Seventeen days ago, and two weeks into the ordeal of what we now know to be nearly 300 young female Nigerian scholars, Al Jazeera America began publicizing the Twitter hashtag campaign #BringBackOurGirls. I had not seen any other news outlet acknowledge the story at that point. Plenty of time and money had been spent for weeks on the missing airliner and the sunken ferry, but it seemed at the time that no one was particularly concerned about thugs invading a girls’ dormitory on the eve of final exams and abducting them for doing exactly what they were there to do: studying.
First and foremost, at that time, the story needed publicity – a higher profile – and the hashtag campaign seemed exactly what was needed so I came here, posted about it, and tweeted the post with the hashtag. Reactions to that post indicated what I had predicted. A lot of people did not know about this situation. I continued posting and tweeting and as the days went by the hashtag campaign did what it was meant to do. It went viral. Big names picked it up and the media could no longer ignore the story.
The whole point of the campaign was to raise public awareness, and it worked. Now it is a story. Now it gets coverage. People know. The global hashtag campaign forced the hand of the Nigerian government which had done nothing to help the girls or their families. Now on the evening news we see the girls, their faces sad and surrounded by veils. We see the abductors, cocky and jeering.
The girls are not home yet. We are not even sure where they are. We have heard the stories of a few who escaped, and at least one says that she cannot return to school. Mission accomplished, Boko Haram! At least one young woman will not be studying Darwin, or be looking online at powerful telescopic photos near the moment of the Big Bang, or grow up to find ways to build a greener future for her country – the leading oil producing nation on the continent.
The supremely ironic, crazy attack by right-wing media on the hashtag campaign and on Hillary Clinton (I predicted that here) should come as no surprise and is no coincidence.
They live in the same insulated deadpool as the kidnappers. They are the American Boko Haram who deny scientific evidence of evolution, the Big Bang, and the human influence on the climate. Like the kidnappers, many of them hold fundamentalist beliefs. Eschewing education themselves, they are averse to reasoning, and the last thing on their agenda is the rescue of these girls. Had it been, they would have joined the campaign rather than attacking it.
There is nothing sillier than aligning Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama with the bullies who are holding these girls. Nothing. There is nothing more outlandish than the notion that Hillary and Michelle want to bring down the Nigerian government. Hillary, a longtime advocate for women, girls, and education, proudly watched her daughter receive a Ph.D. last weekend. Michelle is the mother of two schoolgirls in the same age group as those kidnapped. They joined a social media campaign the same way the rest of us did in sympathy with those girls and their families. There is nothing hard to understand about that and certainly no shady hidden agenda.
For her part as a member of the Obama administration, and contrary to what the right-wing media reports, Hillary Clinton followed established protocol in the pursuit of a terrorist designation of Boko Haram. In fact, in June 2012 she listed the very perpetrator we see in videos taunting everyone who wants these girls released, Abubakar Shekau.
How that, exactly, would be sympathy for this devil defies logic, but then logic has never been the strong suit of the far right.
(Cross-posted at The Department of Homegirl Security)
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Still4Hill 