It is easy to mock the Twitter campaign against Boko Haram. It is easy to conflate the Twitter mob that suppresses lack of conformity, the protest culture that sees the act of protesting a good itself and which the Tweet allows you to do without even the minimal effort to walk down to a protest, and the Tweet as substitute for action (as I've said, when you Twitter a king, kill him).
But Twitter campaigns are not worthless, I have to admit:
The mass tweet is, after all, just the cyber equivalent of the mass petition. And people don’t sneer at petitions. Historically, they’ve been a way for individuals, famous or anonymous, to make their views known and, by weight of number, influence authorities who, in democratic societies, might respond to such expressions of popular sentiment.
The Twitter campaign to save those girls seems to be prompting a welcome addition to the coalition that wants to fight and defeat jihadis, bringing out those previously unimpressed by the war on terror:
These were members, like Sheila Jackson Lee, not heretofore known for hawkish anti-jihadist sentiments. No matter. People find their own causes. Their sincerity is to be credited and their commitment welcomed.
The American post-9/11 response to murderous jihadism has often been characterized, not least by our own president, as both excessive and morally suspect. There is a palpable weariness with the entire enterprise. Good, therefore, that new constituencies for whom jihadism and imposed Shariah law ranked low among their urgent concerns should now be awakening to the principal barbarism of our time.
And this was the ultimate source of my mockery: frustration that the thug Islamists I've wanted to defeat these many years show up in Nigeria and yet anti-war types here don't recognize that Boko Haram is just another flavor of jihadi nutballery:
The War on Terror has always been about defeating murderous jihadi thugs, who actually do wage a war on women--and girls. Now our government has noticed the jihadi group, Boko Haram. Although I suspect they secretly harbor hopes that Tea party groups are responsible.
More good jihadis, please. When you Twitter akingterrorist group, killhimthem.
Boko Haram is another reason God gave us JDAMs, don't you think?
So if Americans who until now considered the war on terror just a "war on brown people" want to wage war on jihadis notwithstanding their skin color, who am I to complain?
Tweet--and bomb--away.
UPDATE: Yet the force of denial that Boko Haram is another part of the jihad we fight is strong:
Boko Haram’s stated desire is to create a sharia state in the Muslim-majority north, governed by Islamic law. Behind that aim is a deeply held view that the north is badly managed by government elites in the majority Christian south who enjoy large oil profits and a more comfortable life.
Yet contrary to much recent press and media, the group is not mainly fixated on attacking Christians. That is secondary to its anti-government program. While Boko Haram turned truly bloody five years ago, in 2009, it began attacking Christian targets only in 2011.
“Some people say Boko Haram is primarily concerned with destroying Christianity,” notes Jacob Olupona, a Nigerian Anglican at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. “They do bomb churches, but also mosques. Many of the kidnapped girls are Muslims.”
See? It's just a youth movement that coincidentally latched onto Islamist jihad as the way to express their youthful disaffection. Jihad. Droopy pants. Could have gone either way.
And the fact that Moslems are the dominant victims of their jihad is no different than jihadis in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Mali, or wherever else jihadis rise up. Funny that most Moslems aren't sufficiently Islamic in the eyes of these jihadi thugs.
It's a long war for a reason. Not the least because of our inability to recognize the war we are in.
