by WorldTribune Staff, January 7, 2024
While the United States and much of the world was celebrating, Muslims carried out the massacre of 200 Christians in Nigeria on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“During this holy time, ‘well-armed’ Muslim Fulani tribesmen hacked, stabbed, riddled with bullets, and burned alive their Christian victims, many of whom were in the process of celebrating Christmas,” Raymond Ibrahim noted in a Jan. 7 report for Gatestone Institute.
More than 300 Christians were also seriously wounded, 29,350 people displaced, and countless homes and churches — including 221 homes in just one village — were burned.
Between 2009 and April 2023, 52,250 Christians have been killed by Muslims in Nigeria, according to a report cited by Gatestone Institute. In that time, 18,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools were attacked, many “destroyed in part or in whole including being razed or burned down.” The death toll will rise substantially considering the data had not been updated since April 10 of last year.
Nigerian army soldiers were complicit in the attacks according to a report by TruthNigeria.com, and the government has urged broadcasters not cover them and to “to collaborate with the government in dealing with the security challenges.”
The report quoted tribal youth leader Mabas Ayuba as follows:
Occupied villages include Bodel, Ngyong, Ndun, Mutfet, and Yelwa Nono. The Fulani are there terrorizing anyone visiting. The soldiers have refused to go after them but are here arresting our people.
Team Biden has ignored the atrocities carried out by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria while the “mainstream media” does “everything possible to conceal this genocide. They present it as only territorial clashes between herdsmen and farmers,” Ibrahim wrote.
In its report on the Christmas slaughter of nearly 200 Christians, The Associated Press (AP) “failed to mention that the massacres occurred during Christmas, just as it failed to mention the identities of the attackers (Muslims) and their victims (Christians). Rather, it presented, as did Reuters, the conflict, as many commentators increasingly do, as a supposedly regrettable byproduct of climate change – which is, according to them, forcing herdsmen (Muslims) to encroach on the lands of farmers (Christians),” Ibrahim noted.
Related: Reuters blames Muslims’ slaughter of 140 Nigerian Christians on climate change, December 27, 2023
President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Johnnie Carson, blamed “inequality” and “poverty” after Muslim terrorists slaughtered 50 Christian church worshippers on Easter Sunday, 2012:
I want to take this opportunity to stress one key point and that is that religion is not driving extremist violence [in Nigeria].
Nigerian nun, Sister Monica Chikwe, noted:
It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.’
In 2020, President Donald Trump placed Nigeria on the State Department’s List of Countries of Particular Concern — that is, nations which engage in, or tolerate violations of, religious freedom. Team Biden removed Nigeria from the list even though, as Ibrahim noted, “a Christian is butchered every two hours.”
Sean Nelson, Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom for ADF International, slammed Team Biden’s move: “Outcry over the State Department’s removal of Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria’s religious freedom violations is entirely warranted. No explanations have been given that could justify this decision. If anything, the situation in Nigeria has grown worse over the last year. Thousands of Christians, as well as Muslims who oppose the goals of terrorist and militia groups, are targeted, killed, and kidnapped, and the government is simply unwilling to stop these atrocities. … Removing Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria will only embolden the increasingly authoritarian government there.”
American media and government, Ibrahim concluded, “present Nigeria’s problems in purely economic terms that defy reality. Put differently, for the mainstream media and many politicians, black lives — well over 50,000 and counting — apparently do not matter. At least not when those lives are Christian and being slaughtered by Muslims.”
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