Boko Haram

A month ago, Boko Haram terrorists stormed a secondary school in the village of Chibok near the Cameroon border and kidnapped over 200 girls.  Other attacks and kidnappings have gone on since then in the village of Warabe in the Borno state of north-eastern Nigeria as well as other places in the country.   Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, boasted in a recent video, “There is a market for selling humans…” 

Many of us are well aware that is sadly true, and the kidnapping and enslavement of young women is not limited to Nigeria, but happening in our own backyard.   Sex trafficking is spreading in America.  Predators abound and vulnerable young women are finding themselves entrapped and sold in hotel rooms and hide-away brothels.

Many of us have been watching the news focused now on Nigeria and praying for the girls kidnapped by evil men.  Boko Haram means “western education is forbidden”.  This group targets Christian and Muslim girls in secular schools.  Members of the gang are always on the move, skulking like rats and vipers to hideouts deep in the forest.  According to rights groups, these men use some of the girls to perform chores and sexual services.  Others they sell as wives.

Who are the buyers?  What sort of man would purchase an underage girl as “a wife”, knowing full-well that she had been kidnapped from a school?  Such a man is a pedophile and rapist.   I define American men who buy sex trafficked children in the same way. A pity they are not arrested and tried for the crimes they commit.

Boko Haram’s version of Sharia law is keeping women at home, uneducated and raising children.  Not all cases involve kidnapping.  Bombings have been going on for some time, killing and maiming hundreds of children who dare go to school to learn to read and write. 

Such crimes hit at the heart of who we are as a people of conscience.   Nigerian or American, they are all our girls.  I’m thankful a team of U.S. experts has gone to help find them.  I’m thankful other nations are speaking out and helping as well.  

Many times in scripture, God turned evil men upon themselves.  This is my prayer:  that members of Boko Haram will fight among themselves, and the captives will escape with wings to fly them to nests of safety.  And may Boko Haram and all groups fashioned in their likeness cease to exist.