Boko Haram Now Armed With Weapons Gotten From... Post-Invasion Libya

Well.

From Reuters:

The Bama attack showed [Boko Haram's] substantial firepower, including machine guns, large numbers of rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and pick-up trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns, a sign the weapons flood from the Libyan war that helped rebels seize parts of Mali last year has reached Nigeria, officials say.

From @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar, this piece on Bill Clinton's claim that only poverty, and not Islamism, animated Boko Haram's savagery.

Mr. Clinton not only stated that poverty was the cause, but that specifically, Islam and religion could not be blamed in any way.

“You have to somehow bring economic opportunity to the people who don’t have it,” Clinton stated. He added, “You have all these political problems — and now violence problems — that appear to be rooted in religious differences and all the rhetoric of the Boko Harams and others. But the truth is the poverty rate in the north is three times of what it is in Lagos."

This psychopathy, like many psychopathy, has several causes. The government of Nigeria has long been accused of being, by turns, corrupt, incompetent, and oppressive. And poverty is a sadly enduring incubator of social pathologies.*

But it is beyond absurd to claim that ideas and ideology have nothing to do with it.

The Left forever claims this when it comes to global jihad -- that it is not the Islamist ideology to blame, but rather "root causes" such as poverty or Western Aggression.

That's a strange thing for anyone on the American Left to claim -- because they vigorously attempt to marginalize, delegitimize, and silence any ideas conflicting with their own.

Why? Well, obviously they fear that ideas have power, and that if people believe ideas contrary to the left's ideas, then the nation will change from what it otherwise would have been. It will turn from the America that could be, as Hillary Clinton would say.

For example, if even one alleged Racist is permitted to own a basketball team, why, that would Normalize racism, mainstream it, suggest that racism is permissible and proper.

Thus, we must ruthlessly stamp out of Racism at the ideological roots or else it will surely bloom into flowers of racist action.

And yet when it comes to Islamism, the American Left engages in endless apologism and bizarre claims that the vicious dehumanization of women and non-Islamists as preached by Islamist priests and inculcated into the youngest of children has nothing at all to do with the horrors that ultimately flow from such ideas.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

If it's true, as the left claims in the case of violent global jihadist Islamism, that ideology is not a powerful motivator of human behavior, why does the Left spend its every moment preaching its political ideology in America, and demonizing those who depart from it?

We have to stand united to kick Donald Sterling out of the NBA for a couple of lines he spoke in private to his mistress, but a thousand clerics preaching hate and murder have no impact on behavior whatsoever?

'Tis very strange, the ideologies the Left deems terrifyingly dangerous and those it deals harmless, blameless, and even quaint.

* Of course, in this case, it could well be that the Muslim-held north is poor precisely because its intense xenophobia causes it to reject the wealth-producing culture of the Western boko it so despises.

posted by Ace at 06:56 PM

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