Fight to stop Boko Haram
in West Africa
Source
Evidence
This clip also comes from the program Defcon 3 with Katie Mcfarland. In this segment
she interviews Caitlin Poling from the Foreign Policy Initiative or FPI and Jennifer
Cooke from the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (Mcfarland, 2015).
According to the FPI’s website, it is “The
Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is a non-profit,
non-partisan tax-exempt organization” (FPI),
and from the CSIS website they are “ a bipartisan, nonprofit organization headquartered
in Washington, D.C.” (CSIS, 2016)
While not expressly stated, Jennifer Cooke
references the coalition formed between the
five countries affected by Boko Haram (Mcfarland, 2015). For the most part the references made in the video are verifiable and are
either accurate or at least based on credible
reports.
Motive
The logic in this video is based on the idea
that rooting out corruption in Nigeria is at
the heart of defeating Boko Haram and that
the results of the Nigerian election would
have an impact on their ability to effectively fight against Boko Haram’s insurgency
(Mcfarland, 2015). Caitlin Poling’s statement
about Goodluck Jonathan needing to do
more about corruption shows her logic that
part of the ability to defeat Boko Haram lies
in the hands of Nigeria’s leaders (Mcfarland,
2015).
The involvement of both women featured on
the segment in nonprofit, bipartisan organizations, speaks to the fact that their motive is
to inform and not persuade. There is, however, a motif throughout the video to persuade that the United States should be more
involved in the conflict. This is evident when
Katie Mcfarland asks if the US “is doing anything substantive with the coalition” (Mcfarland, 2015).
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Logic
Left Out
What was left out of this video is any personal knowledge or experience having to do with
Boko Haram. None of these women appear
or claim to have any special knowledge on
Boko Haram, western Africa, or even Islam
in general. This video feels extremely one sided, Even more so than the other videos under
examination. It would have been beneficial to
bring in a source that had better proximity or
personal experience with the subject (Mcfarland, 2015)
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