How does the well-documented mass murder of Christians in Nigeria by Islamists suddenly become a "right wing" conspiracy?
Whenever Trump gets involved with it
America’s attention span is getting ridiculously short, and its credulity dangerously out of synch with reality as a whole.
Moreover, America’s cognitive elites have at the same time been perversely stripped of their moral compass, if they ever really possessed one.
Take the very recent kerfuffle with a three-day shelf life over the reported mass slaughter of Christians in Nigeria.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and several Congressional representatives from red states have been heard beating the drum for the last several months about doing something to counter the persistent atrocities.
Estimates vary about how many Christians have actually been killed, mainly by Islamist jihadists. However, consensus estimates peg the figure at a little over 50,000 since 2009.
Cruz himself drew significant public notice on September 11 of this year when he introduced as legislation the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025 aimed at “holding accountable Nigerian officials who facilitate Islamist jihadist violence and the imposition of blasphemy laws”.
But Cruz’ initiative did not gain much traction until last Saturday when President Trump threatened in a Truth Social post to launch military strikes in Nigeria.
Trump wrote: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
Of course, Trump’s statement about a genuine tragedy that has been slinking in and out of the news for years suddenly made it headline news.
But given the overpowering posture of the American news media that Trump can do nothing but wrong, Trump’s announcement – even more tragically - made the matter no longer about the tragedy itself, but all about Trump and Trumpism.
The African editor of the influential global news site Semafor put it smugly:
The Nigerian government can’t say this Trump move has come as a surprise. The “Christian killings” in Nigeria narrative had picked up steam in recent weeks as it made its way from fringe right wing conservative Chrisitan (sic) media circles to lower profile Congressmen then on to Sen. Ted Cruz. It was clear that this would eventually get to Trump.
Rather than “right wing” Christian conservatives, however, it was mutatis mutandis a prominent, secular Nigerian NGO named the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, popularly known as Intersociety, that issued the original report back in August of this year.
Founded in 2008 by Emeka Umeagbalasi, a criminologist and human rights advocate, Intersociety focuses on democracy, rule of law, and citizens’ security advocacy in Nigeria. It also exposes human rights offense while seeking to hold perpetrators accountable.
Intersociety is generally considered a highly credible source of data and information by both parties in Congress, which historically has relied on its expertise.
Following Intersociety’s report high-profile Christian organizations such as Global Christian Relief and Christian Solidarity International as well as the Vatican itself mobilized to increase both political awareness and pressure on the United States government to do something.
It should be noted that, according to its special report, Intersociety has down the same with government officials in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union.
While left-leaning mainstream media in both North America and Europe seemingly has gone out of their way to debunk the very narrative that Intersociety painstakingly fashioned, the US State Department uncovered alarming information correlating what the Nigerian NGO had been bringing to light as early as 2020.
It was then, not five years thereafter, that the state department designated Nigeria – as did other countries accordingly – a “Country of Particular Concern”.
According to Intersociety, the situation today is absolutely dire. Intersociety itself does not pull punches.
Nigeria is headquartering and providing safe haven for no fewer than 22 embryonic and full grown Islamic Terror Groups in Africa with links or potential links to ISIS, ISIL and World Jihad Fund. The 22 Islamic Terror Groups, presently using Nigeria as their safest haven, are also seeking to obliterate or wipe out estimated 112m Christians and 13m Traditional Religionists across the country, particularly in Igbo Land South-East and South-South by the Year 2075 or in 50 years’ time. It is also important to inform that apart from seeking to uproot and obliterate Christianity, these 22 Islamic Terror Groups are seeking, using violence and genocidal means, to obliterate or wipe out Nigeria’s indigenous ethnic groups and their identities especially the 3,475-Year-Old Igbo Cultural Heritage put in place since 1450BC. It is also very important to clarify that many of the Igbo Traditional Religionists are Christianity-affiliated.
Thus one is obliged to pose the prickly and unnerving question – why is the American intelligentsia along with so much of academic completely unconcerned about the transparently documented, targeted murder of 50,000 black African Christians, even to the extent that they scoff and jeer at is as partisan, ideologically motivated, and overblown?
The magnitude of officially identified casualties in Gaza, which are sourced from Hamas without distinguishing between civilians and combatants in a manner that makes the data overly suspect, is approximate to the estimates from Nigeria, which may in truth be understated.
Why can the Associated Press quote unnamed “experts” as saying “Nigeria’s complex security dynamics do not meet the legal definition of a genocide” when the latter routinely as just as glibly makes fulsome, maximalist charges against Israel while obliterating the very same “legal” standards that should apply in both situations?
Notwithstanding such blatant and odious hypocrisy, these vaguely credentialed “authorities” that are often cited tend to traffic in smooth, but highly sophistical “both-sides” sorts of narratives, as if the fact that certain non-Christians – what is referred to in the lingo simply and abstrusely as “moderate Muslims” – have also been killed by the jihadists diminishes the urgency of dealing with the mass targeted killings of Christians.
It is akin to arguing that in any given conflict human rights violators should be immune from prosecution for because so many others in similar circumstances did not commit such crimes.
A case in point is an interview in Democracy Now with Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for literature – not the Nobel for peace, mind you, as the article insinuates - in 1986. Supposedly that distinction supplies Soyinka with optimal credentials to trash whatever Intersociety claims.
It would be as if Jean-Paul Sartre, who also was awarded the same literary honors in 1964, turns out to be the obvious go-to pundit most qualified to explain the complexities of the Cold War between the West and world Communism.
Though critical of party orthodoxy, Sartre was a committed Communist.
Complaining about his denial of a visa to the United States by the Trump administration, Soyinka, Soyinka opines to Amy Goodman in the interview:
Let me begin by just stating my conviction that we must separate the problems which Nigeria has, and has had for decades, separate that from President Trump’s response, recent response. The Christian-Islam, or Islam versus the rest, or even Christianity versus the rest, that kind of a dichotomy has existed, as I said, for quite a few decades. It’s escalated. It’s become truly horrendous in many aspects since politics got mixed up with religious differences.
Soyinka cites an incidences where a Nigeria Christian girl was savagely tortured and killed by radical Islamists, who did so with impunity. The girl allegedly “blasphemed against the prophet Muhammed”.
Soyinka goes on to explain:
Now, it is those kinds of incident (sic) which escalates in popular perception that there is a brutal war going on between Christians and Muslims, whereas, in truth, we’re dealing with extremists. We’re dealing with political Islamists, known sometimes as ISWAP across West Africa or Boko Haram within Nigeria. These are the real enemies of society, not Islam as such, not followers of Islam, the Muslims as such. It’s the political Islamist extremists, the psychopaths. Unfortunately, they’ve allied with similar movements outside Nigeria, and so they have a steady supply of arms. I mean, they carry arms so sophisticated that sometimes the military cannot subdue them. Then, you’ve had, frankly, let’s be honest, some very lackadaisical leaders in the direction of curtailing, just curbing, this monstrosity of fundamentalism, of homicidal fundamentalism. We have groups, very well armed, who swoop on villages, and they cite fidelity to Islam. Now, these are the real enemies, not Muslims.
Finally, he accuses Trump of making “sweeping statements” that do not make “things easy for there to be a resolution, because it’s expanding the zones, the regions of hostility, expanding them to an extent.”
Okay, but Trump did not accuse Islam per se. Nor did Intersociety. Nor have any major international Christian agencies who have called for active measures against Islamic “extremists” in Nigeria.
It seems that one cannot condemn atrocities by such “extremists”.
Note to self: one must not dare at all to characterize said extremists as “Islamic” because – heaven forbid – such unabashed truth-telling might somehow somewhere at some time precipitate a flitting instance of “Islamophobia”, despite the calculated butchery of 50,000 souls.
During the interview Soyinka proudly proclaimed that he lives and teaches not in Nigeria but in Abu Dhabi, which according to both Intersociety and the U.S. State Department are principal financiers of Boko Haram, the worst of the homegrown jihadists responsible for the slaughter of Christians.
So that inconvenient factoid further undermines Soyinka’s credibility when it comes to this particular controversy.
Human rights lawyer, scholar, and activist Nina Shea, appointed by the House of Representatives to the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom from 1999-2012, testified before Congress earlier this year about how the Nigerian government openly enables the Fulanis, another local Islamist terrorist group, to systemically murder Christian farmers without fear of consequences.
Shea told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs:
There is broad concern that this reflects a plan to forciblyIslamize Nigeria in violation of its secular Constitution. Last week the Nigerian Catholic Bishop’s Conference released a letter expressing deep concern that some of the 12 northern states that impose Sharia law ordered Catholic and other Christian schools closed for 5 weeks and forced observance of Ramadan. And theycited the Constitution’s guarantee of a secular State.
In other words, the Nigerian government ipso facto remains utterly and unextricably complicit in the campaign against Christians, and it is without any doubt the persecution of one religion byanother.
Whether all this is tantamount to a “genocide” in a technical sense, of course, beside the point. In the last few years the g-word has been slung about with such abandon that it has become insufferably trite and vacuous (like the all-purpose political aspersion “fascist”).
But, no, it is not “politics” that just so happened to get “mixed up with religious issues”.
Hair splitting, red herrings, and logic chopping, if not downright distortion of the facts on the ground, seem to be the polemical tricks of the trade for our jaded progressive commentariat, who seem to reflexively assimilate any inconvenient truths concerning the persecution of Christians by Islamists to their ritualized and fetishized condemnations of all things Trump.
Let’s be honest.
For Trump, who is relentlessly flayed by his critics for cozying up to dictators and ignoring human rights violations, ostensibly to expose real, blatant, and ongoing human rights abuses to which his critics routinely give short shrift while seemingly taking outsize measures to deny and cover them up, is quite a sight to behold.