While the world remained transfixed on the atrocities perpetrated by radical Islamists in Paris, a far more extensive slaughter was being conducted in Nigeria. The African Islamofascist terrorist group Boko Haram killed as many as 2,000 people in horrific attacks on northern Nigerian villages that left bodies scattered as far as the eye could see.

On Saturday, Nigerian government spokesman Mike Omeri reported that fighting continues for Baga, a town that sits on the border with Chad. Boko Haram terrorists had seized a military base in the town Jan. 3 and initiated further attacks last Wednesday. “Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and conducted air strikes against militant targets,” Omeri said in a statement.

Those counter-attacks mattered little to Baga’s women, children and elderly, killed when they were unable to flee in time. “The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” said Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for a poorly armed civilian defense group that fights the terrorists.

District head Baba Abba Hassan tried to diminish the scope of the atrocity. “To say 2,000 people were killed is on the high side. The death toll could run into several hundreds,” he insisted, adding that an official body count had yet to be undertaken. But he also noted these Islamic thugs were not content with murder alone. “To add to our misery, Boko Haram fighters who remained in the area went on a burning spree, setting fire to our homes after looting them,” he revealed.

Musa Bukar, chairman of the local government where Baga is located, was not quite as sanguine. “Dead bodies litter the bushes in the area and it is still not safe to go and pick them [up] for burial,” he explained. “Some people who hid in their homes were burned alive.”

And while the world collectively mourns the 17 people killed in Paris over the course of three days, Boko Haram slaughtered more than 10,000 Nigerians in 2014, according to a count by the Council on Foreign Relations in November. In other words, more than 27 Nigerians were killed on average every day of the year.

Moreover, that carnage doesn’t include the spate of kidnappings also perpetrated by the terror group, including another 200 people from the village of Gumsuri in December, following the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from a boarding school in Chibok last April. Those kidnappings have subsequently resulted in hundreds of young girls being enslaved, raped, beaten, used as decoys in military operations – and now as suicide bombers. In the city of Maiduguri, a girl who may have been as young as 10 killed up to 20 and wounded several others at a crowded market Saturday when she detonated explosives hidden under her veil.

The West’s response to the initial kidnapping spree? A Twitter campaign that has since been forgotten. If there is anything that epitomizes the kind of feel-good-about-myself impotence of the West’s response to terror better than #BringBackOurGirls, one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is.

British writer James Delingpole penned a brilliant column last week explaining how the West will respond to the carnage in Paris – in all its multi-culti, hand-wringing, morally relative, bankrupt glory. Delingpole enumerates the machinations of a poisonous ideology that once again suggests it is Western society as a whole, or even the victims themselves, who bear a certain level of responsibility for inciting Islamofascist rage. The column ends with a well-deserved swipe at the contemptible denial that forms the heart of such bankruptcy:

> “Within a month, the [Paris] incident will largely be forgotten. Just like the Mumbai and Nairobi massacres were. Sophisticated commentators will recognise that though, of course what happened was pretty frightful and all that, it’s important to appreciate that your chances of being killed in a terrorist incident are way smaller than being, say, run over by a bus and that actually all we’re doing when we overreact to such incidents is placing undue emphasis on what are, after all, just rogue criminal acts and not the end of civilization.”

It is far worse than that. There is one – and only one – common denominator that links the atrocities in Paris and Nigeria: radical Islam. If only 5% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims have been radicalized, then there is an army, 80 million strong, yearning for the West’s submission to Sharia Law at best, or our complete annihilation at worst.

Nonetheless, we are supposed to be comforted by the notion that “moderate” Islam has our backs. Perhaps that is true, but it is of little comfort because so-called moderate Muslims are viewed as every bit the apostates by their radicalized brethren as any Jew or Christian – which is why they are also slaughtered with impunity, just as French policeman Ahmed Merabet was.

And that’s if moderates exist at all. As Front Page’s Daniel Greenfield so deftly points out, moderate or secular Islam “is not the religion of Mohammed, the Koran, the Hadiths, the Caliphs or its practitioners in such places as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq or Indonesia.” It is the one concocted by Western progressive apologists who require its existence lest “nationalism returns, borders close and the right wins,” and the Left’s “Socialist Kingdom of Heaven on Earth has to go in the rubbish bin.”

Perhaps nothing better explains the Left’s despicable “lone wolf” exhortations that inevitably follow each new atrocity.

Make no mistake: There is a war against an Islamic cancer far more reaching and deadly than the gaggle of Neville Chamberlain-like Western leaders are willing to countenance. Those leaders recoil from the proactive response such a threat desperately requires. Until an epiphany occurs, the body count of innocents across the globe will continue to multiply.

“The future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” said our feckless president at the United Nations in 2012. The hell it doesn’t – unless the freedom to criticize, satirize and ridicule all religions and prophets is extinguished by force. Or by self-imposed cowardice.