The United States should employ drones to fight the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, which has kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls to sell into slavery, Raheel Raza, president of The Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, says.
"The Boko Haram is a terrorist group … opposed to anything that is Western. They think that being Westernized, Western education, or any kind of Western connection is a sin, and they've taken it upon themselves to punish and kill ...
"No drone attack from them? This is when drones should be used by the United States," Raza told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
In recent weeks, more than 200 schoolgirls
have been kidnapped from their boarding school by the Boko Haram Islamists in Borno State.
The group, which threatens to sell the girls — some as young as 9 — into slavery, believes the practice is part of the authentic teachings of Islam.
"These poor innocent girls were kidnapped only because they were in a school and they were getting educated," said Raza, noting that the Boko Haram has successfully used terror to squash dissension.
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"They're rightly called terrorists because they have certainly created terror in the hearts of the whole world, it seems, because nobody wants to speak out. People are scared. The Nigerian president has said that he is scared.
"But this is horrific that the global community ... would be scared of a group of terrorists who are continuing to terrorize people and massacre people and persecute Christians," Raza said Wednesday.
Raza, who appeared in the "Honor Diaries," a documentary about human rights violations against women in the Middle East, said it is difficult to interpret the terrorists' ideology behind the abductions.
"It's very hard to say that anybody would want to promote a horrific agenda like this, but certainly they have some convoluted understanding of Sharia laws in which they believe that they can do this because they are fighting against Western evil," she said.
"What they don't accept or understand is that what they're doing is extremely evil and that under certain aspects of Sharia law, they believe that they have the right to marry these girls or to sell them because they're treating them as slaves and they feel justified by doing this.
"So it's a very warped understanding of Sharia laws ... This is happening right under our eyes in the 21st century."
Raza said Muslim communities around the world — and particularly in the West — should be speaking out against the kidnappings.
"There are thousands, if not more than one million, Muslims in the U.S. and North America totally, and yes, they should be out walking in the streets, they should be lobbying, they should be rallying," she said.
"It's a global disaster and even if one girl had been kidnapped it would have been bad, but this is more than 200. These are our sisters, our daughters. We should not be sleeping at night. We should be writing letters, we should be rallying forces, and the Nigerian government should be held accountable. There should be pressure on them."
Raza said any efforts by the United States to negotiate with the terror group won't work.
"You can't have a dialogue with people who are evil, who are the devil incarnate … These are people without a conscience, who can't see their shadow,'' she said.
"The only way they know how to deal with women is to shoot them in the face like they did to Malala Yousafzai. So there's no conversation there.
"There has to be action, there has to be pressure, international pressure."
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