Tea at Trianon: The Silent Jihad in Nigeria

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, January 29, 2021

The Silent Jihad in Nigeria

From Chronicles:

“Boko Haram kill villagers in Christmas Eve attack,” the BBC reported on Dec. 25: at least 11 Christians were murdered in the village of Pemi, in northeastern Nigeria. As villagers fled into the bush, jihadists looted their homes and burned the local church and clinic. The site of the attack was only about 12 miles from the town of Chibok, where 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. Many of them were subsequently raped, and more than a hundred are still missing.

Christmas Eve also saw five Christians abducted from the village of Garkida, also in northeastern Nigeria. They were subsequently murdered by the Islamic State in West Africa Province, a Boko Haram splinter group. On the same day, 40 loggers were abducted from the Wulgo Forest in Nigeria’s Borno State, with three killed while attempting to flee. In the course of the previous week at least 18 Christians were killed in Kaduna State in a number of attacks. This series of outrages in the final week of 2020 made it the deadliest year for Nigeria’s Christians since 2014.

Remarkably but perhaps unsurprisingly, none of these horrors have found their way into the U.S. corporate media machine. On Dec. 17 there was a story in The New York Times and on NBC News’ website about an earlier abduction incident, but nothing since. Such inattentiveness is typical of the mainstream media’s unwillingness to report attacks on Christians in the Muslim world in general. This is in stark contrast with the frenetic reporting of attacks on Muslims in the Western world, which are extremely rare.

There is nothing new about the obstinate refusal of American elites to acknowledge the predicament of Nigerian Christians. During his two-day visit to Nigeria in August 2000, then-President Bill Clinton encouraged the country to continue to pursue democracy following years of military rule. He did not mention Nigeria’s most acute human rights problem, however, which had claimed thousands of Christian lives in the months preceding his visit. It was as if a visitor to Yad Vashem talked of historical memory, but avoided any reference to the Holocaust.

With a GDP of $448 billion in 2019, Nigeria overtook South Africa as Africa’s largest economy. With over 200 million people, it is the also the continent’s most populous country.

It is also the new Ground Zero for global Jihad and close to becoming a failed state. Nigeria has been plagued by many standard African post-colonial experiences, from a bloody civil war and a procession of corrupt and brutal military dictatorships, to intercommunal strife rooted in tribal-religious loyalties. For decades its oil riches have been squandered, stolen, or mismanaged. According to the entry on Nigeria in The Heritage Foundation’s 2020 Index of Economic Freedom, the country is among the worst in the world regarding the rule of law.

According to a recent report by Patrick Tyrrell, a research coordinator at the Heritage Foundation, the most heinous forms of cruelty and brutality go unopposed in Nigeria, and terror reigns in Christian villages in the northern and middle parts of the country. He quoted a Genocide Watch report from last April which found that over 11,500 Christians were murdered from June 2015 to the report’s publication. Tyrrell also drew attention to a new book, “The Next Jihad: Stop the Christian Genocide in Africa,” which documents atrocities and warns that an outright genocide of Christians may happen if the Nigerian federal government and the world’s leading media conglomerates do not stop turning a blind eye to the unfolding horrors. (Read more.)