Trump Can End Obama’s Christian Genocide in Africa

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Beginning with the Obama administration, Muslims murdered over 125,000 Christians in Nigeria. This revelation in the latest report from the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law documents a Christian genocide that has been taking place in Africa, enabled by Barack Obama and the State Department, and carried out with the complicity of the media.

Even as over 125,000 Christians were murdered, over 1,000 Christian communities shattered and 19,000 churches destroyed, the media has buried the regular massacres, including the latest massacre in which 160 Christian villagers, many of whom were burned alive, were killed, on the ‘back pages’ even as it trumpets false Muslim claims of a genocide taking place in Israel.

Every Hamas claim appears on the front pages even when there’s not a single shred of evidence to sustain it, but actual massacre scenes in Nigeria, burned churches, bullet-riddled bodies and child survivors, rarely make the evening news. And when they do, the term ‘genocide’ is never used the way that it is constantly deployed in Gaza on behalf of Hamas.

Instead the media denies that the massacre of over 125,000 Christians is a genocide, denies that the Muslim killers, no matter how often they declare this, are motivated by Islam, and rejects the idea that there is any role for America in preventing the genocide except by defusing Muslim grievances by allowing them to seize power and turn Nigeria into an Islamist tyranny.

This ‘Arab Spring’ playbook took off under Obama and it is no coincidence that the beginning of the Christian genocide dates back to the first year that he took office. Rather than condemning the massacres of Christians, the Obama administration claimed that the real problem was that the Nigerian military and law enforcement were too aggressive in fighting Islamic terrorism.

According to the Obama administration, Muslim massacres of Christians were really a retaliation for excessive force being used by the military against the Jihadists. The State Department pressured the Nigerian government to address Muslim grievances, made aid conditional on ‘reforms’ and the reduction of the use of force, and denied that religion was the root cause.

Even as Republicans urged the Obama administration to designate Boko Haram, an Islamic Jihadist group affiliated with Al Qaeda, as a terror group a parade of State Department officials told Congress that “religion is not driving extremist violence”, argued that Nigeria’s “religious and ethnic diversity is one of its greatest strengths” and contended that the answer was “to press for a change to its (Nigeria’s) heavy-handed approach to the security threats in the north”.

Two years before the kidnappings of girls by Boko Haram that made #BringBackOurGirls into a hashtag, the New York Times ran an op-ed titled, “In Nigeria, Boko Haram Is Not the Problem” which described the group as “peaceful”, claimed that “there is no proof that… Boko Haram even exists” and blamed Nigeria’s Christian president, Jonathan Goodluck, for the violence.

They got their way when former Muslim dictator Muhammadu Buhari returned to power with the assistance of the Obama administration. Buhari, a ruthless killer, had previously warned that if he were not allowed to take power, “By Allah, the dog and the baboon will be soaked in blood.” His Muslims followers had lashed out after previous election defeats by assaulting Christians.

Rather than being critical of a former dictator who had threatened violence taking power, the Obama administration championed Buhari and the violence against Christians grew. Fulani Muslim herdsmen were empowered to massacre Christian herdsmen and drive them off their own land. The International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law states that not over 1,110 Christian communities were destroyed and 20,000 square miles of land were seized.

In 2020, the Trump administration finally listed Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” on religious freedom. It was not a gamechanger, but it at least began the process of expressing American concern over the Christian genocide taking place and offered a warning to Buhari.

However, next year, the Biden administration took power and reverted to the Obama administration’s old policy, removing Nigeria from the list of countries where religious persecution is taking place with no justification. Secretary of State Blinken, who visited and cheerfully chatted with Buhari, refused to answer questions about the pro-genocide move.

Year after year, the Biden administration refused to list Nigeria, even as it became known as “the deadliest country for Christians in the world”.

“There is no justification as to why the State Department did not designate Nigeria or India as a Country of Particular Concern, despite its own reporting and statements,” U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom chairs Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Rev. Frederick A. Davie, an African-American Obama appointee, warned.

The International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law is now asking the Trump administration to relist Nigeria as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’, to list the Fulani Jihadists massacring thousands of Christians as terrorists and to bar Imams involved in supporting the atrocities from the United States. In the face of the mass murder of Christians, these are not big requests and they would signal that the United States is at least paying attention to the killings.

Unlike the atrocity propaganda that the media pushed for Muslim territories like Yemen, Gaza and Afghanistan, the United Nations will never call for intervention or sanctions, the New York Times or Tucker Carlson will never highlight the plight of Christians being killed by Muslims, and the streets won’t be filled with protesters crying out against the Islamic genocide of Christians.

But President Trump has shown that he has the power to take an issue that no one in the media wants people to pay attention to and make it front page news. He did it with the ethnic cleansing in South Africa and he can do it with the genocide in Nigeria.

Obama enabled the Muslim genocide of Christians in Nigeria. President Trump can help end it and can bury one more ugly legacy from a man who did so much damage around the world.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.