Selective indignation should turn its gaze to lawless kidnappers

AUSTRALIAN capital city streets will this week echo to protesters chanting their detestation of Russia’s relentless takeover of Ukraine.

AUSTRALIAN capital city streets will this week echo to protesters chanting their detestation of Russia’s relentless takeover of Ukraine, where four military helicopters have been shot down by alleged “civilians” who appear to have been able to obtain surface-to-air missiles from the local equivalent of Bunnings.

Martin Place in Sydney and Federation Square in Melbourne will be filled tonight with people lighting candles for more than 220 schoolgirls abducted by Islamic extremists in Nigeria shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” (God is great), with a further eight girls kidnapped only yesterday.

They and the world’s human rights organisations are galvanised in opposition to the cruelties of Boko Haram in Nigeria and to the Russian march to war.

Yes? Er, actually, no.

Australia is a country smitten by a syndrome that sadly is not rare: SI — selective indignation.

Our newspapers’ letters and op-ed pages, our websites, our twittersphere, the ABC’s ­
Q, A, R & S — Questions, Answers, Rudeness and Screaming, not all of it from the audience — are set at constant levels of anger against the “hellhole” that is now perceived to be Papua New Guinea since it accepted Kevin Rudd’s request on asylum-seekers, against any task undertaken by the US military even when it protects girls going to school in Afghanistan, against Japan due to its evil whaling.

It’s good to hold our own government and its agencies to high standards of human rights, and to challenge both it and Australia’s allies to maintain them when they operate overseas.

But increasingly often, as our social-media-dominated space shrinks our world down to local, bite-sized emotional prompts, real wickedness runs its course comparatively untroubled by external pressure.

A thousand very important people are attending a conference today in Abuja, Nigeria’s Brasilia-wannabe capital, that is organised by the World Economic Forum, the Swiss-based bien-pensant body.

Elsie Kanza, the forum’s Africa head, says: “Africa’s continued progress depends fundamentally on the ability of its leaders to take the bold decisions necessary to transform the region’s economy and society.

“We hope the meeting will offer an environment where such decisions can be catalysed.”

Indeed, up to a point. But catalysing decisions should, perhaps, come a little down the progress priority list — after tackling an organisation that is capable of stealing children, and conducting other terrorist acts, with impunity.

The leader of Boko Haram (“Foreign Education is Forbidden”), Abubakar Shekau, crowed in a video this week: “I abducted your girls” whom he described as “slaves”.

“By Allah, I will sell them in the marketplace,” he said.

Reports have also circulated of the girls being forcibly “converted” from Christianity to Islam and of mass “weddings” — a euphemism for pedophile rape — to Boko Haram thugs.

Western education should end, said Shekau: “Girls, you should go and get married. I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of 9. God instructed me to sell them. They are his properties.”

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek commendably issued a statement on Tuesday stating the obvious — but sometimes it needs to be stated, and amplified: “The situation is horrific. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Our thoughts are with the girls’ families and friends.”

She urges the Abbott government to “use our position on the UN Security Council to help drive an effective international response”.

The response from the US, to which the international community has so often looked for a lead since World War II, will unfortunately be guided by Secretary of State John Kerry, the most ineffectual person to hold the post in living memory.

While girls are being sold into sexual slavery at the age of nine, the UN’s Human Rights Council has this week castigated the Victorian government and police for failing to compensate a woman whose nose was broken in what does seem to have been a pretty awful incident back in 1996 — although the case went through to the Court of Appeal.

To give some credit, the UN’s council did commission Michael Kirby to chair an investigation into human rights abuses in North Korea, which he concluded in a damning
372-page report that listed “unspeakable atrocities” one after another after another.

Greater attention, however, was paid in Australia instead to a film released at around the same time that applauded “the cinematic genius” of Kim Jong-il and celebrated what filmmaker Anna Broinowski described as “the generosity, candour and passion with which (North Korea’s) top filmmakers embraced our environmental cause” — halting coal-seam gas production in Australia.

This year, in proportionality, our SI is hitting the heights.