By Emmanuel Ogebe
Before Dr Jill Biden-bashing, the Wall Street Journal pulled a Kashoggi-style hit on a foreign regime’s critic. Now it’s hackmen Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson are profiting from it. Fortunately I lived to tell about it.
I was at dinner in Nigeria when both journalists phoned me in April 2018. I had just finished testifying in my defamation lawsuit against the Nigerian government to which they had no defense.
Under false pretenses that they wanted to speak to me about the case, Hinshaw and Parkinson sandbagged me in an attack that was clearly meant to make up for the Nigerian government’s poor performance in court.
What followed was a gutter piece published in WSJ completely contrived to totally obliterate me and my decades of work as a human rights lawyer.
Hinshaw and Parkinson were brutal – they disparaged my congressional testimony against Boko Haram terrorism as exaggerating “genocide” of Christians, they called me a terrorist who held captive the escaped Nigerian schoolgirls who I brought to school in America and accused me of profiting off them.
Without providing any proof, Hinshaw and Parkinson then went a step further and invented their own facts. They fabricated a story of me abducting the schoolgirls from a school in Nigeria were I simply wasn’t and then their most interesting work of “faction” – they fabricated the contents of a video they purportedly saw of me fundraising with pictures of the girls in DC.
No video on earth contains anything of the sort but Hinshaw and Parkinson refused to produce the video which would have clearly shown they were liars, in the defamation suit I eventually filed against, or conversely vindicated them if the video proved their claim.
On my part I produced correspondence with an ex-UK Prime Minister’s assistant scheduling a call with him proving the WSJ lied and defamed me when they claimed I made that up. Having investigated human rights violations for decades, I had meticulously documented exhibits of the conspiracy, bribes, coercion etc for the girls to lie against me.
In all, WSJ did everything to shy away from the truth and ironically violate my constitutional speech rights in a dubious exercise of theirs. Imagine that – a media organization complaining that I gave the girls too much press. Basically constitutional rights are equal but some are more equal than others!
But in addition to acting as lying proxies for a foreign regime whom they also knew to be liars, WSJ created a pathway and precedent for foreign media influencing and attack campaigns against activists such as myself who had fled such regimes to safety in America – in my case after I was abducted, tortured and detained for months by a brutal military junta.
It wasn’t just in the lies they told but in the truths they didn’t tell. WSJ didn’t admit that the schoolgirls “rescued” from me by the Nigerian embassy serially failed their classes since 2016 but those who refused to follow the regime graduated in 2017 – a whole year before WSJ’s character assassination piece – setting a global record for the escaped schoolgirls. You read that right, instead of rescuing 112 girls from Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Nigerian government “rescued” seven girls from me in USA but five girls declined to be rescued!
In the entire hatchet piece, WSJ only attributed $7000 to me but couldn’t explain how I catered for a dozen schoolgirls for two years in America including putting three through college at exorbitant international student fees which in itself was a feat worthy of commendation.
WSJ’s lawyers argued it was “hyperbole” or that they were merely quoting the government but quoting a lying government doesn’t give one the right to suspend rational thought for stupidity. If it were, Trump would have reduced us to a nation of nincompoops.
It didn’t matter to WSJ that the Nigerian government in addition to wanting to hide the embarrassing saga of the terrorist abductions had mismanaged over $25 million dollars donated for securing schools with officials falsely claiming to be funding the girls I had sponsored abroad!
However the sorriest aspect to this pathetic saga, sad as it is, isn’t WSJ’s efforts to silence the most vocal Nigerian rights advocate in America for the freedom of the abducted and still missing 112 schoolgirls or that Nigeria actually has bragged about the mega budget which it claims to use to influence WSJ et al to counter activists’ advocacy.
Hinshaw and Parkinson have now published a book in a brazen attempt to profit off the backs of the schoolgirls whose greatest benefactor and advocate in the US they had defamed. Hutzpah doesn’t even come close! You can’t make this up, unless of course you’re Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson…
But this is the hubris white privilege smacks off. These unprofessional and untruthful journalists, as my lawsuit maintains, also just engaged in white appropriation of the Nigerian schoolgirls’ stories for personal profit after denigrating, as a terrorist, the human rights lawyer who actually sacrificially gave them an opportunity at life in America.
It’s the same Trumpesque bravado that carries on with its “alternative facts” as if no insurrection happened and self-adulates a corrupt acquittal.
It’s the absolutist monarchical impunity that allows WSJ to evade legal consequence – just because – like Buckingham Palace, they can do no wrong and I can do no right! In three decades of human rights work, I have seen plenty terrible things but nothing prepared me for the way white privilege tried to destroy a proven battle-scarred black humanitarian.
And it is the same mindset that Saudi Royal murderers cannot be trifled with regardless who’s in power. My lawyers uncovered a secret Nigerian embassy memo that targeted me for punishment and prevention from exposing the regime’s human rights abuses. Although a violation of US and international law, neither the Democrat nor Republican administrations held Nigeria’s government to account, even less so WSJ!
As Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson promote their for-profit book while hundreds more schoolgirls are kidnapped, no thanks to their help squelching or canceling voices like me fighting to end it and #bringbackourgirls, one question they should answer is, “dudes, where’s the video you claim you saw?”
* Ogebe is US based Human Rights lawyer