Letter From the UK (About Kidnapping)

'Climate Change' to Blame for Boko Haram and Nigerian Girls' Kidnapping

By James Delingpole 11 May 2014

Breitbart London

Britain's Guardian newspaper has come up with a novel explanation for the kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria.

Conventional analyses have pinned the blame on the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram (which means: "Western education is forbidden"). But according to the Guardian's Nafeez Ahmed, the real culprit is 'climate change.'
Ahmed writes:

Instability in Nigeria, however, has been growing steadily over the last decade - and one reason is climate change. In 2009, a UK Department for International Development (Dfid) study warned that climate change could contribute to increasing resource shortages in the country due to land scarcity from desertification, water shortages, and mounting crop failures. A more recent study by the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace confirmed a "basic causal mechanism" that "links climate change with violence in Nigeria." The report concludes: "...poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict."
Unfortunately, a business-as-usual scenario sees Nigeria's climate undergoing "growing shifts in temperature, rainfall, storms, and sea levels throughout the twenty-first century. Poor adaptive responses to these shifts could help fuel violent conflict in some areas of the country."
According to the late Prof Sabo Bako of Ahmadu Bello University, the 1980s "forerunner" to Boko Haram was the Maitatsine sect in northern Nigeria, whose members included many victims of ecological disasters leaving them in "a chaotic state of absolute poverty and social dislocation in search of food, water, shelter, jobs, and means of livelihood."

The article is by no means Ahmed's first attempt to exculpate Islamist terrorists' actions by implying that the West is, in fact, mainly to blame.
He is also a 9/11 Truther.

In fact, overwhelming evidence confirms that al-Qaeda networks in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Asia-Pacific, have been penetrated and manipulated by Western intelligence services. Conspiraloonery? If only it was. As I argue in my 3rd book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (2005), the evidence for this is extremely well-documented, deriving from innumerable, credible intelligence sources. But why? Largely to destabilize regional environments to pave the way for new “security” policies that serve to protect not people, but foreign investors taking over regional markets -- especially markets with significant oil and gas deposits.

Ahmed's work has been praised by luminaries including left-wing journalist John Pilger, who wrote:

"Nafeez Ahmed’s understanding of the post 9/11 power game, its lies, illusions and dangers, is no less than brilliant. Everyone should read this wise and powerfully illuminating book."

And also by the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai Brown:

"Disturbing and clearly evidenced... Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed traces the unholy games played with Islamist terrorists by the US, and through acquiescence by the UK, flirting with them when it suited and then turning against them."

And by the Sunday Times's Bryan Appleyard:

"Lucid and persuasive account of how our security mandarins talked themselves into believing we could make quiet, backroom deals with terrorists."

And by the late Gore Vidal:

"Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don’t – particularly about what we are up to."

But not all his readers were quite so impressed. The late Christopher Hitchens described him as:

"A risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering."

These quotes were, until recently, available on Ahmed's website. However, following a critical blog post by one of his fellow environmentalists Robert Wilson, Ahmed's posts on 9/11 mysteriously disappeared.
Last month, Ahmed launched an attack on Breitbart London which he described as a "sorry stain on British journalism."

Our response: with enemies like Nafeez Ahmed who needs friends?