Boko Haram put out a video yesterday showing some of the kidnapped enslaved schoolgirls (and perhaps some other girls) wearing hijab and long robes, chanting a bit of the Koran. Relatives and friends have identified some of them from the video.
The 27-minute footage was shown to some people in Chibok – the town where the girls were kidnapped – on Monday evening.
Not all girls are from Chibok itself as pupils from surrounding areas had come to do their final year exams in April as the school in the town was considered relatively safe.
A community leader in Chibok told the BBC that school friends had identified three of the girls in the video.
A mother had also recognised her daughter from the girls who appear in a group wearing hijabs, the chairman of the parents-teachers association at the school told the Reuters news agency.
It’s a painful thing to watch, knowing they’re there under duress, with their lives ripped away from them, at the mercy of a bunch of men who love killing people.
Meanwhile, the US has revealed it is flying manned surveillance missions over Nigeria to an effort to find the missing schoolgirls.
A team of about 30 US experts – members of the FBI and defence and state departments – is in Nigeria to help with the search. The UK, France and China also have teams on the ground in Nigeria and an Israeli counter-terrorism team is on its way.
I hope they succeed.
Interesting that boko is haram but the products of boko, like firearms and video cameras, are okay with He Who Must Not Be Pictured.
Totally not coerced at all, right? Is that what they want us to believe?
I have a scene in HotShots these assholes should watch…. (Or was it HotShots 2?)
The first time I saw a clip of Boko Haram being was last night on the Daily Show.
See the guy at about 1:30, who I presume is their leader? What the fuck was that? Is he doing a Joker impression? No, I don’t mean the grinning and tooth cleaning thing (although that definitely “helps”), I mean when he’s standing there babbling like a drunk, smiling and making creepy ass noises that kinda sounds like it might be laughter.
***
15 minutes after writing the above paragraph…ok maybe more but who’s counting.
I sat here for at least that long trying to figure out what it reminded me of and why I couldn’t put my finger on it. Yeah the Joker, but that was making me feel gross like I complimented him. I hate the Joker, it was not intended as a compliment, but I know he has some cool anti-hero factor that was wrong to apply to this man, despite the shared appearance of feigned babbling lunacy to cover up something much, much worse. And the creepy ass smile.
While I was feeling gross about that, I kept imagining him meeting Michonne in the woods, I suppose because it made me feel less like dying inside, but also because it made me smile. I briefly considered Ninjas. Effective I bet, but they just weren’t working for me as a good revenge fantasy. Too impersonal. I considered other things I won’t mention.
I kept coming back to Michonne, though. I imagined her seeing him and having a “wtf, is that walker talking?” moment, putting it together and coming to same conclusion I did. And then it hit me, he reminds me of a fucking articulate zombie, that’s why. Ugh. Disgusting beyond words. That creepy piece of shit reminds me of a talking god damn zombie, and apparently my cells knew it a good “ten” minutes before I was aware of it.
I know this is all intensely ridiculous and I don’t mean to trivialize anyone’s suffering with my own internal nonsense. I can’t even imagine what the victims and their families suffer. Boko Haram have done more senseless damage than I can comprehend, and maybe that’s why my brain went to zombies.
I don’t know, but I also don’t think the tiny place in my brain that fears zombies (well it’s maybe not so small- I’ve had recurring nightmares of them for years, so they probably loom a little larger in my psyche than most) is necessarily wrong to put the more banal human monsters like that talking fucking human zombie from Boko Haram in the same category. That part of my brain does not make those distinctions very well, even if the rest of it knows Boko Haram’s victims were very, very real and zombies are not, but I don’t know that I can blame it.
Both Boko Haram and zombies make me feel intensely stabby, so I’m going with Michonne on this one for my own internal dialogue. And maybe some money for the families and search efforts for the external dialogue.
I saw a brief moment of the video this morning on CNN. They mentioned that in addition to some of the recent kidnap victims being identified, some girls who were kidnapped up to two years ago were seen. Two years with those murdering rapists.
And here in the USA, we have TeaPartiers demanding an end to public education. Just like Boko Haram.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2014/05/14/wingnut-public-schools-causing-holocaust-in-churches/