OPINION:
If children are the future, the terrorists who ravish and ravage the young in pursuit of empire portend a very bleak future in the benighted lands. Evil men continue to poison the young with the venom and bile that describe the distortions of their religion. The world stands aghast and incredulous at the violence visited upon the innocent, and at the reluctance to judge another’s faith that is the mark of American tolerance. The fear of reprisal restrains many Muslims from condemning acts they know are atrocities. There is no holy writ anywhere to excuse using children as fodder for cannon. No one’s God is that cynical.
The attention of the world has been focused on the terror in Paris, but Nigeria has suffered far more devastating destruction at the hands of the sick brotherhood of jihad. There the Muslim army called Boko Haram continues its war on little girls. The army that kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls last April swept through the villages of Baga and Doron Baga in northeast Nigeria on Jan. 7, killing 2,000 Nigerians, mostly women, children and the elderly, who were not swift enough to escape their pursuers. Amnesty International published before-and-after satellite photographs that documents the devastation of the area, including the torching of 3,700 buildings.
Worse, Boko Haram is said to have turned girls laden with explosives into human bombs to annihilate people and property. Human rights authorities suspect that some of the bomb carriers were the very girls who were taken hostage last year. Those sold as child brides are the lucky ones.
Terrorists who profess Islam eagerly train their guns on children when it suits them in pursuit of their unholy agenda. Taliban commandos killed 132 of them at a Pakistani school in December in retaliation against their parents who serve in the Pakistan military. Other children in Iraq have been beheaded for refusing to renounce their faith in the gentle Jesus Christ.
Children in the region are recruited as soldiers of jihad. The Islamic State distributed a video showing a child in Syria executing two Russians accused of spying. In the photograph, a pre-adolescent boy stands behind the kneeling men with a terrorist at his side, watching as the helpless captives are shot with a semi-automatic pistol. Flashpoint Partners, an organization that monitors jihadi groups, identified the child as a native of Kazakhstan who had come to Syria with his family to fight for the Islamic State.
Murder and mayhem don’t come naturally to children, and the radical Islamists aren’t willing to wait for them to grow up. The Islamic State is putting them through terror camps, where they learn such “skills” as firing an AK-47 and slicing heads off dolls. Some childhood.
And it’s not just Islamists with no regard for the next generation. A new survey by the U.N. Secretary-General lists 23 countries in which children fight in organized armed conflict, mostly in Africa and the Middle East. The rest of the world stands aside, as if helpless.
Perhaps not technically “genocide,” the use of children as expendable war materiel would nevertheless be a cause worthy of Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who calls herself “the genocide chick.” The “chick” has had almost nothing to say about Boko Haram and its barbaric kidnappers.
Tyranny flourishes when others keep their silence. Edmund Burke observed that “All it will take for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” Destroying the next generation to satisfy a bloodlust in the name of a perverted theology must be recognized as pure evil. Are we there yet?
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