Boko Haram Says Video Shows Missing Nigerian Girls

The group that took more than 200 girls from a Nigerian school last month released what it says is a video of the girls, along with demands that the government release militants from prison. The group's leader, Abubakar Shekau, says the video shows around 130 of the girls.

In the undated video released Monday, a crowd of girls is seen outdoors, arranged as if for a class photo. They are wearing the full-length hijab; some portions of the footage show them praying.

The video was first reported by Agence France-Presse; the agency says Shekau claims some of the girls "converted to Islam" as he talks on camera for 17 minutes. Several girls speak as well.

"It is thought the majority of the abducted girls are Christians, although there are a number of Muslims among them," the BBC reports. "Correspondents said the girls appeared calm, and one said that they had not been harmed."

And CNN adds, "Shekau appears in a separate part of the video, but never with the girls."

There's no way to be sure of the date the video was shot, but it offers some hope that the abducted girls have not been sold, as Boko Haram's leader has threatened. It also suggests that the girls, who were seized by gunmen during a raid in the northeast town of Chibok, haven't been dispersed, a move that experts say could make the girls harder to locate.

Nigeria's Interior Minister Abba Moro tells the BBC that his government will not agree to an exchange of jailed militants for the kidnapped girls.

"As far as this government is concerned, the option of [the] swap of innocent citizens with people who have taken arms against the country... is not on the table," he said.

Agence France-Presse has posted the video online again; the agency removed excerpts from the lengthy video earlier Monday.

“Kidnapped” —riiiiight. By their BOYFRIENDS taking time off from 419 scams.

They’re all out in the bush having a nice BBQ and volleyball game and earning some pocket-money by choking up a few tears in some grainy, “Oh, I’m so scared and TOTALLY CHRISTIAN..!”- shots for credulous American viewers, made ready to be fleeced all over again.

By expensively sending out our SF guys into fly-infested FraudCentral on a wild, media-centric goose-chase.

If we want our girls We Can Keep Them, uh-huh.

Riiight. We have seen this movie many times, before.

My scenario is too heartless and crazy, you wonder...?

From a guy who exported machine-guns to NarcoTraffickers SPECIFICALLY in order to generate grisly murder headlines....?

I don’t believe ANY of this —it’s a huge orchestration by a desperate and immoral adminstration whose 2nd term is a TOTAL FRAUD.

CHRISTIAN TRAGEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

DEFINING IDEAS ¬- HOOVER INSTITUTION JOURNAL July 25, 2013

by Bruce Thornton (Research Fellow and W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow, 2009–10, 2010–11)

We are living through one of the largest persecutions of a religious group in history. Human Events Few people realize that we are today living through the largest persecution of Christians in history, worse even than the famous attacks under ancient Roman emperors like Diocletian and Nero. Estimates of the numbers of Christians under assault range from 100-200 million.

According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes. And most of this persecution is taking place at the hands of Muslims. Of the top fifty countries persecuting Christians, forty-two have either a Muslim majority or have sizeable Muslim populations.

Human Events

The extent of this disaster, its origins, and the reasons why it has been met with a shrug by most of the Western media are the topics of Raymond Ibrahim’s Crucified Again.

Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow of the Middle East Forum.

Fluent in Arabic, he has been tracking what he calls “one of the most dramatic stories” of our time in the reports and witnesses that appear in Arabic newspapers, news shows, and websites, but that rarely get translated into English or picked up by the Western press. What he documents in this meticulously researched and clearly argued book is a human rights disaster of monumental proportions.

In Crucified Again, Ibrahim performs two invaluable functions for educating people about the new “Great Persecution,” to use the label of the Roman war against Christians. First, he documents hundreds of specific examples from across the Muslim world. By doing so, he shows the extent of the persecution, and

Additionally, Ibrahim commemorates the forgotten victims, refusing to allow their suffering to be lost because of the indifference or inattention of the media and government officials.

Second, he provides a cogent explanation for why these attacks are concentrated in Muslim nations. In doing so, he corrects the delusional wishful thinking and apologetic spin that mars much of the current discussion of Islamic-inspired violence.

Ibrahim’s copious reports of violence against Christians range across the whole Muslim world, including countries such as Indonesia, which is frequently characterized as “moderate” and “tolerant.” Such attacks are so frequent because they result not just from the jihadists that some Westerners dismiss as “extremists,” but from mobs of ordinary people, and from government policy and laws that discriminate against Christians.

Rather than ad hoc reactions to local grievances, then, these attacks reveal a consistent ideology of hatred and contempt that transcends national, geographical, and ethnic differences.

In Afghanistan, for example, where American blood and treasure liberated Afghans from murderous fanatics, a court order in March 2010 led to the destruction of the last Christian church in that country. In Iraq, also free because of America’s sacrifice, half of the Christians have fled; in 2010, Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad was bombed during mass, with fifty-eight killed and hundreds wounded.

In Kuwait, likewise, the beneficiary of American power, the Kuwait City Municipal Council rejected a permit for building a Greek Catholic church. A few years later, a member of parliament said he would submit a law to prohibit all church construction. A delegation of Kuwaitis was then sent to Saudi Arabia––which legally prohibits any Christian worship–– to consult with the Grand Mufti, the highest authority on Islamic law in the birthplace of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula.

The Mufti announced that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” a statement ignored in the West until Ibrahim reported it. Imagine the media’s vehement outrage and condemnation if the Pope in Rome had called for the destruction of all the mosques in Italy. The absence of any Western condemnation or even reaction to the Mufti’s statement was stunning. Is there no limit to our tolerance of Islam?

Moreover, it is in Egypt––yet another beneficiary of American money and support–– that the harassment and murder of Christians are particularly intense. Partly this reflects the large number of Coptic Christians, the some sixteen million descendants of the Egyptian Christians who were conquered by Arab armies in 640 A.D.

Since the fall of Mubarak, numerous Coptic churches have been attacked by Muslim mobs. Most significant is the destruction of St. George’s church in Edfu in September 2011. Illustrating the continuity of mob violence with government policy, the chief of Edfu’s intelligence unit was observed directing the mob that destroyed the church.

The rest of the history

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/152651

Are there any pictures of Michelle pleading for the end of the slaughter of Christians by Muslims?

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