Christians in Africa: "You have three days to go or you will be killed!"

by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14430/christians-africa-persecution

June 30, 2019 

Funeral service in Nigeria (EMMY/IBU/Getty Images)

Persecution of Christians in the Middle East is now close to "genocide", a UK-commissioned report just revealed. The same threat has also become critical for Christian communities in Africa.

Some say it began in Algeria in the 1990s, when 19 monks, bishops, nuns and other Catholics were killed during the civil war. Since then, in Nigeria, Christian faithful have been massacred in their churches; in Kenya, Christians have been killed in universities; in Libya, Christians have been beheaded on beaches; in Yemen, nuns have been assassinated and in Egypt, massive anti-Christian violence is prompting an exodus. It is the new African archipelago of persecution.

Distressingly, these Christians have been finding themselves in the blind spot of the West: they are "too Christian" to get the Left's attention, but too far away for the Right. Africa's Christians are orphans. They have no "allies", John O'Sullivan writes.

Christian families recently fled the city of Diffa, in Niger, after Boko Haram delivered the message: "You have three days to go or you will be killed!". "There is no Christian anymore in this town", someone reported to the non-governmental organization, the Barnabas Fund. The town, Arbinda, is in Burkina Faso. Numbers are telling: 82 pastors, 1,145 Christians and 151 households have fled from violence in the Muslim-majority nation. Just in the last few weeks, several of the Christian faithful and clergy have been murdered. Jihadists killed six Christians in a Catholic church in the town of Dablo. A pastor was murdered in an attack in Silgadji, Catholic parades have been targeted.

Jihadists apparently want to "cleanse" these areas of Christians -- and they are succeeding. "There is an atmosphere of panic in the town," the mayor of Dablo, Ousmane Zongo, said. "People are holed up in their homes, nothing is going on. The shops and stores are closed. It's practically a ghost town".

In Nigeria, attacks on Christians never stop. The country has become a "war zone for Christians".

"The attacks on Christians are growing more flagrant and more aggressive," Father John Bakeni from the Maiduguri Diocese, northern Nigeria, said. "We consider each day we live in safety a blessing because we do not know what will happen the next day".

"We Christians are at risk of extinction and an attempt is being made to Islamize the whole country because controlling Nigeria means expelling Christians from all of West Africa", said Father Joseph Fidelis Bature, a Catholic priest in the Nigerian diocese of Maiduguri, in the Italian monthly Tempi.

Boko Haram

Unfortunately, we Westerners have a short memory. Al Qaeda's first attacks took place in Africa: the bombings against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Africa matters for the West. That is why we should take this monstrous new anti-Christian persecution more seriously. "Christianity originated in the Middle East", the Egyptian Coptic Pope Tawadros II said in Germany, where he was inaugurating a new Coptic church in May for his exiled community. "Thus, the displacement or evacuation of Christians from the Middle East is very dangerous for the safety of the region, not only in the Middle East but also in the Mediterranean Sea region. Europe is affected by this, and the Arab countries as well". The West should take much more seriously these appeals from the Eastern Christian leaders.

With a secularized Europe and a Middle East close to becoming emptied of Christians, those jihadists who are obsessed with eradicating Christianity understand that their current ideological battlefield is in Africa. "By 2025, 50 percent of the (world's) Christian population will be in Africa and Latin America", wrote the scholar Philip Jenkins. The share of the world's Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is expected grow from 24% in 2010 to 38% by 2050. That is why jihadists there are pursuing a horrific project of religious cleansing.

"Christianity has literally 'gone south', exploding demographically in the developing world and augmenting ongoing sociopolitical turmoil in places such as West Africa", the Pew Forum reports. Radical Islam wants to stop this demographic movement, which Professor Philip Jenkins called "the largest religious change of any kind that has ever occurred".

According to another report, in one century the number of Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa has increased more than 20-fold, rising from 11 million in 1900 to 234 million in 2010. At the same time, the number of Christians has grown 70-fold, rising from 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to 21% of all the Christians in the world and 15% of the world's Muslims. "Islamic extremism has two global centers of gravity, one in the Arab Middle East, but the other is in sub-Saharan Africa", researcher Ron Boyd-MacMillan noted in a report for Open Doors.

Every year, Open Doors lists the world's 50 worst persecutors of Christians. The list include 14 African countries, called home to "extreme" or "very high" levels of persecution: Algeria, the Central African Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia. Mali, for instance, went from no listing to seventh place in just two years. In Kenya last year, Islamists forced passengers of a bus to present their identification cards. Then they separated Muslims and killed the two Christians.

Regrettably, the tragedy of these massacres of Christians is directly proportional to the neglect with which they are reported in the West. "One of the basic facts of contemporary religious history is that Christians around the world are persecuted on an extraordinary scale", Ross Douthat recently wrote in The New York Times.

"Yet as an era-defining reality rather than an episodic phenomenon this reality is barely visible in the Western media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by Western governments and humanitarian institutions. ('Islamophobia' looms large; talk of 'Christophobia' is almost nonexistent.)"

Jihadists know a secret: persecution works. Algeria -- the country of origin of some of the Christian fathers such as Augustine of Hippo -- has become a country that is 99.9% Muslim and where officially there are "no native Christians". How many other countries will meet the same fate? And will the West ever come to the help of their Christian brethren?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

International Community Ignores Genocide of Christians in Nigeria

by Raymond Ibrahim
July 8, 2018 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12645/christians-genocide-nigeria

Members of a Christian family mourn three relatives who were killed by armed Fulani herdsmen in Jos, Plateau state, Nigeria in March. (Reuters)

In what the Christian Association of Nigeria is calling a "pure genocide," 238 more Christians were killed and churches desecrated by Muslims last week in the west African nation. This brings the death toll of Christians to more than 6,000 since the start of 2018.

According to a joint statement by the Christian Association, an umbrella group of various Christian denominations, "There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage."

The statement condemned the recent attacks, "where over 200 persons were brutally killed and our churches destroyed without any intervention from security agencies in spite of several distress calls made to them."

The statement adds that the majority of those 6,000 Christians massacred this year were "mostly children, women and the aged... What is happening in ... Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately."

The details of the murder of these thousands, though seldom reported, are often grisly; many were either hacked to death or beheaded with machetes; others were burned alive (including inside locked churches or homes); and women are often sexually assaulted or raped before being slaughtered.

Both the Nigerian government and the U.S. government have long sought to present this protracted jihad as territorial clashes between the haves (apparently always Christians) and haves-not (apparently always Muslims).

In 2012, for instance, President Bill Clinton said that "inequality" and "poverty" are "what's fueling all this stuff" (the "stuff" being a reference to the ongoing Muslim slaughter of Christians in Nigeria). Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Johnnie Carson, said after an Easter Day bombing in 2012 of a Nigerian church left 39 worshippers dead, "I want to take this opportunity to stress one key point and that is that religion is not driving extremist violence". The Obama administration reportedly agreed to spend $600 million in a USAID initiative launched to ascertain the "true causes" of unrest and violence in Nigeria -- which naturally lay in the socio-economic, supposedly never the religious, realm.

In its recent statement, however, the Christian Association of Nigeria denied these claims. After saying that those responsible for slaughtering Christians are always allowed to "go scot free" by the Nigerian government—which further portrays the attacks as "farmers/herdsmen clashes"—it inquired:

"How can it be a clash when one group [Muslims] is persistently attacking, killing, maiming, [and] destroying, and the other group [Christians] is persistently being killed, maimed and their places of worship destroyed? How can it be a clash when the herdsmen are hunting farmers in their own villages/communities and farmers are running for their lives?"

On May 2, the National Christian Elders Forum -- a wing of the Christian Association, the members of which average the age of 75 and come from Nigeria's six geopolitical zones -- met with the British High Commission in an effort to receive support. (Days before the meeting, around 30 Muslim herdsmen had stormed a church during early morning Mass and murdered nearly 20 parishioners and two clergymen.) The group's executive summary of issues included:

It is clear to the Christian Elders that JIHAD has been launched in Nigeria by the Islamists of northern Nigeria led by the Fulani ethnic group [the "herdsmen"]. This Jihad is based on the Doctrine of Hate taught in Mosques and Islamic Madrasas in northern Nigeria as well as the supremacist ideology of the Fulani. Using both conventional (violent) Jihad, and stealth (civilization) Jihad, the Islamists of northern Nigeria seem determined to turn Nigeria into an Islamic Sultanate and replace Liberal Democracy with Sharia as the National Ideology. The object of course, is to supplant the Constitution with Sharia as the source of legislation. The current 1999 Constitution is plagued with dual conflicting ideology of Democracy and Sharia. There are certain values which are non-negotiable in a pluralistic society and it seems the advocates of the Caliphate do not respect this. A dual-ideology-driven Nigeria cannot be the Nigeria of our dream. We want a Nigeria, where citizens are treated equally before the law at all levels.... Bearing in mind that Christians constitute over 50% of the Nigerian population, the goal of the Islamists is bound to create serious conflicts which if not checked is capable of escalating into another civil war. Already, the Islamists are murdering Christians with impunity and destroying vulnerable Christian places of worship and communities at an alarming and inhuman rate.

That 6,000 Christians, "mostly children, women and the aged," have been butchered in just the first six months of this year is a reminder of how violence only escalates when left unchecked. That is the story of the Muslim persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

It took three times as long (a year-and-a-half, between December 2013 to July 2015), for example, for the same Muslim herdsmen to slaughter a total of 1,484 Christians (532 men, 507 women, and 445 children), critically wound 2,388 Christians (1,069 men, 817 women, and 502 children), and burn or destroy 171 churches.

The Nigerian government and the international community, however, have from the start done little to address the situation. This lack of participation is not surprising: they cannot even acknowledge its roots, namely, the intolerant ideology of jihad. As a result, the death toll of Christians has only risen -- and will likely continue to grow exponentially -- until such time that this reality is not only acknowledged but addressed.

Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (published by Regnery with Gatestone Institute, April 2013).

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No Holds Barred: Susan Rice and the politicization of genocide

While Israel faces the possibility of genocide, Rice shows gross insensitivity to an Israeli leader for simply speaking out.

By SHMULEY BOTEACH

02/26/2015

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion

Susan Rice on 'The Charlie Rose Show' (2/24/15)

Is there any dirty job for the Obama administration that Susan Rice is not prepared to do? Need someone to fraudulently blame the murder of an American ambassador in Libya on a stupid film? Send Rice to the Sunday morning talk shows.

Need someone to savage the leader of the only democracy in the Middle East as damaging the “fabric” of Israel’s relationship with the United States? Put Rice in the makeup chair of television interviewer Charlie Rose.

Yes, it seems there is nothing Rice isn’t prepared to do. And why should that surprise us? 

This is the same Susan Rice who forbade Israel from criticizing John Kerry in her infamous tweet: “Personal attacks in Israel directed at Sec Kerry totally unfounded and unacceptable.” Yes, Israel’s freedom of expression is circumscribed by none other than Susan Rice.

But there is another reason Rice’s attack on the prime minister of Israel on Charlie Rose merits special opprobrium and that is the unique insensitivity she is famous for when it comes to genocide.

Iran is threatening to annihilate Israel. It is building the bombs to make that possible. It has lied to the world for more than a decade about its nuclear program. Iran is an oil superpower and energy exporter that needs nuclear energy about as much as I need a pork sandwich.

America is about to do a bad deal with Iran that will leave it something in the range of 5,000 spinning centrifuges enriching uranium.

Israel is not party to the talks. It has been cast in the same position of Czechoslovakia in the Munich agreement of 1938 where Britain and France negotiated away Czechoslovak security (and much of the country) without the Czechoslovaks even allowed to be present.

And while Israel faces the possibility of genocide, Rice shows gross insensitivity to an Israeli leader for simply speaking out.

But why shouldn’t Netanyahu entrust Israeli security to Rice? Perhaps it’s because of her record of trivializing genocide.

In 1994, Rice was part of Bill Clinton’s national security team that took no action whatsoever during the Rwandan genocide, leaving more than 800,000 men, women and children to be hacked to death by machete in the fastest slaughter of human beings ever recorded.

Not content to insist on American non-involvement, the Clinton administration went a step further by obstructing the efforts of other nations to stop the slaughter. On April 21, 1994, the Canadian UN commander in Rwanda, Maj.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire, declared that he required only 5,000 troops to bring the genocide to a rapid halt. In addition, a single bombing run against the RTLM Hutu Power radio transmitting antenna would have made it impossible for the Hutus to coordinate their genocide.

But on the very same day, as Phillip Gourevitch details in his definitive account of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will Be Killed With Our Families, the Security Council, with the Clinton administration’s blessing, ordered the UN force under Dallaire reduced by 90 percent, to a skeleton staff of 270 troops who would powerlessly witness the slaughter to come. This, in turn, was influenced by Presidential Decision Directive 25, which “amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions,” even though Dallaire did not seek American troops and the mission was not peacekeeping but genocide prevention.

Madeleine Albright, then the American ambassador to the UN, opposed leaving even this tiny UN force. She also pressured other countries “to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands... the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.”

In a 2001 article published in The Atlantic, Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer- Prize winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and now Rice’s successor as American ambassador to the United Nations, referred to Rice and her colleagues in the Clinton administration as bystanders to genocide. She quotes Rice in her 2002 book as saying, “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November congressional election?” 

This is an astonishing statement. Here you have Rice hearing about the murder of 330 people every hour for three months and her response is – how will this affect us politically? That Rice would have brought up the midterm elections as a more important consideration than stopping the mass murder of so many men, women and children that their bodies were damming the rivers of Rwanda is one of the most heartbreaking pronouncements ever uttered by American official.

But she did not stop there.

Rice then joined Albright, Anthony Lake and Warren Christopher as part of a coordinated effort not only to impede UN action to stop the Rwandan genocide but to minimize public opposition to American inaction by removing words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” from government communications on the subject.

In the end, eight African nations, fed up with American inaction, agreed to send in an intervention force to stop the slaughter, provided that the US would lend them 50 armored personal carriers.

The Clinton administration decided it would lease rather than lend the armor, for $15 million. The carriers sat on a runway in Germany while the UN pleaded for a $5m. reduction as the genocidal inferno raged.

The story only gets worse from there, with the Clinton State Department refusing to label the Rwanda horrors a genocide because of the 1948 Genocide Convention that would have obligated the United States to intervene, an effort in grotesque ambiguity that Rice participated in.

It was painful enough to watch Kofi Annan elevated to secretary-general even though as head of UN peacekeeping forces worldwide he sent two now infamous cables to Dallaire forbidding him from making any effort to stop the genocide (the cables are on display in the Kigali Genocide Memorial).

It’s nearly as painful watching Rice now attack the Jewish state, which lost onethird of its entire people in a genocide of four short years, by saying how its elected leader is destroying its relationship with the world’s greatest superpower simply because a weaker nation insists on standing up for itself and speaking truth to power.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international best-selling author of 30 books and has recently published The Fed-up Man of Faith: Challenging G-d in the Face of Tragedy and Suffering. His website is www.shmuley.com. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

Boko Haram is now a mini-Islamic State, with its own territory

Boko Haram controls about 20,000 square miles of territory and is fast becoming a terrorist state razing villages and killing innocent victims

By David Blair

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

6:55PM GMT 10 Jan 2015

After days of razing villages and pitiless massacre, Boko Haram finished the week with its most chilling atrocity.

As people bustled through the Saturday market in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, a device borne by a ten year-old girl exploded near the entrance.

A witness said the girl probably had no idea that a bomb had been strapped to her body.

The explosion just before lunch killed 20, including the girl, and injured 18, according to the police.

Boko Haram did not immediately claim the attack, but the Islamic insurgents have increasingly used young girls as human bombs as they carve an African “Caliphate” from the plains of northern Nigeria.

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Today, Boko Haram controls about 20,000 square miles of territory - an area the size of Belgium.

Within this domain, the black flag of jihad flies over scores of towns and villages scattered across the neighbouring states of Borno and Yobe.

The latest conquest was the fishing town of Baga on the shores of Lake Chad, which fell to the Islamists last Wednesday.

“For five kilometres (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt,” one surviving fisherman, Yanaye Grema, said.

^{The leader of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram delivering a speech}

Boko Haram’s fighters have now achieved mastery over 11 local government areas with a total population exceeding 1.7 million people, according to the official 2006 census.

Once, the movement’s fighters would launch hit-and-run attacks on defenceless villages. Now, Boko Haram’s realm stretches from the Mandara Mountains on the eastern border with Cameroon to Lake Chad in the north and the Yedseram river in the west.

The Nigerian army, crippled by corruption and incompetence, has shown itself unable to resist the jihadist advance.

Last September, Abubakar Shekau, the self-styled “Emir” of Boko Haram, proclaimed his ambition to conquer a “Caliphate” and follow the example of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

^{The substantial control Boko Haram has is evident in this map}

Diplomats believe this was a logical escalation of Boko Haram’s campaign.

“There is a copy-cat element at work here,” said Andrew Pocock, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria. “If Isil can declare a Caliphate, then so can we. Boko Haram want to be seen by their peers as grown-up jihadis. They want to show 'we can control territory, we can control a Caliphate’.”

There is also a clear practical rationale for Boko Haram to capture territory. “Success - and they have had success - creates a different kind of requirement,” added Mr Pocock. “You need a place where you can base yourself and keep equipment and supplies and, indeed, captives. It means that you’ve got to hold territory.”

Shekau has established Boko Haram’s unofficial headquarters in the town of Gwoza in Borno state. This stronghold has been chosen with great care.

Gwoza is shielded from attack by the volcanic peaks of the Mandara Mountains spanning the nearby frontier with Cameroon. Most important of all, the surrounding area is the homeland of Shekau’s own ethnic group, the Kanuri.

From this base among his brethren, Shekau sends his fighters to strike across a vast area. The border with Cameroon means nothing to Shekau, since it slices directly through the area inhabited by the Kanuri. His men have frequently attacked villages in the neighbouring country, killing 68 of Cameroon’s soldiers in the last month alone.

Sometimes, Shekau’s goal is to grab more territory - as with the assault on Baga last week. Just as often, he dispatches his fighters on what can only be described as slave raids.

Boko Haram profits greatly from the trade in human beings. Last April, Shekau committed his most infamous act by abducting over 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, about 50 miles south-west of Gwoza, triggering a global campaign to “bring back our girls”. By his own admission, the girls were then sold into slavery.

Britain and France stamped out the slave trade in this part of Africa a century ago, but Boko Haram has succeeded in partially reversing this achievement. Today the ancient caravan routes running north across the Sahara are active once more, except that trucks have replaced camels as the means of conveying human cargo.

Boko Haram has expanded to a point where it defies simple categories. Its name is normally translated as “Western education is banned”, yet “boko” means “book” in the Hausa language, so “books are banned”would be more accurate.

In part, Boko Haram is a branch of al-Qaeda’s brand of jihadism. As well as seizing towns, Shekau’s men carry out suicide bombings in Nigerian cities, including Abuja. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Isil in Iraq, they have become expert users of improvised explosive devices. In particular, its men have mastered the technique of creating charges that are carefully shaped to destroy armoured vehicles.

^{A fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) holds an Isil flag and a weapon on a street in the city of Mosul}

In short, Boko Haram have learnt the classic tactics of al-Qaeda. Its operatives have picked up these skills from the jihadist tentacles stretching across the Sahel region of Africa. “Unquestionably, Boko Haram have benefited from the broader Sahelian jihadi network,” said Mr Pocock.

Yet at the same time, Boko Haram is a Kanuri tribal insurgency. In addition, the movement works as a criminal gang, profiting from theft, extortion and slave raiding. Shekau amounts to a global jihadist, crime boss and tribal rebel leader - all at the same time.

If there are limits to his ambitions, they have not been imposed by the Nigerian army. The 7th division was specially created to fight Boko Haram and deployed to Borno. In practise, it does little but try to mount a static defence of Maiduguri, the state capital. In common with the rest of the army, it lacks the mobility and the manpower to challenge Boko Haram’s control of the surrounding area.

The army may also lack the resolve. Last year, the federal government allocated 20 per cent of its budget to the armed forces - over £4 billion.

Yet precious little trickled down to the soldiers in the frontline, who remain poorly armed and equipped. Instead, a large proportion of the military budget simply disappeared into the pockets of senior officers.

Despite being the headquarters of the 7th division, Maiduguri lives under the constant threat of attack.

Oliver Dashe Doeme, the Roman Catholic Bishop in the city, said that 70 of the 150 churches in his diocese had been destroyed by Boko Haram. “We have many parishes which have been sacked and overrun,” he said. “Our major concern is not our buildings - it’s not the churches themselves - but our people who have been driven away from their homes. Some are living in mountains and forests, some are in Cameroon and some have gone elsewhere in Nigeria.”

About 10,000 Catholic refugees have gathered in Maiduguri after fleeing Boko Haram’s new domain, added Bishop Doeme.

President Goodluck Jonathan, who faces re-election next month, has declared an emergency in the three states most threatened by the Islamists. But Bishop Doeme has no confidence in the army’s ability to recapture the territory lost to Boko Haram.

“Nigeria is a very corrupt nation,” he said. “Our main problem is not that Boko Haram cannot be contained, but that you have a deep-seated corruption in high and low places. Many of our top military officers are gaining from what is happening here because it means that a lot of money is coming in their direction.”

^{Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian president, faces an election next month}

Instead of being imposed by the army, the borders of Boko Haram’s new domain may be defined by the ethnic patchwork of northern Nigeria.

Shekau is confident of holding the territory inhabited by his fellow Kanuris, but his grip is looser wherever other groups hold sway.

He recently withdrew from a string of towns in Adamawa state, perhaps because they were inhabited by non-Kanuris.

Boko Haram possesses armoured personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers - in other words, the heavy weapons of a conventional army. Despite all this firepower, the invisible borders of ethnicity may still be a brake on its expansion.

For Bishop Doeme, however, this comes as little consolation. “We have cases here of soldiers deliberately abandoning their armaments,” he said.

“There are cases of corrupt senior officers. The president should sack them so there is an example to the others - but that has never happened.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/11337722/Boko-Haram-is-now-a-mini-Islamic-State-with-its-own-territory.html

Why Ebola’s nothing to worry about

By Michael Fumento

http://nypost.com/

August 5, 2014

Dr. Kent Brantly (left), one of the two American doctors who contracted Ebola, works at an Ebola isolation ward in Liberia.Photo: Getty Images

We’re now witnessing the worst Ebola epidemic ever — and on your list of worries it belongs . . . nowhere.

Here’s a rule of thumb about diseases: The rarer and less likely they are to kill you, the more hype they get. The New York Times ran more than 2,000 articles on SARS, which ultimately killed zero Americans.

This is only the deadliest outbreak of Ebola virus disease because past ones were so tiny. At this writing, there have been 1,603 reported cases in Africa and 887 deaths.

That’s too many. But every day about 600 sub-Saharan Africans die of tuberculosis, and contagious diarrhea claims the lives of 2,195 children, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

Malaria, syphilis, AIDS and probably dozens of other diseases each year kill Africans at higher rates than Ebola is killing right now.

And, should Ebola come to America, it’s vanishingly unlikely to “break out.”

Ebola is a lazy spreader. A cough, sneeze or sweat from an “active” case is harmless. Spreading the virus requires contact with large doses of bodily secretions such as blood or vomit.

In Africa, that makes the proportion of fatalities among health-care workers exceptionally high and thereby makes the illness seem more frightening. After all, they’re specialists.

But in the ramshackle clinics these heroic folks have to work in, they often lack the most basic protective equipment.

Consider: In over four months since the latest Ebola outbreak was identified in Guinea, it has spread to only three other countries — all in sub-Saharan Africa.

Flu can spread to three new countries in a day.

Ebola “outbreaks occur primarily in remote villages in Central and West Africa, near tropical rainforests,” reports the World Health Organization. Sound like Midtown Manhattan to you?

Nor is this virus nearly as lethal as you generally read, with that “up to 90 percent mortality.”

That “up to” is a giveaway: In fact, in the current outbreak, 55 percent of identified victims have died; still not great, but again we’re talking about poor villages with almost no health-care resources.

There’s no specific treatment for Ebola any more than there is for the common cold, but simple hydration with electrolytes and bed rest put the odds in your favor.

That’s what we’ve seen with other diseases such as SARS, where (aside from an unexplained occurrence in Canada) virtually all deaths were in the Third World.

Nor does infection even mean an active case. Vincent Racaniello, a Columbia University virologist, says blood testing for antibodies indicates the vast majority of people infected with Ebola probably have no symptoms, or had extremely mild ones.

It’s only the worst cases that wind up being counted. Surprise: Those cases have the highest death rate.

The only American killed by the Ebola virus worked in one of those four African countries and died there. Another American known to be infected there, Dr. Kent Brantly, was flown to Atlanta (yes, Ebola finally made it here!) and appears to berecovering nicely.

A third American patient has just returned.

What might the US death rate be, should the virus somehow spread here?

“You are always going to lose some, so it’s probably not zero,” Racaniello told me, “but substantially less than 50 to 90 percent.”

The real threat Ebola poses is as an attention hound. It was the subject of the nonfiction best-seller “The Hot Zone” and the basis of the pathogen in the movie “Outbreak.”

Thing is, attention hounds suck finite funds away from more serious threats. (Another current hog: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which has killed fewer than 300 people since first identified two years ago.)

One dollar invested in diarrhea prevention yields an average return of $25.50,according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Syphilis infects almost 2 million pregnant woman yearly, killing perhaps 250,000 babies and blinding and crippling many more.

It’s easily diagnosed and cheaply treated — yet that’s obviously not happening. We need a vaccine, but the United States has none in human trials. US trials for an Ebola vaccine began 11 years ago.

And if you must worry about a new plague, focus on antibiotic-resistant bugs like MRSA and C. diff — and start asking why we’re not developing new antibiotics to fight these ills.

Let’s worry less about greasing squeaky wheels, and more about prioritizing our reactions based not on films or bestsellers but on what poses the greatest threat to the greatest number.

Michael Fumento is a lawyer and journalist who specializes in mass hysteria. He lives in Colombia.

Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. Blocked Terrorist Designation for Boko Haram

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

May 8, 2014

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) talks with Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the Presidential Villa in Abuja August 9, 2012. Clinton arrived in Africa’s most populous nation offering to help Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan fight Boko Haram, a Taliban-like group that wants to establish a strict Islamic state in the north of the vast country. REUTERS/Jacquelyn Martin/Pool (NIGERIA – Tags: POLITICS BUSINESS)

“We must stand up to terrorism,” bleated Hillary Clinton a few days ago in a tweet expressing outrage against Boko Haram, the jihadist organization that has abducted hundreds of young girls in Nigeria. Yet, when she was actually in a position to stand up to Boko Haram’s terrorism as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton instead protected the group.

At the Daily Beast, Josh Rogin reports:

The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years. And now, lawmakers and former U.S. officials are saying that the decision may have hampered the American government’s ability to confront the Nigerian group that shocked the world by abducting hundreds of innocent girls.

While Mrs. Clinton now issues indignant tweets, Mr. Rogin elaborates on her failure to mention

that her own State Department refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011, after the group bombed the UN headquarters in Abuja. The refusal came despite the urging of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and over a dozen Senators and Congressmen. 

“The one thing she could have done, the one tool she had at her disposal, she didn’t use. And nobody can say she wasn’t urged to do it. It’s gross hypocrisy,” said a former senior U.S. official who was involved in the debate. “The FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department really wanted Boko Haram designated, they wanted the authorities that would provide to go after them, and they voiced that repeatedly to elected officials.” 

In May 2012, then-Justice Department official Lisa Monaco (now at the White House) wrote to the State Department to urge Clinton to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization. The following month, Gen. Carter Ham, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, said that Boko Haram provided a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and was likely sharing explosives and funds with the group. And yet, Hillary Clinton’s State Department still declined to place Boko Haram on its official terrorist roster.

As Mr. Rogin further details, placing an organization on the terrorist list enables the government to use various investigative tools for law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering purposes. It also squeezes the organization by criminalizing the provision of material support to it and the conduct of business with it.

After numerous Boko Haram atrocities, Republicans attempted to force Secretary Clinton to designate the group or explain why she refused to do so. The State Department heavily lobbied against the legislation. Only after John Kerry replaced Clinton, and after a series of jihadist bombings against churches and other targets, did the State Department finally relent and add Boko Haram to the terrorist list last November.

The excuses now being offered in explanation of Clinton’s dereliction are specious. As Rogin explains, Clinton’s State Department claimed that Boko Haram was merely a local group with parochial grievances that was not a threat to the United States. Have a look, though, at the State Department’s list, here. Several of the listed groups are waging local terrorist campaigns that do not threaten our country—the Basque ETA, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Real Irish Republican Army, etc. A significant reason for having the list is to promote international cooperation against terrorism and discourage its use against anyone anywhere. The fact that a terrorist organization may have only local grievances and may not directly imperil the U.S. has never been thought a reason to exclude it from the list.

Fox News has further reported another rationale of Clinton apologists: Hillary did not want to raise Boko Haram’s profile and assist its recruiting which, they reason, would be the effect of designation by the Great Satan. That is ridiculous. The main point of having the list, and the sanctions that accompany a terrorist designation, is to weaken the organization by depriving it of assets and material support. The logic of what Clinton supporters are claiming is that U.S. counterterrorism law — much of which was put in place by the administration of President Bill Clinton — does more harm than good. Does anyone think they really believe that?

What happened here is obvious, although the commentariat is loath to connect the dots. Boko Haram is an Islamic-supremacist organization. Mrs. Clinton, like the Obama administration more broadly, believes that appeasing Islamists — avoiding actions that might give them offense, slamming Americans who provoke them — promotes peace and stability. (See Egypt for a good example of how well this approach is working.) 

Furthermore, if you are claiming to have “decimated” al-Qaeda, as the Obama administration was claiming to have done in the run-up to the 2012 election, the last thing you want to do is add jihadists to the terror list (or beef up security at diplomatic posts in jihadist hot spots, or acknowledge that jihadist rioting in Cairo or jihadist attacks in Benghazi are something other than “protests” inspired by “an Internet video” . . .)

It is very simple. Most of us on the national-security right recognize that Islamicsupremacism is an ideology rooted in Muslim scripture — a strict, literal, ancient interpretation of Muslim scripture. Essentially, it advocates the adoption of sharia, Islam’s legal code and societal framework. It is not the only way of construing Muslim scripture — and we certainly hope that more benign constructions become dominant — but Islamic supremacism is far more mainstream than the West likes to admit, particularly in the Middle East and growing swaths of Africa. It is an ideology that endorses violent jihad, the treatment of women as chattel, sex slavery, child marriages, and the other horrible stuff that outfits like Boko Haram are into. Even though these organizations (quite naturally) terrorize locally, their aspirations are global and they are a threat to us because their ideology unites them and regards the West as an enemy.

The Left, by contrast, seems to believe that “Islamists” — adherents of Islamicsupremacism (though the Left would not refer to “Islamic supremacism”) — are motivated not by an ideology derived from scriptural commands but by American policies that promote national defense, pursue other U.S. interests, and regard Israel as a key ally. Indeed, progressives like Mrs. Clinton are anti-anti-terrorists in the sense that they portray the national-security right as a greater threat than Islamicsupremacism.

Mrs. Clinton and her cohort do not deny that there are terrorists motivated by Islam. But they see terrorists and Islamists as separate categories, not united by a single ideology.

Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have convinced themselves that they know more about Islam than Muslim terrorists do, and that the peaceful, pliable, progressive Islam they have concocted somehow renders the jihadists’ Islam false. This means, abracadabra, that Muslim terrorist groups can be miniaturized: They’re not really Islamic, not really united by an ideology that seeks global conquest, and therefore should be seen as isolated, standalone, ragtag cabals whose grievances are strictly local. The Left has even done this with al-Qaeda: The organization heretofore regarded as global is now atomized into something they call “core al-Qaeda” — which Obama purports to have “decimiated” by killing Osama bin Laden — and a bunch of regional franchises (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, etc.). We are supposed to see these franchises not as tentacles of an international terror network but as local gangs trying to make themselves look bigger and more threatening than they really are by adopting the “al-Qaeda” brand name.

As noted above, the Left not only marginalizes terrorists but divorces them fromIslamists. Mrs. Clinton and the president accept Islamists as authentic Muslims but see them as evolving beyond Islamic scripture and toward the progressive Islam of the Left’s imagination. The mental gymnastics at work here require (a) studiously ignoring what Islamists actually believe and the fact that it squares with what Islamic terrorists believe; and (b) belittling, suppressing, and framing as an“Islamophobe” anyone who has the audacity to point out what Islamists actually believe.

Having imposed the premise that the Islamists’ version of Islam should not trouble us in the slightest, Mrs. Clinton and the Left posit that what really animates Islamists against the West are aspects of American policy—which, conveniently, just happen to be the same aspects of American policy opposed by the Left. If only we’d change these policies—less emphasis on American security and interests, more distance from Israel — we’d alter the perception that America is “at war with Islam.” This will make Muslims like us better, promoting peace and stability.

So that’s the plan: pretend terrorists and Islamists are unconnected, miniaturize terrorists, and appease Islamists with the Left’s policy preferences. It’s the plan that convinces you not to put Boko Haram on the terrorist list — that way, you can pretend that the jihadists are not really that important while telling the Islamists, “See? We’re going to treat them like a local criminal gang — the fact that they’re Muslims citing scripture in support of their murder, mayhem, kidnapping and misogyny is irrelevant. No ‘war on Islam’ on our watch.”

From Benghazi to the Brotherhood in Egypt to Boko Haram and beyond — Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department was a disaster. But she is an excellent tweeter.