“If it had happened anywhere else, I would have torn out the front pages of newspapers and the news worldwide for at least a month.” This was the beginning of my last post, where I tried to explain why Islam did not play a role in the kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria. Then Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist and youngest person to ever be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, launched the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, asking Boko Haram to bring the girls home. This got the ball rolling.
In just a few hours, Malala received support from Michelle Obama, and then a chain of hundreds of artists and political figures (British Prime Minister David Cameron, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Justin Timberlake; in Italy, singer Noemi, economist Mercedes Bresso, politician Nicola Zingaretti and the pope). All of them united in the conformist choir to put them at peace with their God.
I strongly doubt that Abubakar Shekau is a man capable of announcing himself in this way: “I like to kill anybody Allah orders me to kill, in the same way that I like to kill chickens.” The hundreds of photos that have exploded on the Internet in the last few days have left us moved. Least of all, if in those images the perfection of the shamed West is portrayed: Young girls posing with a sheet of paper with the hashtag of the campaign. A selfie for life. A truce with their own conscience. It is the time to take a photo to remind us to know how to love.
But who? Nigeria is a country forgotten by the world. The kidnapping of those schoolgirls is an unprecedented tragedy; it is not my intention to discuss the seriousness of what has happened. Malala has always been known for her dedication to asserting civil rights and education, banned for girls by a Taliban order. On Oct. 9, 2012, she was shot in the head and neck while she was on the school bus that took her home every day after class.
As a result, her initiative makes sense and is also noble. The sense is that she has a moralist way of thinking where a country is remembered by spending time on Twitter. On the night of February 24, Boko Haram massacred and burned the bodies of 59 students at a secondary school in Buni Yadi. In the first two weeks of April, it killed 139 people, launching two dynamite attacks right in the heart of Abuja, their first attack on the capital. According to a survey by Agence-French Presse (AFP), since 2002, the ultraradical sect has killed 10,000 victims.
The precious Michelle Obama, however, stood up for the girls, strangely enough, a few days before Mother’s Day, more than week after the kidnapping, and even snatched the space dedicated to her husband in his usual Saturday message. More than a call for freeing the schoolgirls, to me it seemed like a bold message, beautiful and good, to which the West, unsurprisingly, adhered to in great style.
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