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Saturday 17 May 2014

Michelle Obama’s Kony-style ‘Boko Haram’ PR Stunt Inspires Viral Anti-drone Campaign

 

21st Century Wire

Whenever a First Lady tries to astro-turf over a political event to boost White House approval ratings – it never ends well. Remember Michelle’s foray in the Knucklehead issue?

Michelle Obama made a big splash on Twitter and Facebook this week, but it only took a few days before the predictable blow-back to her PR stunt has turned into a storm of ridicule.

Her detractors are right point out how her own husband has sanctioned the murders of thousands of innocents across central Asia and Africa with his shiny new drone toys, but is immune from giving any testimony, nor any prosecution as he claim Presidential privilege.

It should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain in America and further afield, that no amount of tweeting and hash-tagging will speed-up to rescue, or recovery of hostages. In fact, excessive political and military meddling by Washington in Lagos could do the opposite – and create a powder keg which could cost lives and fray international relations.

What is obvious, however, is how the seemingly authentic ‘Boko Haram Terror Crisis’ in Nigeria is being used by the White House to swing public opinion back in favour of a walking wounded Obama Administration mired in multiple scandals, and also guilty of backing a NeoNazi fascist military coup in the Ukraine this past winter, and further seeking to capitalise financially in the arms, oil and gas sector through a permanent stand-off with former ally Russia.

Add to this Obama’s under the radar pledge of $1.7 billion of US taxpayer money to armed Islamic terrorist fighters in Syria this week – and it’s not hard at all to see the benefits of a Boko Haram comic book crisis at this moment in time. If the White can somehow stage – and take credit, for some kind of rescue of the African school girls, then it will have all been worth it. Beltway insiders are already saying that plans are already underway for a White House repeat of the dramatic Bin Laden/Navy SEAL Raid. Although the May 2011 raid in Abbotabad, Pakistan failed to produce an actual body of the deceased Osama bin Laden, ironically, it gave the President the only real bounce in the polls he ever had during his two terms.

By cynically targeting school children, the #Bring Our Girls Home campaign is merely a picking up where the globalised ‘Kony 2012′ social zeitgeist movement left off. Kony 2012 was a state-of-the-art, multimillion dollar, US State Department-backed media effort – disguised as a grassroots ‘schools campaign’, designed to engage US school children in the process lobbying Washington for US military intervention in Uganda to hunt down a non-existent villain who hasn’t been seen for 8 years.


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