Tea at Trianon: Escape from Boko Haram

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 3, 2021

Escape from Boko Haram

From The Christian Post:

She asked God to “please allow me to see my family once more and I promise to follow you for the rest of my life.” According to Bishara, “He came through five minutes later because one of their cars was not moving so they decided to go fix it because we were [too] far from town for them to go back and steal another car.”

The car malfunction kept the terrorists occupied, thereby giving Bishara an opportunity to escape that did not come without risks: “While I was in the truck, I heard a voice say ‘jump’ and then I looked down and it was scary of course.”

“So it was just all scary and I was deciding should I jump, should I not and a voice in my head is battling with another voice saying, ‘If you jump, you’re going to die.’ And the other one is saying, ‘Jump,’ so I had to decide should I jump or should I not? I ended up coming to a conclusion that even if I jump and then I get injured or die, at least my parents will find me here or my corpse and bury me knowing I am dead, rather than to go with these people and never be seen ever again.”

Bishara believed that her mom “would not be OK knowing … thinking about me, if I am OK every single day, that would be a torture for her, so I decided to jump and die.” And so she jumped from the truck.

“So when I jumped out and I fell on my belly, realizing I was still breathing, I got up and started sprinting … and I ran for the rest of the night,” she said. Upon arriving in a village, Bishara ran into two other girls from the school she attended in Chibok who had also jumped out of the truck. They all asked for assistance from a farmer, who took them back to Chibok.

Bishara’s speech followed ICC’s designation of Nigeria as one of three Persecutors of the Year. The religious freedom advocacy group cited Nigeria’s lack of action to address the deaths of tens of thousands of Christians, the displacement of millions of additional Christians and the government’s failure to persecute the perpetrators of attacks against Christians as the justification for labeling Nigeria a Persecutor of the Year. (Read more.)