[THENATIONONLINENG.NET] So, is Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... alive and well? Not quite.
For one, the frontal attacks on big towns and cities, with the anarchists thumping their noses against Nigeria's much-vaunted federal might has fizzled out. So has the lunatic boasts of Abubakar Shekau or his corresponding ghosts, as he bobbed up from yes-he's-dead-no-he's-not-dead sickening tales from the Goodluck Jonathan ... 14th President of Nigeria. He was Governor of Bayelsa State from 9 December 2005 to 28 May 2007, and was sworn in as Vice President on 29 May 2007. Jonathan is a member of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). He is a lover of nifty hats, which makes him easily recognizable unless someone else in the room is wearing a neat chapeau.Other than that he's pretty useless as the Boko Haram debacle shows.. presidency, and its army high command.
But the threat seems to have retreated to the pristine hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, of Boko Haram's battle-entry strategy, before it was allowed to festered by an apologetic and hesitating presidency. That a DPO reportedly lost his life in the Adawama attack echos those dire beginnings, when Boko Haram on Okada would attack police posts, kill luckless coppers in there and set free detainees in the facilities' cells.
Yet, between January 2015 and January 2016, Boko Haram has been so heavily degraded that talks about mass resettlement of the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) don't sound so fantastic and far-fetched again.
If Hardball were even to be more date-dramatic, he would insist that in seven months, a sure-footed and determined government has all but checkmated a seven-year insurgency, that looked like raging undeterred for no less than another seven years, at the very least!
But if the media remains sceptical at President Buhari's claim that the war against Boko Haram had been substantially won, it is because humans are basically pain-avoiding; a traumatised people, even more so. That would explain the seeming waywardness and obduracy of the Biblical Israelites who, after being saved from Egyptian tyranny, en route to the promised land, would forget the last celestial munificence, no matter how grand, and scream at Jehovah to return them to Egypt, rather kill them all in the desert between Egypt and Canaan.
Of course, the 15 killed in the latest Adamawa attack are humans with flesh and blood, families and loved ones. They are not just mere stats to be compared and discounted. That means the war won't be fully won, until every inch of Nigerian territory is safe from Boko Haram's plague.
Still, Nigerians cannot afford to be as obdurate and stiff-necked as the Israelites of old. We should applaud the government to more success, when it is doing well, just as we reserve the right to excoriate it, when it falters.
On Boko Haram, the Buhari Presidency has done well. But it should not rest until those blood-sucking criminals are totally sacked from our land.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/27/2016 00:00 ||
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h/t Instapundit
If you believe Israel's relentless critics in the media and now in the State Department, Israeli democracy is on death's door.
The irony is, this accusation comes in response to Israel's efforts to actually preserve and strengthen democracy from the forces that seek to weaken it.
The fuss is about Israel's proposed law requiring transparency from political organizations in our country funded by foreign governments.
...Here are the facts about the proposed law:
It doesn't prohibit any activity whatsoever. Even entities funded entirely by foreign governments will still be free to do and say whatever they want in Israel.
But -- and this is crucial -- the groups that claim to be nongovernmental but are actually instruments of foreign governments will be acknowledged as such.
The bill does one thing and one thing only: When more than half of an entity's funding comes from foreign governments, it must disclose that fact and the amount of funding from those governments. That's it.
It's similar to several statutes in the United States. Both the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and more recent laws adopted by Congress impose special disclosure requirements on individuals and organizations funded by foreign governments. There's a simple reason for such requirements. Without them, organizations held out as NGOs -- that is supposed to mean nongovernmental organizations -- operate as stealth diplomats funded by foreign governments without saying so.
This lets them do what diplomats do -- press other countries for actions and policies they favor -- without any of the consequences, trade-offs and publicity that proper diplomacy entails. In the intelligence world, entities that do these things are called "agents of influence."Every country tries to identify such groups.
That's the purpose of the extensive US regulation for such entities, starting with FARA enacted back in 1938, and continuing with an array of other laws and regulations put in place since then.
About $66 million flows into these groups from European governments. The European Union itself, Norway and Germany are the largest such donors.
Additionally, Israel's proposed law is, in fact, milder than existing US law in important ways:
In the United States, these are criminal statutes -- punishable by up to five years in jail. Israel's law has no criminal component.
US law determines who are "agents" of foreign "principals" using a complicated and vague legal test that leaves room for uncertainty, further threatening to chill political speech. Israel's test is simple: If a majority of an entity's money comes from foreign governments, they're covered. If not, they're not.
#5
^Who would be getting the geld?
The joooos are the only ones that could afford the treatment, thus more joooooos, thus ask the UN to ban oppressively good medicine.
[Ynet] Analysis: A massacre by chemical weapons in Syria in 2013 led to Russia and the US forcing Assad to give up on his arsenal of non-conventional weapons. But recent reports suggest that the regime is using Sarin gas against the opposition -- and that the rebels themselves are using chemical weapons as well.
New reports emerging from the ground in Syria suggest that despite Assad's assertions in 2013 that he had disposed of his chemical weapons arsenal, his regime continues to fight in the civil war using non-conventional means.
The war, which will enter its sixth year in two months' time, has no end in sight. The number of victims of the conflict -- killed, injured, traumatized, etc -- continues to rapidly increase and intensive efforts to bring the two sides to the negotiating table have yet to bear real fruit.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Goodluck Jonathan
