Is Nigeria a
Terrorist "Country of Interest"? (Part 1)
By
Max Siollun
maxsiollun@Yahoo.com
What did Nigeria do
to find itself mentioned in the same sentence as "terrorism", and be
blacklisted in the same illustrious company as Somalia, Afghanistan
and Libya? Firstly, the U.S. list of countries that will be subjected
to additional security scrutiny (the “List”) did not list Nigeria as a
state sponsor of terror. The List has two parts. The first part
consists of countries the U.S. considers as "state sponsors of
terrorism": Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria. The second part of contains
countries that the U.S. considers as "countries of interest":
Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, Somalia and Yemen.
RACIAL PROFILING
WORKS: FACT
So why are the
American government brazenly singling out certain countries like this?
Firstly, America is not Britain. Terror is a new reality for
Americans, and they are jittery. The British reacted to the July 2005
train bombings with their usual stiff upper lip because decades of
bombing by the IRA has stiffened their resolve. Terror on American
soil began only in 2001. Americans are simply not accustomed to
tumbling skyscrapers, and exploding planes and city centres. Obama has
to worry about something that Nigerian leaders rarely care about:
public opinion. Obama does not want the Neo-Cons and Republicans to
“out security” him. There is competition in U.S. politics to see who
can be more rightwing and hard-line on terror and security. In
America, elections are REAL and if Obama is not seen as being tough on
terror, he might get voted out of office. In America, election results
are determined by votes cast at polling stations, not by shady deals
struck in hotel suites with bag fulls of Naira. Obama made this move
for domestic consumption. He has to LOOK as if he is doing something
proactive to protect his people. You will not find many Americans that
have problems with the List.
The List amounts to
racial profiling. No amount of spin can hide that. Is profiling moral?
No. But does it work? YES. Israel has conducted racial profiling of
Palestinians and other Arabs with success for decades. Israel is
subjected to more security pressures than any other country on Earth,
yet when was the last time you heard of someone getting on board an
Israeli plane with bombs? The English police used to profile the Irish
during the IRA bombing campaign. Even benign entities like car
insurance companies profile and demand higher insurance premiums from
car drivers aged under 25 because they cause a disproportionately high
number of road accidents.
Even Nigerians are
not above racial profiling. Ask yourself what you would think if a
foreigner tried to murder several hundred Nigerian citizens
simultaneously? Most adult Nigerians are familiar with "Ghana Must
Go" bags. Does anyone remember where the phrase originated from?
It originated from Nigeria's 1980s knee-jerk expulsion of
several million Ghanaian citizens at short notice - whom were blamed
for crime and exacerbating Nigeria's economic crisis. If Nigeria could
expel over a million Ghanaians because some of them were accused of
nothing more sinister than illegal immigration and petty crime, how do
you expect the Americans to react to someone that attempted to murder
several hundred of its citizens?
SWISS CHEESE LIST
The List has more
holes in it than Swiss cheese. Firstly, why is the List even being
published? That does not seem like a very security conscious thing to
do. Surely terrorists will just find someone from countries other than
those on the List to act as bomb couriers? They have already been
trying to find Caucasian bombers for several years because they know
Arabs were being profiled.
For internal flights
within the U.S., it will not make a dent because most people in the
U.S. use driving licenses (not passports) as identification when they
fly. So there is absolutely no way of knowing the nationality of a
passenger on a U.S. internal flight, so long as (s)he knows how to
drive.
Remember the "shoe
bomber" Richard Reid? He was British. Another huge loophole is that
several Muslims of Pakistani/other Asian descent hold British
passports. Yet they will be able to fly into the U.S. without any
additional scrutiny. Speaking of Britain, that country is more
qualified to be on the List than Nigeria is. Mutallab's radicalisation
occurred in Britain where he was the president of the University
College London Islamic society. For the Americans and Nigerians
reading this, that is like being the president of the Islamic society
at a prestigious university like Harvard, ABU or UNN. In 2003, a
British citizen named Assaf Mohammed Hanif carried out a suicide
bombing in Israel that killed three people and wounded scores of
others. His accomplice Omar Khan Sharif (also a British citizen), fled
when his bomb failed to detonate. His corpse was later found on a
beach. Both men entered Israel with their British passports. The 4 men
who carried out the July 2005 train bombings in London in which 56
people were killed, were all British citizens - three of them were
actually born in Britain. So in the past six years
multiple British citizens have carried out terrorist attacks in which
scores of people have been killed in a geographic area spanning
thousands of miles from the middle east to central Europe to north
America. Yet Britain is not on the List, and Nigeria is.
15 of of the 19
September 11, 2001 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The other four
consisted of an Egyptian, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one
Lebanese. So why are Egypt and the UAE not on the List? As well as an
Egyptian being among the September 11 bombers, Osama bin Laden's right
hand man Ayman Al-Zawahiri is also Egyptian, and the U.S./Israeli
nemesis Hamas was born from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
So Britain, Egypt and
the United Arab Emirates have multiple overlapping connections with
terrorist activity, yet none of them is on the List and Nigeria is,
when for the first time in Nigeria's 90 years plus existence as a
corporate entity, a Nigerian attempted a terror attack after being
radicalised in Britain and Yemen. The attack was not condoned by the
Nigerian federal government or the government of any Nigerian state,
and the attacker's father had warned the authorities of his son's
radicalisation. How many of the numerous terrorists from Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Yemen, or Pakistan were ostracised and reported to their
authorities by their own parents? So why did other countries escape
the List, and how did Nigeria find itself on the List? Nigeria has
fallen victim to its moral and religious ambivalence, and is being
punished for its "previous record" in other areas that have nothing to
do with terrorism.
maxsiollun@yahoo.com
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