Nigerian Terrorist Leader Tells Obama to Go ‘To Hell’

The leader of Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist group in a weekend video claimed responsibility for a deadly bomb attack in Abuja last week, taunting the government for its failure to defeat the Islamist group and telling President Obama and other world leaders to go “to hell.”

“To hell with Obama!” Abubakar Shekau said during the rant. “To hell with [U.N. secretary-general] Ban ki Moon! To hell with [French president] Francois Hollande! To hell with [Russian president] Vladimir Putin!”

Although Shekau claimed responsibility for last Monday’s bomb blast in Abuja, which cost at least 75 lives and was the deadliest terrorist attack ever in the capital, he did not refer to the abduction hours later of more than 100 schoolgirls in the country’s far north-east. A Borno state’s top education official said in a statement Friday 85 of the girls remain missing.

Shekau, one of three Boko Haram leaders designated by the State Department in 2012 under an executive order designed to disrupt funding to terrorists, said his group carried out the bombing in Abuja because of the killing of Muslims in Nigeria and elsewhere. His remarks in the local Hausa language were translated by Premium Times, an Abuja-based media group.

“We carried out the attack because you kill Muslims in Plateau,” he said in comments directed at Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, and referring to the Nigerian state that lies roughly on the divide between the country’s Muslim north and Christian south.

“You kill Muslims in every country of the world,” he continued. “Why don’t you global tyrants talk when Muslims are killed in Afghanistan? Why don’t you talk when Muslims were killed in Iraq? And they are still being killed. Why don’t you talk when Muslims are killed in the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria, and now Yemen, Mali, Azerbaijan, Shishan [Chechnya], Pakistan?”

Shekau, dressed in military fatigues and carrying an assault rifle, taunted Jonathan directly, calling him a “lame duck” and inviting him to hunt for Boko Haram, which he said was “in your city, near you.”

“Jonathan, you are now too small for us. We can only deal with your grand masters like Obama the president of America,” he said. “Even they cannot do anything to us … we are more than them.”

Shekau described himself as someone who “does not like Christians, and I don’t like Muslims that relate with Christians. We have been commanded by Allah not to associate with infidels because they cannot be trusted until they accept your religion.”

In a previous video message, last August, Shekau boasted that his group was now strong enough to “comfortably confront” the United States.

“Let the world know that we have been enjoined by Allah to kill the unbelievers,” he said in that message. “We shall continue to kill those who strive to stand against the will of Allah by opposing shari’a. We don’t mind if we die doing this because it is even a blessing for us to die in this cause and gain paradise.”

In a 2012 message, Shekau urged Jonathan to “repent and forsake Christianity” – or resign. Inviting an enemy to convert to Islam or face the consequences is a longstanding tradition in Islam, modeled on the example set by Mohammed.

After coming under pressure from U.S. lawmakers for almost two years, the State Department last November designated Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization.

In the past, some U.S. officials have played down religion as a main motivation for Boko Haram’s violent campaign, which began in earnest in 2009. In 2001 then-assistant secretary of state for African affairs Johnnie Carson told a U.S. Senate hearing that religion was “not the primary driver behind extremist violence in Nigeria,” and said Boko Haram was exploiting “the legitimate grievances of northern populations to garner recruits and public sympathy.”

The following later, Carson told a congressional panel that Boko Haram remains “primarily focused on discrediting the Nigerian government.”

There will be a time when the world will miss Al Qaeda prime - the original group started by UBL and currently headed by Zawahiri. Now, by 'miss' I do not mean with fondness, but rather out of the fact they were not as smart, not as tenacious and not as evolved as the current groups coming up. Apart from the main Al Qaeda, there are four Qaeda based groups mucking about. There is Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Shabaab (AQ in East Africa), Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS). These groups have seen what the West did to the original group, and they have evolved. Their sources of funding are no longer solely Pakistani and Saudi, their communications take into account the NSA and The Activity, and their methods have advanced. Take for instance ISIS. Led by Abu Balr Al Baghdadi it has established a mini caliphate that covers part of Iraq and Syria, freed HUNDREDS of prisoners out of Abu Ghraib in an operation the SAS would be proud of, and has both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda main worried (and fighting them ...but losing).

What does this have to do with Boko Haram? Well, I predict a union of this group with one of the Qaeda groups ...in my estimation AQIM. You may also see Al Shabaab and AQAP join. Finally all will join with ISIS.

Result? Rather than the original Qaeda's control of part of Afghanistan, you may now see a true hydra controlling parts of West, North and East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Syria.

All is needed is for Abu Sayyaf, which mucks about in the Philippines and Indonesia, to join in and you have what I was calling global agglomerated terrorism last week.

The West has so far largely ignored these groups. After all, Boko Haram and AQIM attack places in West Africa most Americans can't pronounce, on FR I saw FReepers making light of the mall attack in Kenya by Al Shabaab (I guess to some FReepers the dead were not humans), and even ISIS is ignored because it is making life difficult for the likes of Assad and Hezbollah in Syria, and hey, Al Baghdadi told Zawahiri to shove it, thus he cannot be all bad ....right?

Wrong!

What you have here is a 16 foot King Cobra eating a 5 foot Russels Viper, and people cheering for the King Cobra not realizing the cobra is not their friend and is not doing that for their benefit. It is removing competition, following which it will focus on you.

Today it was Nigerians dying. The day before Kenyans. Maybe tomorrow it will be tourists in Indonesia. But mark my words that the targets of these animals extends beyond Nigerians and Kenyans. Their main target is the West, and they need to be stopped.

Kill the King Cobra first, or better yet, kill the cobra and the russels viper at the same time. People like Al Baghdadi make Zawahiri look like a stupid piker, and when these groups join they will focus on the West. Baghdadi is keen on re establishing the Abbasid Caliphate, and by taking over towns like Raqqa he has done something even UBL was unable to do.

Boko Haram is not just a Nigerian problem. Al Shabaab is not just an East African problem. ISIS is not just the bane of Assad's existence. All of these groups are like seeds sprouting, with the focus of their eventual fruit being to attack the West.

There's a saying by my people that the best time to kill a crocodile is when it is in its egg. It gets much harder to do so when it is an 18 foot leviathan.

Maybe the West prefers hunting adult crocs rather than squashing eggs. At least the behavior towards some of these groups by the West seems to indicate that.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.