Above: remains of the Federal Government College. Buni Yadi, Nigeria.

It’s stories like this that help put it all in perspective.

And it’s interesting that this story comes to us in an age when we are constantly reminded how much worse women have it than men in third-world countries, and how religion – and especially the Islamic religion – oppresses women while granting men and boys unending privilege.

According to the Associated Press:

Islamic militants set fire to a locked dormitory at a school in northern Nigeria, then shot and slit the throats of students who tried to escape through windows during a pre-dawn attack Tuesday. At least 58 students were killed, including many who were burned alive.

The author starts off by saying “students” as if the militants’ attack was indiscriminate. It was anything but.

They “slaughtered them like sheep” with machetes, and gunned down those who ran away, said one teacher, Adamu Garba. Soldiers guarding a checkpoint near the coed government school were mysteriously withdrawn hours before it was targeted by the militants, said the spokesman for the governor of northeastern Yobe state.

Female students were spared in the attack, said the spokesman, Abdullahi Bego, though girls and women have been abducted in the past by militants of the Boko Haram movement, whose name means “Western education is forbidden.”

What did they do to the women?

The insurgents went to the female dormitories and told the young women to go home, get married and abandon the Western education they said is anathema to Islam, Bego said. All of the dead were teenage boys or young men.

Interesting. No singling-out and beatings of girls for daring to get an education. No killings of them, either. Nor were there any misogynistic acid attacks, whippings, or stonings. Feminists often present such things as though they are the norm in middle-eastern countries where religions like Islam have substantial infulence. But evidence is increasingly coming to light that the state of affairs is not as one-sided as we have been led to believe.

ABC News continues:

Garba said the militants locked the door of a dormitory where male students were sleeping, then set it on fire. Some students were burned alive in the attack that began around 2 a.m., he said.

The governor said it took hours for troops to arrive, giving the assailants plenty of time to set the rest of the school campus ablaze— six dormitories, the administrative building, staff quarters, classrooms, a clinic and the kitchen. Bego, the governor’s spokesman, said the governor will be looking into why the school was left unprotected. “The community complained to the governor that yesterday the military were withdrawn and then the attack happened,” he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday condemned the “unspeakable violence and acts of terror” and said the United States was helping Nigerian authorities “to combat the threat posed by Boko Haram, while protecting civilians and ensuring respect for human rights.”

By the way, that would distinctively be men’s human rights in this case.

But survivors and local officials charge they get no protection.

“Everybody is living in fear,” local government chairman Maina Ularamu told the AP after Izghe village was attacked twice in a week this month — with militants killing 109 people and burning hundreds of thatched huts in neighboring Adamawa state.

“There is no protection. We cannot predict where and when they are going to attack. People can’t sleep with their eyes closed,” Ularamu said.

Scary. And despite the fact that countries like my own are pretty messed up, I am glad that I don’t have to deal with this kind of thing. Again, it helps put it all in perspective.

This attack occurred on February 25, 2014. It isn’t the first time this all-male massacre has happened, however. On September 29, 2013, the same group (Boko Haram) perpetrated the Gujba College Massacre against 50+ Nigerian students [1].

Again, all of them were male.

This is female privilege and male disadvantage in action. Despite the dogma of Feminists, the most normative type of violence is not male-on-female violence, but male-on-male violence. And it is as old as war itself.

The time has come to ask what is it about worldviews that see men as the default and deserving targets of violence. The time has come for everyone to stand up and say “I will not lay a hand on my brother in anger.”

Notes:

1. Original article with dead link here. Article can currently be found via Wayback Machine here. Screenshot of old article preserved here.

2. A broken link to an ABC News reprint of the Associated Press article, which was later taken down.