Africa Why Nigerian Schoolchildren Keep Getting Kidnapped: A Brutal Business Model That Pays Criminal gangs are earning millions of dollars by taking schoolchildren hostage, sometimes cooperating with Boko Haram, further destabilizing countries in the region By Joe Parkinson and Gbenga Akingbule

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kidnapping-schoolchildren-in-nigeria-becomes-big-business-11616511947?mod=hp_lead_pos5

KADUNA, Nigeria—The kidnap for ransom business is booming across northern Nigeria, and schoolchildren are its hottest commodity.

Just before midnight on March 11 gunmen barged into a school around 300 yards from a military training college in Kaduna state and seized dozens of students from their dormitories. It took less than 12 hours for the captors to issue a now familiar demand, through a grainy video posted on Facebook.

“They want 500 million Naira,” said one of the terrified hostages from the Federal College of Forestry, sitting shirtless in a forest clearing, a sum equal to around $1 million. Masked men wielding Kalashnikovs paced among the 39 students—mostly young women—then began to hit them with bullwhips.

“Our life is in danger,” a woman screamed. “Just give them what they want.”

On March 13, the Nigerian army foiled an attempt to kidnap 300 more students at a boarding school less than 50 miles away. The following day, children were among a group of 11 people abducted from the town of Suleja, in Nigeria’s Niger state.

This was just one weekend in what has become a routine and brutal business in Africa’s most populous country. Since December, heavily armed criminal gangs have abducted and ransomed more than 800 schoolchildren, rocking Nigeria and drawing calls for urgent action from the U.S. government, the European Union and Pope Francis. Hundreds of school campuses have been closed across four states for fear of more attacks, leaving close to 15 million Nigerian children out of school—more than any other country in the world.

Garland-Wray Axis Exploits January 6 to Criminalize Dissent “We are facing a far more dangerous period than we did in Oklahoma City.” Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/far-more-dangerous-period-lloyd-billingsley/

“Under Joe Biden, by contrast, the FBI mounts massive raids against people not charged with any violent crime. The president’s lawyer Merrick Garland gives full support. This partisan sophist vows to protect the DOJ, not the constitutional rights of the people. If anybody thought Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are out to criminalize dissent it would be hard to blame them. As Garland says, we are facing a more dangerous period now.”

“I certainly agree that we are facing a more dangerous period than we did in Oklahoma City at that time,” said Biden Attorney General pick Merrick Garland in his Senate confirmation hearing. The reference was to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people.

Garland supervised the prosecution of the bomber, Timothy McVeigh. On the other hand, according to remarks Garland made before confirmation as U.S. Attorney General, that deadly bombing would not even qualify as an act of terrorism.

According to Garland, nationwide BLM-Antifa violence does not qualify as terrorism because it took place at night. So if Timothy McVeigh had detonated his bomb at midnight, he too would have escaped the domestic terrorist tag. So much for the great legal mind all attorneys general are supposed to display.

For Garland, job one will be prosecution of those involved in the “heinous attack” of January 6, in which no bombs were detonated and the only people with guns were the police. One cop gunned down Air Force veteran and Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, but Garland appears unconcerned about that police shooting.

Boulder Shooter is ISIS Sympathizer, Leftists Hardest Hit Another opportunity to shore up their sagging “white terror threat” narrative is lost. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/boulder-shooter-isis-sympathizer-leftists-hardest-robert-spencer/

A man murdered ten people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket Monday. No details were immediately released about the shooter, but Leftist “journalists,” working from a photo of the shooter, seized upon the shooting to shore up their sagging narrative of “white supremacist terrorism.” There was just one problem: the massacre was actually, after a four-year hiatus, a new incidence of Islamic jihad on American soil.

Even after the shooter’s name was revealed as Ahmad Al Issa (which is how he himself wrote it on his Facebook and Twitter accounts), establishment media reports continued to give his name as  “Alissa,” which of course is a common first name for women in the U.S., and thus gives the impression that he is an American non-Muslim. Were “journalists” trying to obscure the fact that he is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer? Of course they were.

And that was after they had already decided that he was one of those “right-wing extremists” who are, according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the “most lethal and persistent” threat the U.S. faces today. Julie DiCaro, a senior writer and editor at Deadspin, tweeted: “Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.” As of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, DiCaro has not taken down the tweet, as some media hacks are still, like a captain going down with his sinking ship, insisting that Al Issa is white. Prominent race baiter Tariq Nasheed tweeted: “White supremacists are trying their hardest to deflect from the fact the Boulder suspect is WHITE. Syrians in America are legally, politically & socially WHITE. Their white status is well documented in court cases Terms like ‘muslim’, ‘Arab’, ‘islamic’ doesn’t change whiteness.”

Of course Al Issa really is white, as he is an Arab Muslim migrant from Syria, and Arabs have been considered “white” ever since they began arriving in this country. Nasheed’s tweet, however, still pointed up the Left’s inconsistency and hypocrisy: up until this shooting, Leftists considered Arab Muslims to be “brown,” after the fashion of Linda Sarsour, who memorably identified as white until she put on a hijab and miraculously became a “person of color.” If the Boulder shooter had been a white non-Muslim American and his victims had been white Arab Muslims, Tariq Nasheed would be railing against the persecution of “brown” people in the United States.

The Climate Headline The Legacy Media Wouldn’t Dare Write

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/24/the-climate-headline-the-legacy-media-wouldnt-dare-write/

Barack Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science has shattered the popular global warming narrative. If he had worked in the Trump administration, he’d be labeled a “denier” and hounded like a suspected witch in 17th century Massachusetts. But because he was an Obama appointee, the press simply ignores him. 

Steve Koonin, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology- and CalTech-educated physicist, said last week that “discussions of existential threat, climate crisis, climate disaster are really at odds with what the official science says in reports that are issued by the U.N. and the U.S. government.” Shouldn’t the press have picked up on this?

Koonin, in an interview on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow, busted the tale that humans are wrecking the planet and endangering themselves through their fossil-fuel burning habits.

“This is not Steve talking, this is what’s in those reports, often explicitly but sometimes a little but obscured, and you’ve got to read closely to find it.”

Koonin said there has been a single degree of warming over the last century, caused partly by man, partly by nature. He sees nothing menacing about it. He also admitted that science has a “very poor understanding” of natural long-term climate cycles, something the global warming alarmists are unwilling to acknowledge.

The Q Lie: The Power-Grab After January 6th Was the Real Insurrection. Thomas J. Farnan

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/the-q-lie-the-power-grab-response-after-january-6th-was-the-real-insurrection/

“The Q Lie is an excuse for politicians to grab power from the people. It is, to borrow an expression, a form of insurrection.”

Despite parts of the fencing being removed this weekend, the nation’s capital is still protected by armed troops and razor wire because government officials claim to fear invasion by Trump-supporting QAnon followers.

Seriously.

The concern is they will drive to D.C., get hotel rooms, grab their free breakfast, then strike at dawn with fire extinguishers or anything that counts under the present hysteria as an armament; i.e., shoes, purses or bear spray.

The attack was expected on March 4 but never materialized. Federal law enforcement recalibrated, shifting the anticipated coup de main to March 20. That never happened either.

Notably, the federal government failed to similarly protect the capital in 1814, when the Brits burned down the White House, and in 1861, when the Army of Northern Virginia encamped at what is now a shopping mall in Manassas, Virginia.

C’mon, man!

Immediately after the events of January 6, The National Pulse called out The Insurrection Lie, specifically questioning the political narrative then being fabricated around Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick’s unfortunate death.

Our reporting would eventually push the New York Times to back down from its fake news claim that Office Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by Trump supporters using a fire extinguisher.

It is now obvious that the continued military occupation of Washington D.C. under a phony, Q-pretext is a purposeful overreaction to silence objections over the use of mass mail-in ballots to swing the 2020 election.

In support of our election skepticism, we cite Time Magazine’s comprehensive report, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS Serial excerpt No. 5: Why it won’t do to admit this is a religion and “own” it – The Elect harbor a religion that harms black people in countless ways.John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-598

“To be Elect is to insist that unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity, which is false.”

One response to a book like this might be to own that Electism is a religion. You might consider it a better one than, say, believing that God’s son died for our sins and was reborn, waiting to envelope you in his eternal grace if you believe in him. This new religion is about countering racism. Who could be against that?

But we must ask whether the Elect approach actually shows signs of making any difference in the lives of black people, other than making educated white people infantilize them. While purportedly “dismantling racist structures,” the Elect religion is actually harming the people living in those structures. It is a terrifyingly damaging business.

ELECT IDEOLOGY HURTS BLACK PEOPLE

The Bigotry Against Black Boys

Black boys get suspended and expelled from schools more than other kids. According to Elect ideology this must be because they are discriminated against.

Specifically, we are told to think that the reason these boys get disciplined more than other kids is because teachers hold biases against them. The white kid acting up is a scamp; the black kid acting up is a thug. There are scholar-activists who have founded whole careers on bringing this wisdom to America’s educators and beyond. In 2014, a “Dear Colleague” letter went out from the U.S. Department of Education concurring that black boys are disciplined disproportionately because of racism. In 2019, the United States Commission on Civil Rights released a briefing report making the same case titled “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities.”

Noble notions from noble entities. But the simple fact is this. Black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids. Period.

The hibernation of democracy A year of lockdown has had dire consequences for liberty and public life. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/23/the-hibernation-of-democracy/

“Democracy was forced into hibernation – an utterly unprecedented state of affairs. Our nation and our lives became the property not of an engaged, free public discussion, but of an expert class of scientists and public-health officials to whom every major decision was entrusted. Parliament temporarily suspended itself. Even when it returned it failed to subject the suspension of public life to any real, meaningful scrutiny. Every other issue other than Covid-19 was forced out of the public realm. Even discussing the economic and social consequences of lockdown was shamed into silence. ‘Do you care more for the economy than for your own grandmother?!’ And we the people were transformed from democratic citizens into recipients of instruction; from free public actors into potential spreaders of disease to be controlled and punished; from voters into mere observers of the spectacle of crisis, our role nothing more than to watch the depressing daily press conferences and heed their warning that leaving our houses would cause death and destruction.”

For a year we have been living through one of the most extraordinary events of modern times: the hibernation of democracy. The suspension of public life. The adjournment of politics itself. This has been the most dire consequence of lockdown. We have witnessed the outsourcing of decision-making to non-political actors, the withering away of political opposition and political debate, and the decommissioning of the public itself. Stay at home, watch the news for Covid updates, and don’t breathe on, far less talk to, another human soul. That has been the instruction to the demos for the past year. The impact of all of this on the spirit and practice of democracy is likely to be long-lasting.

Today is the first anniversary of the imposition of lockdown in the UK. It was a year ago today that Boris Johnson, having initially bristled at the idea of enforcing a China- or Italy-style shutdown of society, solemnly addressed the nation and said: ‘Stay at home.’ It would last three or four weeks, we were told. It was just about ‘flattening the curve’ and preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed. We’d be out of it soon and cracking on with life relatively normally. How naive we were to believe that. Today, on this unhappy birthday, we’re in lockdown again – our third – and public-health experts are telling us that some social restrictions could last for years. A three-week shutdown has become a neverending nightmare.

WHEN HARRY MET ARTHUR

In an era when bipartisanship seems impossible, and votes on people, policies and bills are riven with harsh rhetoric and monolithic and intractable behavior by the Democrat legislators, I returned to a book which details the partnership of a Democrat President with a staunch conservative Republican Senator.  rsk

Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World by Lawrence J. Haas

With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time to craft a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom. These two men transformed America from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape; and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined.

Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how, through the close collaboration of Truman and Vandenberg, the United States created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe’s economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.

Columbia University’s Ultra-Woke Idea: Segregated Graduation Ceremonies By Tristan Yang

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/columbia-universitys-ultra-woke-idea-segregated-graduation-ceremonies/

My university’s decision shows how an obsession with diversity has corrupted modern academia.

Last week, Columbia University, where I am currently a junior, made national headlines over commencement ceremonies demarcated by race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Such multicultural ceremonies have a history at many schools, but Columbia’s was apparently the one to receive nationwide media attention. Though discussion and discourse are always important, most of the resulting social-media frenzy focused on the wrong ideas. It is not about getting into the weeds and arguing over which historically marginalized group deserves to be recognized or whether these ceremonies are optional. The very creation and existence of such events is fundamentally problematic right out of the gate.

To segregate students by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status is inherently harmful to the fabric of college communities and harms the social progress these events ostensibly intend to achieve. The embrace of resegregation in this scenario to combat “inequality” centers on one uncontrollable characteristic of an individual and reduces a person’s identity to superficial stereotypes, neglecting his or her nuanced existence. It also bears more than a passing, uncomfortable resemblance to the racism of decades past. People are multifaceted with their own experiences, talents, interests, and strengths. Failure to recognize that is not only ignorant, but also dehumanizing.

A common rejoinder to criticisms of these ceremonies is that those who want to end them do not care about the achievements of the students the ceremonies celebrate. This is not only untrue, but also condescendingly assumes that Black, Asian, “Latinx,” First-Generation/Low-Income, “Lavender” (LGBTQIA+), and Native-American students can only have their accomplishments celebrated through the uplifting of an institution that cannot see past their mere identities. It also assumes that America is so racially bankrupt that those in these groups must depend on an institution to be recognized as human. In this way, the university’s focus on identity reinforces campus division, as students depend more on institutional labeling to define who they are. The result is the undermining of campus unity to an almost irreparable point.

Columbia likely started these ceremonies in good faith. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Diversity and multiculturalism can be worthwhile aims. However, they cannot be the sole focus of all university affairs. Yet that is increasingly exactly the case, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to identify what else one might learn at these expensive elite institutions. The imposition of diversity as the reigning prerequisite to any action has soiled good intent, and now facilitates the weaponization of multiculturalism to conduct witch hunts on conservatives, quash free speech, and command political correctness in the classroom. As a result, identity politics now runs rampant, such that no objective debate can occur because of overwhelming affectual censorship. Objectivity is outlawed, and everyone is made to believe he must have an emotional investment in a discussion. Everything is now personal to those in any conversation.

Suspect in Boulder Mass Shooting Identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa: ‘Very Anti-Social’ Jack Phillips

https://www.theepochtimes.com/suspect-in-boulder-mass-shooting-identified-as-ah

Police have identified 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa as the suspect in the Boulder, Colorado, shooting that left at least 10 people dead, including a police officer, on Monday.

Boulder Police Chief Maris Harold on Tuesday identified the alleged shooter and the 10 victims, who range in age from 20 to 65.

The victims include Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowika, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65. Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley, 51, was also shot and killed while responding to the incident.

“I want to say to the community, I am so sorry this incident happened,” Harold said, adding, “We are going to do everything in our power to make sure this suspect has a thorough trial and we do a thorough investigation.”

Officials said that Alissa, 21, was shot during an exchange with officers at the King Soopers on Monday afternoon, leaving the suspect injured.

“The man who gunned them down will be held fully responsible. We don’t have the answer for that yet,” said Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty during the news conference.

When asked about the weapon the suspect allegedly used, officials refused to comment.

Alissa, whose last name is also spelled as Alyssa or Al-Issa, is slated to be charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, officials said, adding that he’ll be transferred to the Boulder County jail to await court proceedings.

Police officers and an ambulance are seen at the scene where an active shooter was reported at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., on March 22, 2021. (Cecil Disharoon/via Reuters)

Ali Aliwi Alissa, the suspect’s 34-year-old brother, told The Daily Beast that his brother was mentally ill, disturbed, and paranoid.

The suspect is “very anti-social” and paranoid, his brother told the news outlet, noting that he would often remark that he was “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”

“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Alissa said.