Refugees in a camp in Kaduna state
"Church spokesmen warn that the country is becoming a 'theater for religious war.'" From Compass Direct:
April 5 (Compass) — Christian leaders have condemned Muslim fundamentalists for killing Christians and destroying churches in northern Nigeria, warning that the national government’s inability to address the violence against Christians could turn the country into a theater for religious war.The warning comes after a recent outbreak of religious violence that has set Muslims against Christians in different parts of the country. Ongoing conflict has been reported in the states of Plateau, Jigawa, Nasarawa and Bauchi.
Just as Christian leaders were emphasizing that the patience of Christians is wearing thin due to the violence perpetrated against them, Muslim fundamentalists unleashed more attacks in the northern state of Jigawa, burning down three churches in the town of Dutse.
Lamenting the reprehensible acts of violence in the country, Archbishop Peter Akinola issued the warning in the capital of Abuja on March 29. He said there is no justification for the incessant aggression against Christians. Dr. Akinola is primate of the Anglican Church and the national president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), an umbrella body uniting Christians in the country.
CAN issued a prepared statement to the press that read, “How can anyone explain the reason for invading a church where women, children and men were worshipping, asking them to surrender and lie face down and then proceed to machete and axe them to death in their house of worship?”
The statement, signed on behalf of Nigeria’s churches by CAN leadership, asserted that Christians in Nigeria have never initiated any such act of violence against Muslims and wondered why killing Christians and destroying churches has become a Muslim pastime. The statement also claimed that the Nigerian government and its security agencies demonstrate lukewarm attitudes toward the plight of Christians, particularly in northern Nigeria. It also expressed CAN leaders’ sadness that none of the perpetrators of the violence has been arrested.
“Even the police and other security outfits who are being paid from taxes paid by Christians for protection are not doing anything,” the Christian leaders wrote.
They warned that the Christian population is nearing its limit of endurance and explained that CAN leadership has been restraining restive Christians from retaliating on the Muslims. They said Muslims must stop further provocation, “if we are all truly interested in peaceful co-existence.”
Meanwhile, Muslim fundamentalists in the state of Jigawa burned down three churches in the town of Dutse on March 31. The sanctuaries of Redeemed Christian Church, Calvary Church, and the Living Faith Church were reportedly valued at several million dollars.
Prior to the destruction of the churches, a local Muslim fundamentalist leader, Alhaji Ibrahim Adamu, had taken the leadership of the Living Faith Church to court. Adamu demanded that the church move away from the town because, as a Muslim, the presence of the church affected his sensibilities.
The case was still being tried when the Muslim cleric led a band of extremists on a raid against the church and carted away church goods. Arrested and charged with theft, Adamu was subsequently remanded to prison. The court action angered his Muslim followers, who burned down the churches and attacked Christians.
Deputy state police commissioner Haz Iwendi confirmed the destruction of the churches. “Yes, three churches, the Redeemed Christian Church, Living Faith and Calvary Church, were burnt down, but no one was killed in the attacks,” Iwendi told Compass in Dutse.
State police commissioner Alhaji Sale Abubakar issued a directive that journalists be barred from the arson sites “because we fear that reports of the attacks could spark off more violence in the country.”
Jigawa deputy governor Alhaji Ibrahim Hassan described the burning of the churches and the violence against Christians in the town as “unfortunate and shameful.”
Hassan, a Muslim, told Compass, “It is a mob action by miscreants to destabilize the state. Government is mindful of its responsibilities toward protecting life and property.”
And yet, in the few times that the media has picked up on the destruction of Christianity in northern Nigeria, the news is labeled as "sectarian violence," as if all is equal in violence and jihad. Muslims are burning Christian churches, businesses, young Christian girls are told to wear the veil,or suffer the consequences. From the southern Phillippines to nortehr Nigeria, the story is the same, and the victims are non-Muslims.
And why is the Pope quite?
Where is the leader of the anglican church in England ?
What does Tony Blair and his idiot wife have to say ?
Where is jenny Tonge (Liberal democrat MP, Richmond park ward) "I can understand why people turn to suicide bombing"
Why are the French & german leaders quite ?
Why Why ???
It is widely reported Brittany Spears lates paramour
and the name of Mick Jagger's new wife...
But try to find this story in the elite media...
it won't happen!
The British press has much more vital things to write about than this. Posh and Becks' marital upsets are much more important....
When the Ibos, Christians in the south, from which all of Nigeria's oil wealth comes, tried to secede from the north, and the constant aggression by the Muslim Hausas (the other main tribe, the Yoruba, contain both Christians and Muslims), and declare the state of Biafra, only two countires in the world recognized Biafra -- Ghana, and Israel. The rest of the world thought it more important to "hold Nigeria together" (why?). Neither Nigeria, nor the Sudan, ought to be "held together" for some as yet quite unidentified principle -- why should the Christians of Nigeria, or of Sudan, in whose territories the oil deposits can be found, be forcibly yoked to the northern Muslims, who in the Sudan have engaged in several decades of mass murder and enslavement (and have now added the western area of Darfur -- even Nicholas Kristof is outraged, though it is doubtful he will ever recognize what is happening in the Sudan as part of the world-wide Jihad, because that would require a complete change in his understanding of history, and of the world).
Why should not the American government take a much more active interest in the oppression of Christians in both Nigeria and the southern Sudan-- a little publicity given to black church leaders, in conclave assembled at the White House, to discuss the Muslim aggression against Christians in both places (along with slavery in Mali and Mauritania, Muslim terrorism in Tanzania, Kenya, and Capetwon, that agenda will be quite full). Why, even that tool of the Islamintern International, Kofi Annan (just look at how Edward Mortimer, his "Director of Communications," uses him as his marionette), cannot -- after his scandalous performance during the Rwandan murders, with which General Romeo Allaire, and the judgment of posterity, will always indissolubly link him, will have a hard time coming up with arguments why Biafra redevivus (just tryng to avoid that damned "redux" that Updike brought back for the world's overuse and misuse), or a free southern Sudan (10,000 marines, or even 5,000, with airpower, could stop the northern Arabs in their tracks, preserve the southern Sudanese, and while throwing back the dar al-Islam, and winning territory back for dar al-Harb -- and not insignificantly giving heart to the beleaguered Christians of East Africa, who feel the Arab slavetraders of Pemba and Zanzibar somehow coming back. Can a few thousand good men be spared from the idiotic goal of "winning hearts and minds" (hostile hearts, primitive minds) in Iraq, and do something that will really inflict serious damage on the world-wide Jihad?
That Awful Mess on the Via Mutanabi has just got to stop. Please -- get out, let Iraq descend into Night and Chaos (don't hear much about Somalia, anymore, do you?), and accompany that intelligent withdrawal, not retreat, with a series of actions that will truly harm the Jihad, and put Islam on the run.
Start with the Sudan. Other measures that might accompany the establishment, after two decades of genocide, of a free and independent southern Sudan, would be to cut all military and other aid to Egypt, as a world center of antisemitism and anti-Americanism (even threatening to cut a mere $30 million got the attention of corrupt Egyptian officials, and their spoiled anti-American children, from assorted Jockey Clubs and Mena Island pleasure-palaces, so that they promptly found a way to free a "civil society" activist and head of the Ibn Khaldun Center -- not out of any sense of justice, or decency, but just to avoid having that $30 million cut. It is maddening that Mubarak, far from being read the riot act, was actually invited to the ranch in Crawford -- how much longer can this nonsense, taking seriously the pashas and beglerbegs with their absurd pretentions and demands?
The only thing worse than continuing the farcical and Sisyphean task of creating "democracy" in Iraq (a society riven with tribalism, sectarian and ethnic divisions), is to get out without accompanying that decision with a host of measures clearly designed to cleverly damage, on a variety of fronts, the Jihad -- in other words, to show that we realize realize that while the dethroning of Saddam Hussein, and the destruction of Iraq's arsenal, was important (and all Muslim states must be similarly deprived of major weaponry that, by accident or design, could fall into the most extreme anti-Infidel hands), was perfectly justified, it is the Iraqis themselves who have failed -- failed to be anything but passive,waiting for the Americans to rebuild and their country and give it, in the manner of the television show, an instant make-over, while they continue to complain about the pace of the building, and rebuilding, and repair, and re-repair, of schools and hospitals, roads and electricity grids, oil wells and -- well, by the way, those soccer balls you have been handing out -- well, we want i-Books too. The "misrepesentative men" such as Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya are far less the "real" Iraq than is Muqtada al-Sadr, or the frenzied mobs in Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Baghdad. And policy has to be based not on the misleadingly amiable and smiling (some of them, such as Adnan Pachachi, are famously untrustworthy, though they always manage to land on their feet. Pachachi, no doubt smacking his lips over the amount of loot he figures will be his share of the American-supplied bonanza, has lasted through every regime since the last Hashemite, even through his attempt, when he worked for Zayed in Abu Dhabi in 1971, to work with the Saudis behind Zayed's back) failed in their absurd expectations that the Americans, for whom they feel a gratitude that is feigned, go on? just imagine how they will react when the Infidels start to remove them from the dole)aworld center of antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
There's more -- but let's begin there: a free southern Sudan, a Biafra if the Christians in southern Nigeria if feel they need it, an end to foreign aid to Muslim states unless they embrace a version of Kemalism, and mean it -- beginning with cutting off all aid to Egypt, which has violated every single one of its solemn commitments under the Camp David accords. And don't worry about predictions of doom, after all the indignat huffing-and-puffing from Cairo -- really, where are the Egyptians going to get the kind of military hardware that we have been supplying them so dangerously? (Does the example of Pakistan, or those Stinger missiles handed out like confetti in Afghanistan, not come to the minds even of the most heedless?) Who's going to give Egypt the $60 billion America has, for no discernible good reason (what? to keep the peace? but the peace is kept, by the army of Israel, the only thing which keeps Egypt from attacking), already foolishly handed over to a Muslim country, which ought instead not to be kept alive with infusions of Infidel wealth, but be made to see that it is Islam itself which, unless tamed, is the cause of the political and economic and intellectual and moral failure in Egypt.
Besides, let it be clear that the continued persecution of Copts, and the continued busy preparations for eventual war with Israel (not to mention the fact that Egypt is now the world center of antisemitic propaganda as well as a center for anti-American activity) is no longe going to be rewarded by the long-suffering American taxpayers. Sorry!
That Awful Mess on Via Mutanabi... well, let us leave them to make each other miserable, and leave the Lesser Anti-Jihad (Iraq) for the Greater Jihad outside Iraq, which must involve all the cunning stratagems of war, including the careful re-allocation of men, materiel, money, and political capital.
Nigeria, and the Sudan, are good places to show that we are serious about protecting non-Muslims, and not only our cosseted Western selves, from the depredations of Islam. And the Western Europeans, now on the brink of figuring out about Islam (but they need a big American push, which will undergird what Oriana Fallaci, and Magdi Allam, and Bat Ye'or, and Alain Besancon, and Alain Finkielkraut, and a swelling chorus of suddenly frightened locals, can provide).
Has everybody got a hold on the EXACT NATURE of the media's problem: this is a religious distortion, not money, not politics. The distortions are all over the U.S. in information and justice issues, not RIGHTS but BELIEF. If you think you have persecution, that's right, that's what it is: think of all of the dynamics in terms of evil/good, power, hope and struggle for the truth. We are still trying at all costs to organize our forces, and there is going to be opposition to match our faith and fight.