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A few weeks ago on his Real Time program, host Bill Maher broke ranks with his mainstream media compatriots, as he occasionally does, to fault them for the widespread ignorance of the ongoing persecution of Christians in Nigeria. He observed correctly that the Boko Haram Muslim terror group there is “literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country.” He even had statistics at the ready: “They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009, they’ve burned 18,000 churches.” He concluded, “Where are the kids protesting this?”
The mainstream media are not covering it, and “the kids” aren’t protesting it, because the purportedly compassionate Left is at best indifferent to, and at worst approves of, the suffering and extermination of Christians. In their multiculturalist mindset, Christianity is categorized as Eurocentric (read: “white”) and therefore oppressive and evil. For a similar reason, Leftists refuse to connect Islam with terrorism because Muslims are grouped with the sacrosanct “Other” – “brown” victims of Judeo-Christian, capitalist, white supremacist oppression. Hence, the Left freely hurls accusations of “Islamophobia” but there is no “Christophobia” equivalent.
This week my colleague Robert Spencer pointed out at Jihad Watch that the Al Jazeera network, the “CNN of the Arab world,” had previously rebutted Maher’s observation with this gaslighting doozy of an editorial: “No, Bill Maher, There is No ‘Christian Genocide’ in Nigeria.” Spencer says of the piece that “the hypocrisy is staggering and the inversion of reality total,” but hey, as the Muslim prophet Muhammad is claimed to have said, “War is deceit.”
The Al Jazeera article was written by Gimba Kakanda, Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Research and Analytics in the Office of the Vice President (I don’t know how he gets all that on a business card). Kakanda argues that “allegations” of a Christian genocide in Nigeria are merely “coordinated attacks” by “foreign actors” who “ignore [the country’s] complexities and manipulate longstanding ethnic and resource-based tensions to advance sectarian agendas.” He declared that “claims of a religious war between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria are simplistic” and ignore “ethnic rivalries, land disputes, and criminality.”
Kakanda zeroed in on Bill Maher’s “sensationalized account” based on “largely fabricated claims and manipulated images from unverified outlets.” He dismissed it as “misinformation – aimed at maligning Nigeria” because of its “support for a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict.”
“While Western media often highlight attacks on churches and Christian communities,” Kakanda writes, the reality is that Boko Haram kills Muslims too, so “the real danger lies in media outlets portraying Boko Haram… as representative of Islam.” Characterizing their “indiscriminate” violence as “a strictly anti-Christian campaign is propaganda.”
He goes on to minimize religious violence by claiming that “some outside groups have published inflated statistics of Christian deaths without credible methodology” and that such “dubious claims, pushed by the likes of Bill Maher, obscure the truth”:
Nowhere is there an official policy or plan to eradicate Christians. Nigeria’s conflicts are grim and complex, but they centre on terrorism, crime and communal disputes, not religion. Terror groups kill opportunistically, striking churches, mosques, markets and villages alike. As the Tinubu-led government has stressed, no Nigerian is targeted by the state because of their faith.
Kakanda’s agenda is to defend his government, led by President Bola Tinubu, which faces international condemnation for taking precious little action against the slaughter of Christians and minimizing it as the “malicious lies” and “fabricated narratives” of Western media. In fact, Jihad Watch has collected an abundance of documentation here that a Christian genocide is indeed underway. And for a sobering corrective to Al Jazeera’s propaganda, check out this report at Persecution.org, the website of International Christian Concern (ICC). It begins,
For once, Bill Maher is right. One of the most horrifying yet underreported crises of our time is unfolding in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, and home to one of the largest Christian communities on the continent.
According to a new report by the Nigeria-based International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, known as Intersociety, jihadist groups are destroying roughly 100 churches every month – an estimated 19,100 attacked, burned, or shut down at gunpoint since 2009 as part of Boko Haram’s genocidal rampage against Christians.
The report directly contradicts Al Jazeera’s whitewashing of jihad:
The violence is not merely the byproduct of “land disputes” or “local feuds.” It is a systematic assault designed to completely erase Christianity from Nigeria. Intersociety reports that since 2009, a staggering 185,000 Nigerians lost their lives to jihadist violence — and more than two-thirds of that total were Christians. More than 7,000 Christians were massacred in the first 220 days of this year alone, an average of 32 per day. Thousands more have been abducted, including many pastors and young women who are targeted for ransom, forced conversion, or sexual slavery. All while the Nigerian government does nothing to end the violence…
Unless something dramatic is done quickly, Christianity in Nigeria could disappear within the next half-century.
“History offers painful precedents” of genocidal jihad, the report adds. Indeed it does. In the modern world alone, from Lebanon to Egypt to Turkey to Syria and now Nigeria, everywhere Muslims gain sufficient power or numbers, or are simply not restrained by government intervention, Jews and Christians – and yes, even insufficiently fundamentalist Muslims – are targeted for persecution if not eradication.
The Persecution.org piece notes that during the first Trump administration, Nigeria was justly labeled a Country of Particular Concern, only to have that designation reversed less than a year later under President Biden. The Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025, legislation being put forward by Sen. Ted Cruz, would impose on the Nigerian government sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and public shaming through international accountability in defense of millions of courageous believers in Nigeria who are truly facing martyrdom at the hands of ruthless jihadists acting on Islamic imperative.
“Today, the blood of thousands of Nigerian martyrs cries out for justice,” the ICC writes. “The Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act is a strong first step toward answering that cry. The survival of Christianity in Africa’s most populous nation may depend on it.”
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