Northern Nigeria-Persecution and Slaughter of Christians

‘Disgraceful’ Church of England leaves persecuted Nigerians to their fate      Douglas Murray, scourge of politically correct liberals, and president baiter who launched 'the President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition’, has turned his guns on the Anglican Church for its ‘pathetic’ stance on Northern Nigeria.

The influential Spectator columnist and Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society has accused the church of ‘wilful self-deception’ in its analysis of the trials of Christians still being slaughtered by militarised Fulani Muslims as the world looks away.

Murray spent four days visiting massacre sites and interviewing victims in and around Jos, capital of Plateau State, in the contested Muslim north of the country.

‘The simple evidence from the map of the diminishment of the Christian community is demonstrable,’ he told Lapido.

He accused the new government of Fulani Muslim President Buhari of ‘impunity and connivance’ in killings that go on under the noses of soldiers sent to protect the villages.

Over and over again witnesses spoke to him independently and in similar vein of the use of military helicopters to drop munitions in Fulani areas.

Despite this, he was struck by the lack of pressure being brought to bear through diplomatic channels on the Nigerian government, whose president was greeted by the Queen and Archbishop Justin Welby in Britain last year...

Murray is convinced the Church of England is averting its gaze.  ‘It’s pathetic.  There seems to me to be a deliberate desire to avoid the facts’, he said. 

‘I think there’s a problem with the Nigerian churches.  There’s an unpleasant underlying thing “they’re not quite like Christians in the West any more because they don’t support gay marriage.  They don’t hold the right views.”

Who will protect Nigeria’s northern Christians?
Another day in northern Nigeria, another Christian village reeling from an attack by the Muslim Fulani herdsmen who used to be their neighbours — and who are now cleansing them from the area. The locals daren’t collect the freshest bodies. Some who tried earlier have already been killed, spotted by the waiting militia and hacked down or shot. The Fulani are watching everything closely from the surrounding mountains. Every week, their progress across the northern states of Plateau and Kaduna continues. Every week, more massacres — another village burned, its church razed, its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away. A young woman, whose husband and two children have just been killed in front of her, tells me blankly, ‘Our parents told us about these people. But we lived in relative peace and we forgot what they said.’

For the outside world, what is happening to the Christians of northern Nigeria is both beyond our imagination and beneath our interest. These tribal-led villages, each with their own ‘paramount ruler’, were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians — from the bishop down — sense that they have become unsympathetic figures, perhaps even an embarrassment, to the West. The international community pretends that this situation is a tit-for-tat problem, rather than a one-sided slaughter. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the press fails to report or actively obscures the situation. Christians in the south of the country feel little solidarity with their co-religionists suffering from this Islamic revivalism and territorial conquest in the north. And worst of all, the plight of these people is of no interest to their own government. In fact, this ethnic and religious cleansing appears to be taking place with that government’s complicity or connivance...