Michelle Obama’s Betrayal of African Girls

We must bring back “#BringBackOurGirls”

On April 14, 2014, the terrorist organization Boko Haram brutally kidnapped 276 Christian schoolgirls from the Nigerian village of Chibok.

News of this atrocity spread around the world, and the hashtag “#BringBackOurGirls” quickly appeared on Twitter in response. Righteous outrage touched the hearts of decent people across the globe, from ordinary social media users to celebrities.

Arguably the most influential celebrity on the planet at the time, Michelle Obama, then joined the campaign. Almost precisely 11 years ago, on May 7, 2014, the First Lady tweeted out a professionally taken picture of herself holding a piece of paper bearing the hand-written slogan. “Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families,” she wrote. “It’s time to #BringBackOurGirls. —mo [sic]”

Even though the girls — just like the Israeli hostages — had been violently dragged away from their village school by heavily armed men, and were hardly “missing,” the gesture made a difference.

But then something happened. Just what cannot be known for sure, but, when Nigerian schoolgirl Leah Sharibu was kidnapped by the same terrorists not four years later — and then made “a slave for life” for refusing to convert to Islam — Mrs. Obama said nothing. She mentioned the Chibok girls again, at a World Bank event in 2016, but that seems to have been the end of her interest in the fate of victimized African women.

Leah, now almost 22, was a black Christian teenage girl, just like the girls from Chibok. She was kidnapped, enslaved, and raped by precisely the same murderers. But a woman who has promoted herself as the Western world’s chief advocate for the dignity of black women is silent about her.

Could it be that only later did she fully understand that the 2014 abductions were an act of jihad in the name of Islam — making the subject “politically incorrect”? Did Louis Farrakhan, an old and secret friend of her husband — and long-time ally and defender of Nigeria’s Islamic political elements — tell her to shut up?

One can speculate endlessly, but the fact remains that Michelle Obama’s interest in the Chibok girls’ abduction rallied some public interest in their agony. Leah’s case, on the other hand, has received only a fraction of the mainstream media coverage, let alone social media fervor.

Whatever the reason, Michelle Obama — now a woman with a podcast — abandoned her concern for (Islamic) violence against women in Africa. While she fills much of her podcasting time complaining about how American taxpayers only had to cover some and not all of her luxury White House expenses, Nigerian girls are raped and kidnapped regularly.

This is why we formed the African Jewish Alliance. To, at least, if nothing else, bring “#BringBackOurGirls” back again.