Hillary Clinton Ignored Nigeria's Terrorist Group

Dereliction: For two years on Hillary Clinton's watch, the State Department refused to designate a Nigerian Islamist group as a terrorist organization. This group has murdered thousands as it wages a real war on women.

Sometimes Hollywood celebrities get it right, as Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres and others did in a protest outside the Beverly Hills Hotel. That property is one of the Dorchester Collection of hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, who has announced his country's embrace of Shariah law.

The protesters recognize that Shariah law is a brutal criminal code employed by Islamists that prescribes amputations and floggings, plus the stoning to death of those who violate its rules or simply for the crime of being too Western.

Case in point: the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram, which means "Western education is a sin."

When the Global Terrorism Database of the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism compiled its list of terrorist organizations and ranked them by the number of their terror acts in 2012, Afghanistan's Taliban came in first. Boko Haram was not far behind.

The world's attention is now focused on the kidnapping of some 300 girls from the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in Lagos, Nigeria.

"I abducted your girls," a man claiming to be Abubakar Shekau, the group's leader, said in a video seen by the Guardian newspaper. "I will sell them in the market, by Allah. I will sell them off and marry them off. There is a market for selling humans."

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined the campaign to free the girls, expressing her concern in a May 4 tweet with the hashtag "BringBackOurGirls." On Wednesday, she called the abduction "abominable" and "criminal."

"It's an act of terrorism," she said, "and it really merits the fullest response possible, first and foremost from the government of Nigeria."

Yet for two years, the State Department refused to acknowledge the growing threat and barbarism of Boko Haram. As Josh Rogin at The Daily Beast reports, the Clinton State Department "refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011" after the group bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria.

"The one thing she could have done, the one tool she had at her disposal, she didn't use. And nobody can say she wasn't urged to do it. It's gross hypocrisy," wrote Rogin, quoting a former senior U.S. official who was involved in the debate.