The persecution of Nigeria's Christians
(and other stories.)
First, a few news roundups (that’s three separate links.) Then we have D.C. Comics taking their LGBT advocacy to the next level with their announcement that the new Superman is gay. This story, about female inmates potentially facing extra jailtime for “misgendering” the male criminals being locked up with them, is particularly blood-curdling. The Cambridge Student Union published a guide to “identifying TERFs.” The Canadian media has finally published an article that recognizes the other side of the transgender story; the mainstream media covered up the story of a girl being sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a boy in a skirt; Northern Ireland’s abortion wars are heating up.
At The American Conservative, I have a review of a new bombshell biography of Norma “Jane Roe” McCorvey, in which the identity of the Roe baby, who was never aborted, is revealed. It’s a fascinating read.
There’s a couple of new shows, too. I had a fascinating conversation with General Keith Kellogg, who served as national security advisor to both President Trump and Vice-President Pence. I also talked with David Critchlow about his new book, Revolutionary Monsters. Finally, I interviewed conservative author and former Marxist David Horowitz (whom I disagree with on many things but has written some magnificent books.)
Finally, I have an essay on the persecution of Nigeria’s Christians in The European Conservative:
The Slow-Motion Genocide of Nigeria’s Christians
At 3 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, May 30, the Fulani attack began. Wielding guns and machetes, the attackers swept into the villages of Ndobashi and Ekpufu, with the violence soon spreading to several neighboring Izi villages in Nigeria’s Benue State. Militants murdered men, women, and children without mercy. Some families—parents and children—were completely wiped out. Pregnant women were not spared. Villagers fled their homes and took refuge in the bush, returning to find burned homes and charred corpses.
“Muslims burned many houses, more than 200 of them in a place called Nwori market,” wrote Rev. Sosthenes Obo after the attack. “They hacked almost 54 persons to death in that one village of Ndobashi Iseke (situated in Ado Local Government area of Benue State). They burned many houses inside the village to ashes and properties worth billions of naira [the Nigerian currency], churches, church generators, seats, Bibles, and song books. They thought they’d killed a Methodist pastor in the same village after they had dealt him several machete cuts, but God prevented his death with the help of medical doctors. They looted handsets, power banks, chargers, laptops, clothes, and many other things.”
The villagers were targeted because they were Christians—both Ndobashi and Ekpufu are home to Nigerian Reformed churches. Miraculously, both Reformed pastors survived the assault. Rev. Obo had just finished preparing for the morning church services and fled with his wife through a passageway in their house. She collapsed during their flight and began to cry out “Jesus, Jesus!” when the attackers overtook her. Strangely, the persecutors let her go. In the days that followed, several such stories surfaced—Christian victims calling on Jesus, and their attackers recoiling and allowing them to survive.
Rev. Obo and his wife escaped with their lives, but their house was looted. A purse, special reading glasses, clothing, large amounts of money, and other items were stolen; twenty-two bags of rice were burned. Video footage taken just after the attack shows a village utterly destroyed, with houses still smoldering and survivors walking about in a daze, assessing the damage, wearing whatever clothes they’d managed to pull on before they fled.
Between 117 and 136 people were killed in a single day. It was yet another attack in what long-time observers of violence against Christians in Nigeria are calling new heights of jihadist violence. Nearly half of Nigeria’s population identifies as Christian (over 95 million people out of 206 million). But since 2015, well over 12,000 Christians have been killed—with many more being wounded, forced from their homes, or simply vanishing entirely. Kidnapped women and girls are often forced into “marriages” with Muslim militants. Violence has driven thousands of Christians into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, with invaders occupying their ancestral homes. Perpetrators of these crimes are almost never punished, and persecution occurs with near impunity.
Some have begun to ask the question: Is a genocide unfolding in Nigeria?
Akey reason that the persecution of Christians in Nigeria receives less attention than violence elsewhere is that the situation there is so complex. Nigeria is a cobbled-together country of hundreds of ethnic groups and three major faiths—Islam, Christianity, and animism—jostle and overlap like tectonic plates, sending shockwaves throughout the region. Many Westerners will be primarily familiar with the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, which operates mainly out of bases on islands in Lake Chad in the northeast and is internationally infamous for kidnapping schoolgirls. While Boko Haram has undergone several splits and iterations, it has successfully achieved a military deadlock with the government in their war to destroy Christianity in Nigeria, not least due to the isolation of its encampments.
Less well-known are the religious motives of the Muslim Fulani herders, a considerable number of whom have formed armed militias. These are the Fulani who were profiled by the BBC in July 2021 and referred to as “Nigeria’s hipster herders—the funky Fulanis”; the BBC’s single oblique reference to the violence noted that: “Most only see the Fulani herders when they are marching their cattle across the country, which has become a deadly issue since 2017 as clashes between them and farmers over grazing land have killed thousands.”
There are some, in fact, who insist that attacks such as those suffered by Rev. Obo and Christians in the surrounding villages are all about clashes over pastures rather than religion, ignoring the fact that one civil liberties group estimates that nearly 3,500 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria since the beginning of 2021—nearly all of them by “extremist Fulani herdsmen.” In a mere 200 days of 2021, according to the same report, an additional 3,000 Christians have been kidnapped and an estimated 300 churches have been either attacked or forced to close. The complexity of these situations can be succinctly summarized: They are attacks on Christians by Muslims to effect the Islamization of Nigeria with the passive cooperation of the Nigerian government.