OPINION:
When you hit church on Sunday, in between prayers for your family and neighbors and the state of your own wretched soul, take a moment to pray for the Christians in Nigeria.
While the Western media have focused almost uniformly on the Gaza Strip, the crazy wing of Islam has been killing Christians across Africa at an impressive rate. In Nigeria, for example, the latest homicidal jag has resulted in the deaths of about 35 Christians every day.
Over the past 15 years, the best estimates are that Boko Haram and its fellow travelers have killed 125,000 or so Christians. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. For comparison, although precise numbers are difficult to come by, depending on whom you believe, the total number of deaths in Gaza is 30,000 to 70,000. Moreover, so far this year, about 8,000 Christians have been abducted. That compares with the 250 or so Israelis taken in the Holy Land. What is it with these people and hostage-taking?
In other words, while your neighbors in intellectually desiccated places such as Arlington and Bethesda have festooned their front yards with virtue-signaling signs about saving Palestine, there has been an actual religious holocaust happening to which they have paid little or no attention.
The toll in Nigeria goes beyond human beings. The somewhat more aggressive adherents of the mostly peaceful religion are not content with killing people; they want to destroy institutions as well. Every year, about 1,200 Christian churches in Nigeria are burned or otherwise destroyed. They have lots of company. Each year, about 60 Catholic churches are burned or vandalized in France. Each year, about 100 Catholic churches are attacked and damaged in the United States.
It is common enough that it would cause a normal person to wonder why we don’t hear more about the destruction of Catholic churches just like we don’t hear more — or anything, really — about the religious killings in Nigeria. It is enough to make one wonder whether the ethnic composition or the irreligiosity of the Western media plays a role in deciding whose stories and what sorts of stories get told and which ones don’t.
With respect to this silence, Bill Maher has been an admirable exception, speaking with power and clarity about Nigeria and the equities of media coverage and liberal concern with respect to Gaza and the African nation.
The reality of the world is that human beings do terrible things to one another, but numbers can’t be ignored indefinitely. A pretty significant chunk of the murder and mayhem that goes on nowadays and is directed at Christians is encouraged, sponsored and carried out by the adherents of one particular religion.
It is a fair question to ask why they hate us. How about this as an answer: It’s because we are believers in something much larger and much more important to both this world and the next than they can comprehend. That makes them afraid. In this, they join a long line of those who have persecuted Christians, starting with the Romans and threading its way through history right up to the present-day communists in China and, unfortunately, “extremist” Muslims in Nigeria and elsewhere.
If President Trump really wants that Nobel Peace Prize and work on his resume for St. Peter, he should turn his formidable skills and abilities to the holocaust going on right now in Nigeria. We should all join him.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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