The Education of an Idealist
Page 67
* Progress against Boko Haram has been uneven since 2016. Despite the splintering of the group into competing factions and claims by the Nigerian government that it had been defeated, Boko Haram militants continue to kidnap children and launch deadly attacks. Although fewer people are being killed than in the 2013–2015 period and Boko Haram controls far less territory than it once did, the group still constitutes a threat to millions of people, and human rights abuses perpetrated by the regional militaries are still rampant.
* Terrorists in fact made use of what Trump was doing—branding all “Muslims” as a threat—to try to broaden their appeal. In 2016, for example, clips of Trump’s campaign rhetoric were featured in recruitment videos for both ISIS and al-Shabaab (the al-Qaeda affiliate based in Somalia).
* Despite President Obama setting the 2017 refugee cap at 110,000, President Trump’s travel ban—which temporarily halted refugee admissions—meant that fewer than 54,000 refugees were actually resettled in the US during 2017. The Trump administration has since further reduced refugee admissions, resettling 22,491 refugees in 2018. From September 2015 to January 2017, the Obama administration welcomed approximately 17,000 Syrian refugees. In 2018, the Trump administration admitted 62 Syrian refugees.
* An estimated 40,000 people from more than one hundred countries ultimately traveled to Iraq and Syria to become foreign fighters for ISIS, including approximately 5,000 residents of European Union countries and around 130 Americans.
* The Yazidi community was concentrated primarily around the Sinjar region in northwestern Iraq. For centuries, the Yazidis had been targeted for persecution due to their religious practices, which combine elements of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. ISIS thus considered Yazidis “infidels” who had to either convert to Islam or be killed. It was later estimated that some 10,000 Yazidis living in Sinjar were killed or taken prisoner during ISIS’s invasion, which displaced the entirety of what was once a community of 400,000 people. Many of the kidnapped women and girls were held for years by ISIS fighters and subjected to unrelenting sexual violence.
* Nineteen of the women came from Azerbaijan, Burma, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Russia, Syria, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Vietnam. The twentieth woman was a composite we referred to simply as a “North Korean political prisoner.” At the time, North Korea held well over 100,000 political prisoners. However, Kim Jong-un’s regime was so brutal that highlighting a single woman’s name would have endangered her. Profiling an unnamed political prisoner in North Korea minimized the risk to any one individual, while still allowing us to draw attention to the country’s mass imprisonment of its citizens in modern-day concentration camps.
* Murad would win the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for her work combating sexual violence in conflict.
* The UN Charter specifies that Security Council votes on “procedural matters” cannot be vetoed. As a result, when a country objects to putting an item on the Council’s agenda, nine of the fifteen countries on the Council must vote in favor of it.
* In June of 2017, President Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accord. According to the agreed-upon rules for exiting, however, the earliest possible date by which the US government can finalize its withdrawal is November 4th, 2020—the day after the 2020 presidential election. The rules also allow for a country that has exited to rejoin, a process that could be completed within a month of a future president formally requesting to reenter. Even if the US ultimately rejoins, what matters most is a concerted American domestic effort to meet and then exceed the commitments the Obama administration made.
* Among Americans who voted for President Obama in 2012, an estimated 9 percent voted for President Trump in 2016; another 7 percent did not vote; and 3 percent opted for a third-party candidate. Together, these three categories represented approximately 13 million votes in an election ultimately decided by fewer than 80,000 cast across the three critical swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.