This latest mass murder in the name of Islam and jihad comes as Islamic supremacists in the U.S. are pushing with renewed fervor the discredited meme that “Muslims are the new Jews,” and that resistance to the jihad and Islamic supremacism is equivalent to Nazism and tending toward genocide, with anti-jihadists cast as Nazi propagandists. Aside from the obvious facts, such as that anti-jihadists oppose the killing of innocents, detention camps, etc., and are standing for human rights, jihadist actions like this one show just how grotesque that comparison really is: it is equating the victims of earlier mass murders — the Jews of Europe — with the perpetrators of mass murders today.
An update on this story. “Officials: 67 dead in northeast Nigeria attacks,” by Jon Gambrell and Njadvara Musa for the Associated Press, November 5 (thanks to Kenneth):
LAGOS, Nigeria “” At least 67 people died in a wave of bombings and shootings carried out in northeast Nigeria overnight, officials said Saturday, as frightened mourners left their homes to begin burying their dead.
A newspaper says a radical Muslim sect known locally as Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks and has promised to launch new assaults.
The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record in Nigeria’s Muslim north, says Boko Haram spokesman Abul-Qaqa spoke to them Saturday and claimed the attacks that have killed at least 67 people in and around Damaturu and Maiduguri.
The spokesman told the newspaper: “We will continue attacking federal government formations until security forces stop their excesses on our members and vulnerable civilians.”
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, has waged an increasingly bloody sectarian fight against Nigeria’s weak central government
The latest attacks centered around Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, Nigerian Red Cross official Ibrahim Bulama said. The attack started Friday with a car bomb exploding outside a three-story building used as a military office and barracks in the city, with many uniformed security agents dying in the blast, Bulama said.
Gunmen then went through the town, blowing up a First Bank PLC branch and attacking at least three police stations and some churches, leaving them in rubble, he said. Gunfire continued through the night and gunmen raided the village of Potiskum near the capital as well, witnesses said, leaving at least two people dead there….
The attacks around Damaturu came after four separate bombings struck Maiduguri, about 80 miles east. One blast detonated around noon outside the El-Kanemi Theological College where parents had gathered. Police said others had entered the college grounds to attend Friday prayers at a mosque located on its campus….
A short time later, suicide bombers driving a black SUV attempted to enter a base for the military unit charged with protecting the city from Boko Haram fighters, military spokesman Lt. Col. Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed said. The SUV couldn’t enter the gate and the explosives were detonated outside of the base, which damaged several buildings in the military’s compound, Mohammed said….
The bombings come ahead of Eid al-Adha, or the feast of sacrifice, when Muslims around the world slaughter sheep and cattle in remembrance of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son. Police elsewhere in the country had warned of violence ahead of the celebration in Nigeria, a country of more than 160 million largely split between a Christian south and a Muslim north. On Wednesday, police in Maiduguri had said they broke up a plot to bomb the city over the holiday.
If claimed by Boko Haram, the attacks would be the most bold and coordinated ever carried out by the group, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege.” In August, Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing at the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, which killed 24 people and left another 116 wounded….