Child Brides in Africa Are Advertised on Facebook and Sold to Old Men

                              Things you can find on Facebook: a child bride.

Things feminism isn't concerned with.

In one Nigerian community, illiterate fathers have learned from their sons that Facebook is a good way to let buyers know their daughters are for sale.

OBANLIKU, Nigeria—Monica, 16, is one of two sisters sold as wives to men who found their photographs on their father's Facebook page and contacted him. She and her 14-year-old younger sister never wanted to get married until they completed their secondary education in Ogbakoko, a small village in Obanliku Local Government Area in Nigeria’s south-central Cross River state. But the teenage sisters fell victims to a culture which subjects little girls, some as young as 10, to de facto slavery through a tradition called “money marriage.”

The sisters belong to the Becheve community, a large tribe of 17 villages in Obanliku where there is a long tradition in which young girls—often referred to as “money women” or “money wives”—are sold in exchange for food or livestock or cash, or to settle debts.

U.S. Approved Thousands of Requests to Bring in Child Brides

Like hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls from the Becheve clan who are victims of money marriages, Monica and her sister were sold without their consent. Their father wanted to clear the debt he owed to a distant relative. The two sisters got married a month apart to men whom they did not know at all and who were old enough to be their grandfathers.

Facebook censors Conservatives while this goes on:

Reports of Facebook being used as a tool to facilitate child marriage aren’t unique to Nigeria. Last November, the social media platform came under fire after posts discussing the sale of a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan. The victim was married in the process after her father, in exchange for his daughter, received 530 cows, three Land Cruiser V8 cars and $10,000. The teenager reportedly was bid on by five men, including senior officials in the South Sudanese government.

The Failure of African Socialism

Believe it or not, in 2005 in the NY Times we read this:

BINGA, ZIMBABWE - The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.

"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: "I want the white man's government to come back. Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today."

His wife, Mugombo Mudenda, remembered that as a younger woman she used to eat meat, drink tea, use sugar and buy soap. But now she cannot even afford corn gruel. "I miss the days of white rule," she said.

Nearly every peasant I've spoken to in Zimbabwe echoed those thoughts, although it's also clear that some still hail President Robert Mugabe as a liberator. This is a difficult place to gauge the mood in, because foreign reporters are barred from Zimbabwe and promised a prison sentence of up to two years if caught. I sneaked in at Victoria Falls and traveled around the country pretending to be a tourist.

The human consequences of the economic collapse are heartbreaking. I visited a hospital and a clinic that lacked both medicines and doctors. Children die routinely for want of malaria medication that costs just a few dollars.

" ... the attention being paid to the killing of a lion somewhere in Africa seems outrageously inordinate."

When Planned Parenthood ends the life of not one, but millions,  of humans the same people outraged by a dead lion go mum.

Bud Norman:

The dentist apparently thought he was shooting an arrow into some anonymous lion rather than a celebrity lion, so far as we can gather from the voluminous news coverage, and since we have to admit even at the risk of of being accused of species-ism or some other damning ism that all lions look alike to us we are sympathetic to his defense. ... We’re also skeptical of the widespread notion that celebrity lives are somehow of greater value than others, whether leonine or human, so that is also a mitigating factor in our decision not to threaten that Minnesota dentist’s life.

Nor can we understand why the public is more outraged about the life of a even a celebrity lion than about the lives of the zebras and gazelles and maybe even the human beings that the lion would have eventually taken had he survived that Minnesota dentist’s safari. There’s an old Jerry Seinfeld comedy routine about how people always root for whatever animal is starring in a nature documentary, with people cheering on the hawk as he swoops down on a field mice to provide food for the adorable baby hawks back in his nest but hoping for the field mice to outrun those deadly talons and get back to his own adorable children when the show is about field mice, and we think some gruesome footage of even a celebrity lion chowing down on a zebra that had been given a top-billed role might even make that Minnesota dentist seem heroic. It’s a rough world of kill or be killed out there, and we’re genuinely sorry about that, too, but the attention being paid to the killing of a lion somewhere in Africa seems outrageously inordinate.

There’s a late night comedian out there who reportedly teared up as he tried to make mean jokes about that Minnesota dentist, even though he’s never been so choked up about the Christians being routinely beheaded by the Islamic State, and some of our Facebook friends posted that the lion’s death makes them ashamed to be human, even though they’ve previously been unashamed by the far more common slaughter of their fellow human beings in the daily crime reports, and a liberal but otherwise delightful woman we ran into at a ballgame Wednesday night was saying that she hopes all of the beasts of Africa slaughter all the African people, even though at the ballgame the night before she was defending the “Black Lives Matter” movement that shouts down anyone who dares say that all lives matter, and it all seems rather silly. We are genuinely sorry that lion was killed, but at the moment we’re more worried about the lives that will be lost when Iran gets a nuclear bomb due to soft-hearted and even more soft-headed western sensibilities, and the black lives that will be lost when the police go into full retreat for fear of well-intentioned reprisals, and the aborted lives whose parts are being sold for scrap on the open market by an organization that enjoys millions of taxpayers’ dollars and the support of all the right people ...

Nestle slashes 15% of African workforce

Nestle, the Swiss-based food and beverage giant is cutting it's African footprint.  It overestimated the continent's potential.

"We thought this would be the next Asia, but we have realized the middle class here in the region is extremely small and it is not really growing," Nestle's Cornel Krummenacher told the FT in an interview.

Things that make you go hmmm.  Africa is rich in natural resources.

 

Those Old, Effective, and Competent Racists

The modern West is beyond parody. This applies to the West and its third world vassals. The West cannot identify proper problems nor prioritize well. The problems it does identify, it creates magical prime movers and explanations rather than deal with reality. An odd one is blaming the 21st century socioeconomic failures of American blacks on the legacy of slavery while conveniently forgetting blacks were doing far better in 1960 a full 50 years closer to the institution of slavery's existence. Even when the West shines, the problems becomes who is doing the great deeds. It's usually those damned straight white men. Remember #BringBackOurGirls and the unstoppable Boko Haram? The men beating them back are old straight white men from South Africa.

'No room' for gays in Kenya, says deputy president

William Ruto made the remarks at a church service on Sunday, the day U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks. The United States has been at the forefront of calls for gay rights in Africa and criticizes anti-gay laws on the continent.

 

Does gay trump black, or vice versa?  Can white Liberals set authentic black people right or do they have to check their privilege?   It's so hard to keep track of the pecking order in the Liberal universe.  

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

Recalling the words of Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain.

The difference between then and now?  Say what you will about him, Chamberlain loved his country.

As the Saudis and Egyptians saddle up to invade Yemen and confront Iran,  we have to ask if this is what "Smart Diplomacy" is all about. 

Glenn Reynolds comments:  Before you can dub it [Obama's foreign policy] a failure, you have to know what Obama is trying to accomplish.

It's "Zombie Preparedness Month" in Kansas

“If you’re prepared for zombies, you’re prepared for anything” is the theme behind the zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign.

We discovered this interesting fact while reading Bud Norman's great blog.  He also notes that with the introduction of the Ebola virus into the US:

The extraordinary amount of press coverage devoted to the disease has already revealed several instances where themost up-to-date protocols for dealing with the disease with have not been followed, including an unpleasant account theinfected patient’s vomit being cleaned off a sidewalk by power hoses that no doubt sent dangerous bacteria flying off into the atmosphere, and one shudders to think what mistakes might come next. So far as we can tell the government decided not restrict flights from infected countries partly because that had been a Bush administration idea, and partly because it was thought that discriminating on the basis of a deadly disease might offend African sensibilities. Such pointless political considerations are likely to override medical necessity again in the coming days, if the government’s recent history of border security and presidential security are any guide, it does not inspire confidence.

Also that it's all the fault of white people out to kill black people.  Black Leader "Calypso" Louis Farrakhan is telling Obama voters that this nefarious plot was .. well, you can read it here:

The situation has already prompted the survivalists to take precautions beyond their usual paranoid preparedness, and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan is predictably blaming it all on a white supremacist conspiracy to kill black people which is currently being carried out by the first black president, although it was apparently launched at some nonexistent point in history when Henry Kissinger was serving as Secretary of State to President George H.W. Bush, but we’re remaining relatively calm. We’re counting on those reportedly low transmissions rates, though, and not the government. There have been strange accounts of Ebola victims awakening from the dead, and we note proudly that this is  “Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Month” here in Kansas, but otherwise the government doesn't seem ready for the coming challenges.

The Keystone Cops are running America, or could it be "Evil Clowns?"

Obama's White House Guest List

Bud Norman comments about the selective outrage of the Left. Hot and bothered about the Israelis defedning their homes against a rain of rockets aimed at their women and children, a ho-hum pass for the Arabs and Islamist thugs offing Christians and each other in far greater numbers. In fact you will have to go to specifically Christian sources to find more than the occasional brief mentions of the "ethnic cleasing" of Christians in the Middle East and Africa. We get the sneaking suspiction that Liberal/Left America really approves of it.

Turning to Obama's White House

The guest list at that fancy White House gathering of African leaders is a similarly curious example of selective outrage. Among those getting the red carpet treatment and presidential promises of massive wealth redistribution are Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbasago, fresh from a killing spree that left all of his prominent political opponents dead, and Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who advocates a policy of beheading homosexuals, along with the usual assortment of seedy Afro-Marxist thugs who have made such a mess of post-colonial Africa. These elegantly embossed invitations to the White House were handed out by the same administration that routinely derides its domestic political opponents as extremists bent on dirty air and dirty water, and who are implored in faux-hip-hop fashion to “Just stop hatin’,” and it strikes us as odd. Even the most stubborn American adherents of the millennia-old notions about same sex-same marriage draw the line well short of beheading homosexuals, and thus far even the kookiest musket-weilding and tricorner-hat-wearing “tea party” types haven’t offed anybody.

Connecting the dots: Boko Haram, Islam, Christianity, Libya, Slavery, Rape, "Kinetic Action"

Richard Fernandez connects the dots and fleshes out the story that the American media would rather not tell.  It doesn't fit the narrative.

One of the little known facts about the kidnapping of schoolgirls by the Boko Haram in Nigeria is that most of the victims are Christians. “

It's an inconvenient fact that this Islmaist group has already sold some of the girls into sex slavery or as ‘brides’ for just £8, as approved in the Koran.

But then news coverage of the schoolgirl’s abduction has for the most part portrayed the Boko Haram without context. To add any sort of context to the accounts of abductions, instructions from Allah, people sold in markets is to raise disturbing questions about things we are taught do not exist. Religious war? Slavery — in Africa? And where on earth do the Boko Haram get their guns and training?

WE have been taught by the American media that these are just lies spread by those radical terrorists in the Tea Party. We have Harry Reid's word on it: "all lies."

Such context as we get are instructions not to seek context lest they inflame us. The Toronto Star has an article arguing that “Boko Haram does not represent Islam,” as if the crime were against Islam with a world-religion itself as victim. “The group responsible for the kidnapping rampage in Nigeria has hijacked a whole faith, steering the public discourse on Islam.” But that raises even more questions. Such as: what group could possibly hijack a religion of hundreds of millions? Al-Qaeda, you say? But isn’t al-Qaeda’s dead?

It appears that the weapons that this faction of Islam uses comes from Libya, the country we "liberated" via "Kinetic Action." Good job, Barry.

Read the whole thing.

One man was flapping his hands in fraud while the other was flapping his gums in fraud.

While Obama was flapping his gums ...

A fake sign language interpreter took to the stage during a mass memorial for anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, gesticulating gibberish before a global audience of millions and outraging deaf people across the world.

DeafSA, South Africa's leading deaf association, condemned the presence of the unknown man at the memorial, which was attended by President Jacob Zuma and scores of world leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama.

While dignitaries were addressing the crowd in the 95,000-seat Soccer City stadium, the young, suited man with an official security pass round his neck produced a series of hand signals that experts said meant absolutely nothing.

Besides the bizarre twist to an event that also saw Zuma booed and jeered, the man's presence on the stage within yards of Obama and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff raised awkward security questions.

Somehow it's fitting.

Nelson Mandela

The Diplomad is a retired Foreign Service officer who worked all over the world and had opportunities to meet the movers and shakers who made their countries what they are.  Here is his take on Nelson Mandela and the country he left behind.

Nelson Mandela has died, and with him, one hopes, so have a lot of illusions and delusions of both opponents and supporters. I was always conflicted about Mandela, admiring his courage but highly doubtful about his politics and of what he and the ANC would bring to South Africa. I never met him, but did meet several ANC representatives at the UN and elsewhere, and, to say the obvious, had serious problems with their anti-USA and pro-USSR proclivities. While I worked at the UN, Mandela was the cause célèbre of all right thinking people and, naturally, of UN diplomats. The UN passed countless resolutions condemning apartheid, demanding freedom for Mandela, and, of course, condemning the Reagan administration's approach to dealing with South Africa.

I took part in informal "off the record" meetings with ANC reps while in Geneva and Vienna. As mentioned before, I worked for Maureen Reagan while she was the US representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Despite being the President's daughter, she did not support the administration's stance on dealing with South Africa, including not meeting the ANC. She insisted on talking to them to the horror of the State Department. I did my duty and warned Ms. Reagan that it was not US policy to meet the ANC, but, if she insisted, well, I would be there, too. The meetings proved inconsequential, but showed the intense hostility of the ANC towards the USA, capitalism, and Western democracy. Some of the ANC had a very hard pro-Soviet, pro-Castro line, and there was no reasoning with them. These meetings, frankly, shaped my view of Mandela, making me suspicious of him and what he would bring to South Africa were he freed and in power at the head of the ANC.

As it turns out, I was right and wrong. The ANC was a lost cause; they did not believe in democracy, and had a large element of thuggery in their ranks. Many were terrorists who had received training in Libya, and were out for revenge and blood. Mandela, however, was more complicated than I had thought. He had had his violent phase, but only after trying peaceful opposition to apartheid. Both in and after coming out of prison, he proved an extremely intelligent negotiator and compromiser, reaching understandings with Botha and De Klerk, and turning down the volume of the anti-white message of the ANC. He seemed to have an understanding that whites and other non-blacks were essential for a peaceful and prosperous South Africa. He also, surprise, did not go full Mugabe. He won election--although the vote counting was suspicious--served his term, trying to unite blacks, whites, Asians, and others into accepting the new post-apartheid South Africa. He did not try to drive the whites out, and did not go around confiscating farms and businesses. He did not encourage revenge against whites and sought a reconciliation of the races. A practical politician, he turned a blind eye to the rampant corruption among the ANC, finding it better to let the party members expend their revolutionary fervor making money. At the end of his term, he stepped down. Yes, he stepped down. That is an amazing thing in Africa; he stepped down on completing his term of office. It does not happen much on that continent. He, however, never got over his deep mistrust of the USA, and despite his credentials as a victim of human rights abuse, refused to criticize Qaddafy, never gave up his fervent admiration for Castro--who, ironically, runs a racist regime in Cuba--and remained very anti-Israel.

Was he a great man? I think the answer is yes. He had great flaws, but great courage, drive, and commitment to his cause. He showed that a determined person can make a difference. He also showed that an African president can play by the rules and try to be president for all the people of his country. For that he deserves kudos and respect. He, nevertheless, did not establish a viable democratic political system in South Africa, and proved unable to stop the escalating criminal violence that has turned Johannesburg into one of the world's rape and murder capitals. His successors have proven notably less "great" than Mandela, and ANC corruption has gone into the stratosphere--including by Mandela's gangster ex-wife, Winnie. The white and other middle class flight he wanted to avoid proceeded and has grown. I think the jury remains out on whether South Africa can avoid the fate of Zimbabwe in the medium to long run. If I had to place a bet it would be that South Africa will not avoid that fate. Mandela's time in office, unfortunately, likely will prove a brief glorious moment of "what could have been but was not."

Mandela ceremony has fake sign language interpreter

The unidentified man seen around the world on television next to leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama "was moving his hands around but there was no meaning in what he used his hands for," said Bruno Druchen, the federation's national director.

Nicole Du Toit, an official sign language interpreter who also watched the broadcast, said in a telephone interview that the man on stage purporting to sign was an embarrassment.

"It was horrible, an absolute circus, really really bad," she said. "Only he can understand those gestures."

He was later asked by Obama to help fix ObamaCare.

Kenya dig it? Professor Touré serves up a geography lesson [video]; Mockery ensues

When you mix stupidity with arrogance you get Toure ... or Obama.

How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Robert Stacy McCain talking about the Pope and the African migration to Europe.  The Pope tweeted:

We pray for a heart which will embrace immigrants. God will judge us upon how we have treated the most needy.

From a news report:

 

Pope Francis has visited Lampedusa to pay tribute to the thousands of refugees who have lost their lives trying to reach the European Union. The pope also criticized what he called the “globalization of indifference.”

McCain responds

The “globalization of indifference”? Hey, dig this, Pope: How about encouraging the localization of responsibility?

If everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible. If it’s Europe’s job to take care of Africans, what is Africa’s job other than building boats so they can try to get to Europe? How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Also, speaking of “how we have treated the most needy,” Pope, I checked my records and you’ve never hit my tip jar. Just sayin’ . .

I have a great deal of respect for the Catholic church, in fact I am a Christian (of the Protestant variety), but it seems to me that many religious leaders make noises that are designed to place them morally above the rest of humanity.  Now, in many cases they are, and taking care of the poor is a moral imperative.  But taking care of the problems in Africa by encouraging them to move to Europe is not a moral solution to a problem.  It's preening; a characteristic of Liberals in and out of religion.

Obama pining for the peace, quiet, and friendly press of Washington, D.C.

A great way of ending Bud Norman's review of rhe Obama family's $100 million African vacation.
Hooray for Barack Obama the African explorer.
Excerpt:

By one of those hilarious twists of fate that seem to bedevil the president at every turn, Obama happened to be in Senegal on the day that the Supreme Court delivered a ruling striking down key portions of the Defense of Marriage Act and handing what was considered a huge victory to homosexual rights advocates. When asked about the ruling during an obligatory press conference with his Senegalese counterpart, the recently pro-same-sex-marriage Obama couldn’t help exulting. President Macky Sall was then asked for his views on the matter, and replied that he didn’t believe Senegal should go so far as make homosexuality legal. Although Obama takes a back seat to no one in his heightened sensitivity to third world cultures and their venerable traditions, homosexuality trumps multi-culturalism in the contemporary hierarchy of liberal values and he was thus compelled to have a rather public spat with the president of Senegal. The debate was widely reported in the African press, with the African public seeming to come down squarely on the side of Sall, and it seems incident has not strengthened American ties with the region. The Chinese government’s assiduous courtship of the region, so far as we know, have not included any talk of homosexuality.

Read the whole thing.

Zimbabwe Is Down to Its Last $217

There are cash-strapped governments, and there are broke governments. And then there's Zimbabwe, which, after paying last week's government salaries, has just $217 in the bank. No, we didn't forget any zeroes to the end of that figure. Zimbabwe, the country that's home to some of the world's largest plutonium and diamond reserves, is literally as rich as a 14-year-old girl after a really good birthday party.

 

Obama blames George Bush.

Mark Steyn recounts the history of the "Arab Spring"

The Abhorrent Vacuum

In the breast of the Western media, hopes of Arab Spring spring eternal. First we were told the Muslim Brotherhood would contest only a third of the seats in the Egyptian parliament, just to ensure they had some representation in the legislature among all those students, women, and Copts. Then we were told it would be half the seats, but don't worry, they had no plans to contest the presidency. Next we were told they were taking a run at the presidency, but most unlikely to win compared with all those far more appealing time-serving hacks from transnationalist bureaucracies like the Arab League and the International Atomic Energy Agency who were itching to jump in the race. And finally, after the Brothers took the presidency and swept the parliament, we were assured that they could govern only in a finely calibrated balance of power with the secularist military.

Inevitably, within a few weeks of taking the oath of office, President Morsi fired the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, purged the top brass, including the chief of staff and the heads of the air force and navy, and reversed such restraints on his power as they'd imposed. Equally inevitably, the view from Washington was that this was no more than "a generational change in military leadership." It is true that General Sisi is a younger man than Field Marshal Tantawi. However, the fact remains that, in his first month in office, Mohamed Morsi has accomplished what it's taken the post-Kemalist regime in Turkey its first decade to pull off: the end of the army's role as constitutional guardian.

Indeed, he seems to have ended the constitution, such as it is. No piece of paper gives him the unilateral power to revoke Article 25 of the constitution, but he did. No piece of paper gives him the authority to dismiss the Supreme Council's constitutional declaration on parliament, but he did. Whatever new piece of paper eventually emerges will be written by men appointed by him alone. And why stop there? The independent newspaper al-Dustour ("The Constitution," indeed) has just had a print run seized for "harming the president through phrases and wording punishable by law." In whatever lucid moments he still enjoys in his prison cell, the unloved ex-"Pharaoh" must marvel at that CNN coverage of the "Facebook Revolution": As Zvi Mazel wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "Morsi now holds dictatorial powers surpassing by far those of erstwhile president Hosni Mubarak."

I vividly remember that series of "reassuring" analysis  that the so-called Middle East experts fed us via the media that were desperate to believe that western "youth"would take over, and with it validate the Obama policy in the Middle East.  But even then it was obvious to anyone who thought for themselves without illusions that the natural alternative to the old dictators was a fundamentalist Islamic regime that would be even more repressive and backward than the dictators they replaced.  In fact, I did that in February of 2011 when the press was still in love with he revolution. 

Quizzed about the spiralling murder rate Sunday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “We’re containing it.”

After two members of the family were killed within 6 months, brother wants to move back to Africa.  It's safer than gun-controlled Chicago.

They came to the U.S. from Gambia — in search of a better life.

But two tough decades later, some of Kenwood Academy High School student Muhammed Kebbeh’s family say they are considering going back to Africa after he became the city’s 370th murder victim this year and second of his six siblings to be gunned down on the South Side in the last six months.

“I want to pack everything up and go back,” his oldest brother, Momadu Kebbeh, 36, said Wednesday, as his devoutly Muslim family mourned and prayed at their Washington Park home. “What’s the point of staying here?”

 

It may not be hope, but it's certainly change.

Islamists in North Mali Stone Couple to Death

BAMAKO, Mali — Islamists in control of a town in northern Mali stoned a couple to death after accusing them of having children outside of marriage, a local official who was one of several hundred witnesses to the killings said Monday.

The official said the bearded Islamists, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, brought the couple into the center of the town of Aguelhok from about 12 miles away in the countryside. The young man and woman were forced into holes about four feet deep, with their heads protruding, and then stoned to death at about 5 a.m. Sunday, the official said.

“They put them into the holes, and then they started throwing big rocks, until they were dead,” the official said, speaking by satellite phone from the remote desert town near the Algerian border.

“It was horrible,” he said, noting that the woman had moaned and cried out and that her partner had yelled something indistinct during the attack. “It was inhuman. They killed them like they were animals.”

Fellow congregants given land and a speech by Mayor Menino in Boston. 

"Death to the infidel" is an amzingly effective way of scaring the crap out of Liberals

... if you really mean it.

Having children out of wedlock is subsidized and celebrated in America,

in Africa ... not so much.