Why don’t celebrities care about the Israeli hostages?

My mind keeps going back almost ten years, to Nigeria in 2014. As some readers will remember, on the night of 14 April, 276 mainly Christian schoolgirls were abducted by terrorists from the Boko Haram group. It happened at a school in a town called Chibok in Borno State.

In some ways it is obvious why there was such international outrage at the incident. After all, this was 276 schoolgirls, kidnapped by an Islamic terrorist group. Even a world that had seen the Beslan school siege in 2004 and was starting to see the workings of Isis still had the capacity to be shocked.

And yet the international reaction was also surprising. After all it is not like the conflicts in the north of Nigeria are a subject of consuming fascination to non-Nigerians. I well remember returning from my first trip to Borno State and being told by a newspaper editor that they didn’t think a story on a Nigerian church massacre would fit that week’s pages because they already had an Africa story that week (from Johannesburg, I seem to recall). Still, for some reason the Chibok schoolgirls story caught on, and in short order almost every celebrity in the world got on board. It cohered around the hashtag ‘Bring Back Our Girls’.

Michelle Obama was one of the first megastars to promote this slogan. She had herself photographed in the White House holding a piece of paper with the slogan while showing a sad face. And it was sincere, clearly. It was hard to know how else to react to these schoolgirls all being held hostage.

As so often with social media campaigns, it soon became a sort of badge of honour, like that strange moment when all male political leaders in Britain were expected to wear a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt.