Outrage alone won't rescue kidnapped Nigerian girls.

President Obama -- three weeks late -- has done something to help rescue those Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by extremist Islamist terrorists.

He's sending a team of military officials and hostage negotiators to help the hapless Nigerian government track down and retrieve the 223 girls.

The girls will almost certainly be sold to sex traffickers or kept as sex slaves by the militant terrorist group known as Boko Haram, whose name translates as "Western education is sinful.''

It's nice that our president has "sprung'' into action. But what took him -- and the rest of the world -- so long to work up their outrage over this latest crime against children?

Boko Haram is a textbook gang of jihadist thugs.

It has killed 10,000 Nigerians in a decade and specializes in kidnapping Christians and Western tourists.

Its goal is to take over Nigeria and install a pure Islamic state governed by sharia law that will keep its young girls stupid and imprisoned by its moronic brand of 7th-century fundamentalism.

Yet for three weeks there was hardly a peep of protest from the West about what Boko Haram did to these schoolgirls.

I didn't expect to hear any moral fury from the world "leaders'' of the United Nations, where probably half the membership agrees with Boko Haram's position on the subjection of women.

But where was the White House for the last three weeks? Where was Congress? Where was our president-in-waiting, Hillary Clinton? Oprah?

Didn't any American politician think the kidnapping of innocent children by violent Islamists was worth a speech of condemnation?

Or, better yet, a call for the United States to step up, become the moral point man on this act and do something decisive?

Were our brave pols worried they might offend one of their important constituencies? Or be blown up by terrorists?

Poor John Kerry made a fool of himself last week, blustering something about Boko Haram's "unconscionable crime,'' its violence and, bizzarely, its failure to offer people a good health care plan, jobs or schools.

The leaders of Boko Haram deserve to be rounded up and shot for their crimes, not critiqued...