Friday, March 29, AD 2024 6:30am

American Foreign Policy Fecklessness Captured in One Photo

June 6, 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of Normandy, France. General Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in which “we will accept nothing less than full victory.” More than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The D-Day cost was high -more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded — but more than 100,000 Soldiers began the march across Europe to defeat Hitler.

Source.

Fast forward almost exactly seventy years later. A band of Islamic militants opposed to western influence and branding themselves Boko Haram has kidnapped hundreds of girls and are holding them captive. This is our response:

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We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

We will take pictures, we will tweet them, we will create hashtags, we will look sad, we will write sternly worded speeches, we will needle and cajole and nag until the bad men (whom incidentally we refused to label as bad men before) kindly reconsider this whole kidnapping and murdering thing they got going.

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TomD
TomD
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 1:24pm

If you want to see fecklessness, look at Nigeria itself.

It is obvious that Boko Haram is being aided by elements in the Nigerian military. Victims have even seen the military units stationed to guard their villages turn against them when the Boko Haram trucks show up. When parents of these missing schoolgirls went to a nearby army barrack to plead for an immediate hot pursuit of the abductors, the army told them it would do nothing until they submitted a written report to them for their consideration! The Nigerian government occasionally fires the local commanders but nothing changes.

If you want to see fecklessness, look at the international blindness to Boko Haram.

It is obvious that Boko Haram is being aided by elements in the Muslim world with great resources of money and munitions, and with the connivance of the governments of Chad and Niger. The Nigerian government says nothing.

If you want to see fecklessness, look at the U.S. State Department blindness to Boko Haram.

A year ago the State Department held a meeting in which it blamed the violence in Plateau state in – get this – Governor Jonah David Jang! Jang is the only Christian to be elected governor in the region, and the U.S. government evidently believes that he is the cause of the problem and will not allow him to enter the U.S. (see http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/u-s-blocks-christian-governor-from-nigeria-peace-talks/)

Given all this, Michelle Obama’s joining of the recent anti-Boko Haram chorus may be feeble, but feckless? No, it is a positive step upward in a Western civilization that has sunk very low indeed.

tamsin325
tamsin325
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 2:01pm

TomD, there was an interesting article a couple of weeks ago:

Police in Nigeria’s Besieged North Target Battles They Can Win

Two years ago, the insurgents besieged this northern city [Kano], killing 168 people in a weekend of gunbattles. Federal police, most of them Christians from the country’s south, abandoned their posts in the city.

Now the job of policing falls largely to local bodies like the Kano State Road Traffic Agency, created three months after those attacks. Its motto: Restoring Sanity.

Powerless to untangle the city’s hardest problems, its officers say they are at least fighting the battles they can win. “There are a lot of little things that when you remove them, everybody feels better,” said Mohammad Diggol, the traffic agency’s managing director.

His cops started small, directing traffic and inspecting emissions. They have since assigned themselves more ambitious missions. They search cars for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, scrub graffiti, and arrest stray goats. They are training to fight fires, and this month plan to start finding homes for child beggars.

Enforcing rules and regulations, however minor, is how Mr. Diggol hopes to eventually make his hometown as presentable as Paris, a city he fell in love with in the 1990s. “I can even say Paris is a dream,” Mr. Diggol declares.

In that quest, he has help. In recent months, the city’s Islamic police, founded a decade ago to enforce Shariah law, have arrested hundreds of young men charged with allowing their jeans to sag. The infraction isn’t mentioned in Muslim scripture. Still, “it’s indisciplined,” said Abba Sa’id Sufi, director-general of the Kano State Hisbah Board, the local body that enforces Islamic law.

And it fits within a newfound resolve to zealously root out the minor disobediences perpetrated by the city’s youth.

Scores of young men have been forcibly shaved since October for sporting “mischievous haircuts,” many of them modeled after that of an Italian soccer star.

“It is this indisciplined footballer; what’s his name?” said Mr. Sufi, holding up an iPhone picture of Mario Balotelli of A.C. Milan, who sports a razor-thin mohawk. “He has been given red cards, so people had been trying to copy him here…before we came in.”

Nigerians with unconventional clothing, hairdos and methods of tending to livesock say the clampdown sidesteps the root of the country’s problems: a cycle of poverty aggravated by a baby boom and religious war.

TomD
TomD
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 4:46pm

More fecklessness:
Zhang Huixin (the daughter of jailed Pastor Zhang Shaojie) attempted to apply for a visa to enter the United States on April 24, 2014 at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. She was denied a visa and physically thrown out of the Embassy when she tried to resist, was injured and left unconscious with her daughter outside the Embassy gates. Days later it was reported that she had been detained and placed in a black (illegal) jail just prior to the April 29, 2014 restart of her father’s trial.

See http://www.chinaaid.org/2014/04/nanle-county-pastors-daughter-violently.html and http://www.chinaaid.org/2014/05/henan-pastors-trial-resumes-with-little.html

TomD
TomD
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 4:53pm

More fecklessness:
Dr Meriam Yahia Ibrahim (the wife of U.S. citizen Daniel Wani and the mother of 20 month old Martin Wani, who also is a U.S. citizen) was arrested and jailed in Khartoum in February 2014 on a charge of apostasy for being a Muslim woman – her father is Muslim – who married a Christian and adultery since Islamic law does not recognize their marriage, pregnant, has been beaten, denied medical care, and threatened with 100 lashes and death upon conviction. Her son is incarcerated with his mother because Islamic law prohibits his Christian father from having custody. The U.S. Embassy will not assist him without a DNA test proving that he is the son of Daniel Wani but the jail will not allow the testing.

See http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/pregnant-woman-in-sudan-could-be-executed-for-apostasy-whipped-for-adultery/

Paul W Primavera
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 6:16pm

What should we expect from this godless, idolatrous Jezebel? Words fail me in describing how much I loathe this wickedness.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 10:00pm

Paul Zummo brilliant juxtapostion of Churchill’s expressed resolve and our country’s limp.
Is there some organized way we can help through the Church in Nigeria?

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 10:44pm

Tom D.,
.
You left out the part where we destabilized the region exacerbated regional instability by promoting regime change in Libya from an altitude above 20,000 ft.

TomD
TomD
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 11:11pm

Yes, I left that out for a few reasons:
1) Boko Haram was already up and running, in part with Libyan arms, before we did that ‘regime change’
2) The poor Christians killed in Libya since the ‘regime change’ are more akin to the Americans killed at the Benghazi consulate (another, separate act of fecklessness)
The list can just get longer and longer, can’t it?

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, May 8, AD 2014 11:27pm

Boko Haram was up and running before we toppled Qadaffi, but turning all those Libyan arms and Islamists loose surely gave them a boost.
.
Obama and Clinton called that “blowback” when Republicans were in charge.
.
I call it hubris, followed by nemesis.

Donald R. McClarey
Admin
Friday, May 9, AD 2014 4:22am

“We will take pictures, we will tweet them, we will create hashtags, we will look sad, we will write sternly worded speeches, we will needle and cajole and nag until the bad men (whom incidentally we refused to label as bad men before) kindly reconsider this whole kidnapping and murdering thing they got going.”

This of course if the same President who weaponized the IRS against his domestic political opponents. Obama, tough on his own people, a pussycat to our nation’s foreign foes.

This administration reads like a hypothetical National Lampoon parody of a future presidency written by PJ O’Rourke back in the seventies.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Friday, May 9, AD 2014 5:44am

And the bureau of land management

Christine
Christine
Saturday, May 10, AD 2014 1:36am

I truly doubt many of those girls are alive or retrievable. Boko Harum are ruthless, brutal killers. They have attacked & burned down Catholic Churches killing those in attendance the last 2 or 3 Christmas Eves. Nobody paid any attention.

Billy Pips
Billy Pips
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 4:13am

I’m not sure Boko Harum are quite the Nazi Party, are they? I mean, one killed 6,000,000 Jews, one has kidnapped 200 school girls. It would be a bit much if we invaded them for that. Of course, BH has also killed lots of other people, but again, not anything like 1% of the number killed as a consequence of the German-instigated war.

I don’t like your idiot leader too, but a bit of perspective might be in order. America can’t go invading everybody, however much it’d like to. For a start, it’s pretty rubbish at it and normally makes things worse.

Donald R. McClarey
Reply to  Billy Pips
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 4:18am

Who in this thread has called for an invasion of Nigeria or any attack on Boko Haram? They are a bad piece of work, and their kidnapping of these Christian girls is only a very minute fragment of their crimes, but I view this as a Nigerian problem for Nigerians to resolve. The point of this post I believe is that the idiot internet campaign does nothing to assist the kidnapped girls and merely makes the US look impotent, and was taken up by the Obama administration as the cause du jour in domestic politics rather than a serious foreign policy initiative.

Billy Pips
Billy Pips
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 5:41am

Oh don’t. You’re not seriously pretending you weren’t intending parallels to be drawn between western intervention then, and its lack now? Of course you were; that’s how the whole piece reads.

Nevertheless, you’re right: no one cares about Nigerians. Look at this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6719141.stm

Big Pharma’s guinea pigs are probably not deemed to be worth the helicopter fuel it’d take to save them.

Donald R. McClarey
Reply to  Billy Pips
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 5:47am

“Oh don’t. You’re not seriously pretending you weren’t intending parallels to be drawn between western intervention then, and its lack now?”

No, I do not think that was the intention of Paul Zummo who wrote the post at all. I assume that Paul will be along to set you straight if he wishes. What Paul was doing, in my opinion, was to distinguish someone who was really attempting to accomplish a foreign policy goal, Churchill, and the BS artists currently at the helm of American policy who are simply pathetic play actors on the world stage.

Who says no one cares about the Nigerians? Presumably the Nigerians care about Nigerians and it is up to them to fix their own domestic problem with Islamic terrorism.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 6:01am

’m not sure Boko Harum are quite the Nazi Party, are they?
.
The nazis were the nazis BEFORE they killed 6,000,000 Jews. The idea of non intervention was applauded in England. Nazi rhetoric had a certain plausibility(like Putin?) defenders of civilization dithered about “national interest” gosh do we have the right to fight for Good?
Of course we can recognize Evil .. Need not be coy. We can see what these Islamist terrorists are doing and we should find a way to stop them- everywhere they are. We can steel our hearts and dither today about action in defense of people outside our “borders” at the same time borders are ignored by our enemy.
Or who will help us when our own defenses have been decimated from the inside.
Forces of Good, as science fictiony as it sounds, need to band together and recognize that we are not necessarily defined in national borders but in our Christianity. We can’t use the paradigms of the past.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 12:43pm

I’d be in favor of military intervention (not invasion) to get the girls back, if we were willing to do it right –which we aren’t– and if the NIgerians asked us to –which they won’t.

Paul W Primavera
Wednesday, May 14, AD 2014 5:00pm

I agree with Ernst, but we know how much that godless man of sin and depravity and his Jezebel wife occupying the White House really care about young black girls whom, were they in the womb, those two people would abort.

Sorry. I have nothing but loathing for those two.

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