Don't ignore Boko Haram's atrocities

Nous sommes tous Charlie.

But are we also the victims of Boko Haram?

Last week, the Nigerian Islamist group reportedly killed hundreds, possibly thousands of people. And the details are predictably gruesome. The terrorists rode through towns and villages, shooting and throwing grenades as they went. According to one report, they used a little girl as a suicide bomber. They later attacked an army base in neighboring Cameroon.

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Boko Haram now controls a significant slice of northeast Nigeria. They are already well known for their barbarism. So why did this astonishing report receive so little attention?

The short and obvious answer is that it occurred at the same time as the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo that gripped the world's attention.

Why the disparity, when the Charlie Hebdo attack killed "just" 19 people?

Some of the reasons were justified, but some were definitely not.

The justified reason is that the Charlie Hebdo attack was symbolic in a way that Boko Haram's attack was not. Attacking cartoonists who mocked Islam highlighted the jihadi hatred for the very foundations of enlightened civilization. Attacking a kosher supermarket underscored jihadism's relentless anti-semitism. In this sense, it was legitimate that the Charlie Hebdo attack captured our attention in a unique way, despite its relatively low body count. Statistics are not everything, and symbols do matter.

But there are also unjustified reasons, and we know them well: the victims of Boko Haram are black, poor, foreign, mostly Muslim. They don't even have the good taste to sit on a lot of oil or in a nexus of Western interests. And, at least in terms of media attention, it is undeniable that lives like these are deemed less worthy than white Western lives. When the archbishop of Jos, in central Nigeria, lambasted the West for ignoring the situation, he was right.

If we are going to stand in solidarity with victims of terrorism, we should stand in solidarity with all victims of terrorism, whether they are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or of no faith. And the vast majority of them are precisely outside the rich West, and mostly don't register in the headlines.

Although Al Qaeda claims Boko Haram as an affiliate, the insurgency is in many ways an idiosyncratic phenomenon, largely linked to poverty and ethnic strife in Nigeria. But it doesn't mean it's not a destructive force. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do whatever we can to call more attention to it, and help the feckless Nigerian government achieve the level of governance that will allow it to bring law and order to its citizens.