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If 300 American cheerleaders had been abducted by religious fanatics, World War Three would have started last Tuesday

Forced to convert to Islam, hostage schoolgirls were paraded in a video Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Allison Pearson

6:35AM BST 15 May 2014

1481 Comments

It was like a scene from a movie, except there was no Iron Man swooping to the rescue. More than a hundred girls sitting in a clearing, chanting the Koran. Their eyes downcast, the girls were swathed in ghostly grey and black hijabs. Their captors said this was evidence that they had “converted to Islam”, but their fear was palpable. They held themselves unnaturally still, as though to move would mean death.

Many of the girls were abducted on April 14 from a school in northern Nigeria, which means they have had less than a month to memorise those Koranic verses, or at least to have the chants beaten into them. More than half of the 276 stolen girls were missing from the terrorists’ video. Among them were Rebeccas and Esthers and Ruths – lovely, strong Biblical names. One girl was led to the front and told to give a Muslim name, not her Christian one. You wondered about her missing sisters and whether they had displeased their captors by refusing to surrender either their name or their faith.

“These girls you occupy yourselves with… we have indeed liberated them. These girls have become Muslims,” jeered Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram. He addresses the camera as if he were straight out of Evil Villain school. With his silly pointy orange cap and his cock-of-the-walk preening, this gun-toting braggart would be a ludicrous figure were it not for the fact that he holds the lives of all those terrified teenagers in his hands.

“I wondered how many of those girls he’d raped,” said a friend. Me too. Abubakar Shekau makes Idi Amin look sane.

At least you can’t accuse Boko Haram’s leader of ambiguity. “I took the girls and I will sell them off. We are against Western education and I say stop Western education. There is a market for selling girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” he promised.

I doubt that Abubakar Shekau is having many sleepless nights over the hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls. At least the social media outcry, which spread like a forest fire after a boost from Michelle Obama, has challenged the media’s initial appalling indifference to the girls’ fate. Trust me, if 300 Santa Barbara cheerleaders had been abducted by religious fanatics, made to chant the Koran and to adopt Muslim names, World War Three would have started last Tuesday.

A professor in African history tells me that there has been “genuine international revulsion at the idea that girls should not be educated” but, ironically, the wave of Facebook empathy could “undermine the long-term, global effort to close the gender gap, in terms of equal access to basic human rights”. Some groups on the Left are arguing that the kidnapping is “just another cover story for US intervention and the demonising of Islam. Once again we see the rights of women and girls being trumped by power politics.”

Shamefully, the same can be said closer to home. In a powerful essay in this week’s New Statesman, David Selbourne argues that the West is crippled by “frightened self-censorship” when discussing radical jihadist Islamism. He cites a failure to recognise the ambitions of radical Islam, the failure to condemn the silence of most Muslims at the crimes committed in their names, and the failure to respond adequately to the persecution of Christians in many Muslim countries.

As I know from personal experience, critics of the Muslim community soon find themselves on Islamophobia websites, even if we are just sticking up for defenceless women and children who are supposed to enjoy British freedoms. Is it culturally insensitive to point out that female genital mutilation “parties” are still going on in Britain, at which up to a dozen girls at a time may be operated on?

On the Today programme, Tahir Alam, a governor at one of the schools that triggered the Trojan Horse investigation into hardline Islamist infiltration of Birmingham schools, denied that there was any truth in the allegations. No girls, he said, had been told that their hairstyle was insufficiently Islamic, nor had boys and girls been segregated, despite the testimony of sacked, non-Muslim staff. Nor had the “kaffir” – that’s non-Muslims like you and me, folks – been demonised in school assemblies.

Mr Alam did reveal that female pupils had not been allowed to go swimming during Ramadan, because “when children go swimming, they’re likely to swallow water so that will compromise their fasting”.

Yes, that’s what he said. One small admission that exposes a world of difference in culture and values. Consider also the schoolgirl who told Radio 4 that, “as you would expect”, her state school had “an Islamist ethos”.

If the rumours are true, I hope that the SAS does go in and pull off a daring Raid-on-Entebbe-style rescue of those poor Nigerian girls. The Rebeccas, Esthers and Ruths deserve to get back their Christian names – and their lives. In case there was any lingering doubt, their abduction has revealed the deep and ugly misogyny at the heart of radical Islam. And girls everywhere need to be protected from that.