This is quite likely a pointless article, as American news companies are completely laser-focused on keeping you up-to-date with what's happening in the world.
I'm sure you've heard plenty of stories detailing the malnutrition and starvation of hundreds of millions due to coronavirus lockdowns, the ongoing horrors of Communist China, the massive increase in trafficking, domestic abuse, addiction, and suicide due to lockdowns, and the increasing persecution of Christians around the world.
In case you didn't see the extensive one or two articles published on such topics each month – buried at the bottom of webpages below a hundred articles detailing how the president is a Nazi and how the ‘Rona is lurking out your door – here's a peek inside Nigeria, where the brutal mass murder of Christians has become the status quo.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation, and one of the most diverse. It straddles the Sahel – an area across Africa that separates the Muslim-majority Sahara from the Christian-majority tropics.
Since 2009, largely in the north of the country, Islamists have murdered 34,400 Christians and 20,000 cultural Muslims who often maintain animistic traditional beliefs and practices. These Islamists largely come from the Fulani people group and many are members with the group Boko Haram.
In 2020 alone, 2,200 Christians were slaughtered – oftentimes with entire villages being burned, raped, and hacked to pieces.
Consider this story from earlier this year in the village of Gonan Rogo:
"Terrorists killed at least 20 that evening as they went from house to house yelling ‘Allahu Akbar' along the way. They also put a bullet in the head of a 3-month-old and hacked a 6-year-old to death. We don't know their names. We do know the name of a 14-year-old girl who was murdered along with her grandparents. Her name was Blessing."
I tried to locate footage to give a visual on this horror, but 90% of it is too disturbing to post here. This included a video of a woman found dumped in the woods after terrorists raped and murdered her, mass shootings of men and boys tied up on the ground, and the actual beheading of a scared woman with a machete. This video of a burial is about as PG as it gets:
The government does little to help, maintaining troops in the region, but instructing them to flee when attacked and creating propaganda denying the attacks in order to appear useful without actually doing anything.
Even worse is the fact that President Buhari is an Islamist himself, obviously trying to create an Islamic caliphate in the nation by stacking the government with Muslims and breaking the constitution. He's also a member of the "Miyatti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria," which directly supports the nomadic Fulani herdsmen that often attack villages.
Christmas is shaping up to be a particularly bloody season this year, with a string of attacks anticipated in the coming weeks. 300 kids were just taken from a school recently, and attacks on farms and villages continue to ramp up.
Last year, Boko Haram celebrated Christmas Day by beheading 11 Christians on video.
Now the question: What can we do to stop it? There are a few things. First of all, let's note that the Trump administration has made religious freedom a central component of its foreign policy. Should Trump pull off a Hail Mary of the Republic and win a second term, there will be a lot more leverage for U.S. citizens to pressure their representatives and give to ministries working in the nation.
The current ambassador in Nigeria, Mary Beth Leonard, seems disinterested in the slaughters, believing it‘s a "resource" issue. Presumably, the more than a billion U.S. taxpayer dollars that go to Nigeria each year aren't enough "resources" to solve the problem. There needs to be pressure from American citizens to hold her and her successors accountable and call this genocide what it is.
Pressure our elected officials endlessly over this matter.
Should Biden's ambassadorial pick get in, expect a return to the Obama era, where criticizing a violent ideology hellbent on hacking 3-month-olds and raping girls is called "Islamophobic." Remember that Obama wouldn't even call Boko Haram TERRORISTS.
Another thing you can do is support ministries working in Nigeria. Here is a list, and additional ministries can be found with some research.
One thing is for sure: while we hide in our homes in fear of a 99.98% survivable virus, the world continues to go to hell in a hand basket. It's a good thing the ‘Rona wasn't around during the Second World War.
Or perhaps it's that we were once known as a people of valor who were willing to die on foreign shores so that others might live. Now we're afraid to go to Walmart.
As one Nigerian pastor put it:
"This issue of COVID-19: we don't know anything about it; our problem is Fulani who keep killing us."
