and about colleagues.” During the interrogations, he “was repeatedly kicked, beaten and flogged, subjected to a prolonged bath in ice water, threatened with rape and death and deprived of sleep for up to three days.” Ibrahim told the Los Angeles Times that Nafie “was administering the whole thing. He did it all in such a cool manner, as if he were sipping a coffee.”

Condemning the upcoming visit and urging that Secretary Kerry rescind the invitation, Sudan advocacy alliance Act for Sudan noted that Nafie “helped design the regime’s strategy to eliminate or expel indigenous African people by bombing, attacking, raping, and starving innocent civilians. Sudanese Online adds, “Dr. Nafie has expelled international aid agencies from eastern Sudan, Nuba Mountains of Kordofan, Darfur and Blue Nile provinces.”

Recently, Nafie, who is also the deputy chairman of the ruling National Congress Party, addressed a graduation ceremony of the paramilitary Popular Defense Forces (PDF), the jihadists used by Khartoum to conduct the purge of black, African people in the Nuba Mountains. He said of those in Sudan who want equality for all Sudanese and a secular democracy, that they “are traitors for collaborating with rebels to overthrow the regime, and for preaching a secular system.” The opposition “has dug its own grave” by rejecting “the principles of Islamic Sharia law” and seeking to “establish a secular state like the Western countries,” he declared. He vowed to the graduating PDF members that 2013 will be a decisive year in which they would wage a war like that fought by Mohammed at the Battle of Badr, a battle that ushered in the beginning of Islamic expansion.

The Obama Administration is not happy about the backlash it is receiving because of the invitation to Nafie Ali Nafie. Perhaps it has forgotten how frequently Senator Barack Obama and his supporters criticized President George W. Bush’s Sudan policy. Bush’s policies merely saved hundreds of thousands threatened by starvation and disease, brought about the Nuba Mountains ceasefire, created a presidential-level Sudan Special Envoy, and helped to bring about a peace agreement leading to the establishment of the nation of South Sudan. But since he couldn’t bring perform the additional miracle of ending the genocide in Darfur, Obama accused the Bush Administration of not doing enough.

For example, speaking about Darfur in October 2004, Senator Obama said, “There must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government. We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing.” Where is that pressure today, when an architect of genocide is invited to Washington, DC?

In a February 2006 speech on Darfur, Obama confided that “for more than a year now, I’ve been working with other Senators to see what we can do to really push the Administration to take this as seriously as it warrants.” (Emphasis added). He was disturbed that “the United States government seems to be backing off a little bit, the commitment that it made to deal with the problem.” Today, many Sudan activists are disturbed. Members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), have written to the President, questioning his overarching Sudan policy.

Finally, in April 2008, with the Presidential election drawing closer, Obama again criticized Bush Sudan policy, saying, “I am deeply concerned by reports that the Bush Administration is negotiating a normalization of relations with the Government of Sudan.” He warned that “this reckless and cynical initiative would reward a regime in Khartoum that has a record of failing to live up to its commitments.”

Today, in justifying the invitation to Nafie, the Obama Administration challenges the idea that a trip to America for diplomatic discussion can be considered a “reward.” And it posits only three alternatives in U.S. Sudan policy: go to war with Sudan, engage in diplomacy, or be irrelevant. But there could be another alternative for U.S. Sudan policy. In his book, The Coming Revolution, Dr. Walid Phares advises the U.S. government to support the freedom and democracy-loving sections of civil society within totalitarian and Islamist regimes to foster democratic transformation. In the case of Sudan, the U.S. government could also quietly support the opposition forces that want regime change and a free, equal Sudan. In fact, Senator Barack Obama mentioned this possibility in his 2004 speech when he said that we should be “providing resources . . . including logistical support like airplanes, helicopters, trucks, and other resources that are needed to deliver humanitarian aid.”

But although the Obama Administration was willing to take strong actions to bring about the downfall of Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Qaddafi, (and facilitate the takeover by Islamists) in this case, when the downfall of the regime could mean the downfall of the Islamist agenda in Sudan and the wider region, it prefers diplomatic engagement. Could that not be construed as a “reckless and cynical initiative”? Bringing Dr. Nafie Ali Nafie and other high-level officials of the Sudanese government to Washington, DC threatens to once again reward a regime that not only continues to have a record of failing to live up to its commitments and of committing brutal atrocities against its own citizens, but of pursuing an agenda of global jihad and Islamist supremacism.

This blog post originally appeared on the Front Page Magazine website as an article and is reposted with permission.

Documenting Persecution in Nigeria

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Boko Haram, Faith J. H. McDonnell, Foreign Terrorist Organization, Islamists, Jihad, moral equivalence, Nigeria, Northern Nigeria, persecution, Sharia, State Department

By Faith J. H. McDonnell (@Cuchulain09)

The Washington Working Group on Nigeria, of which The IRD is a founding member, this week will release a report of the documented atrocities committed in Nigeria by Boko Haram in 2012. Compiled by Justice for Jos, a project of Jubilee Campaign, the report is in the form of a prayer calendar which memorializes attacks against individual Christians, churches, government institutions and employees, schools, and businesses in 2012 in Nigeria by month and day.

The report is in itself an indictment of the false moral equivalence frequently utilized by the United States government and the media to describe the growing conflict in Nigeria. It will be released on Friday, April 26, at 11:00AM at a briefing at The Family Research Council, 801 G Street, NW, Washington, DC featuring human rights leaders and government officials from northern Nigeria.

April 2013 marks the second anniversary of one of the worst attacks on Christendom in modern history. In Nigeria’s 12 Sharia states in the north, over 700 churches were destroyed in the space of 48 hours in post-election violence stemming from Islamist anger at the April 2011 election of a Christian president, Goodluck Jonathan. The carnage resulted in hundreds of deaths and the displacement of over 65,000 people. But Islamic of militants of the terrorist organization, Boko Haram (“Western education is forbidden”) continue their campaign to Islamize Nigeria with ongoing attacks.

Just this past week over 185 people were killed in Boko Haram’s Friday-after-prayers-at-the-mosque attack on Baga, a town in Borno State. According to the BBC news Boko Haram bombarded Baga with rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire, burning down 40% of the town. BBC reported that “Residents of Baga fled into the bush and only returned on Sunday afternoon to find much of the town destroyed and human and animal corpses strewn through the streets.”

Justice for Jos Special Counsel, Emmanuel Ogebe, adds that his contacts on the ground have revealed that Boko Haram has overrun northern Borno State, much as jihadists took over northern Mali last year. He told of a recent attack on a bus, in which the passengers were separated by religion, and the Christians were killed.

In addition to the meeting on Friday to launch the 2012 report, the Washington Working Group on Nigeria will hold a briefing on Capitol Hill on Thursday, April 25, at 12:30 at the Cannon House Office Building, Room 234. Although open to the public, the briefing will focus on helping Congressional staff members to understand the true situation in northern Nigeria and to encourage a renewed effort by Congress to push the State Department to designate Boko Haram as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.