The New York Times Keeps Getting It Wrong on Nigeria
The New York Times absolutely insists on getting things wrong — deeply and disgustingly wrong — when it comes to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. On Monday, our Ellie Gardey Holmes called out the Times’ coverage of the massacre of 42 innocents. After detailing the abject flaws in this Times article’s analysis, she concludes by noting that, when it comes to the wholesale slaughter of Christians by Muslim terrorists, “the Times has ignored the obvious for far too long and, in doing so, enabled this continued campaign of violence.”
But even as Ellie was exposing the flaws of one Times article, the Times was at it again, finding a creative new way to whitewash evil, this time by actually inverting the moral order of the long-running humanitarian crisis in Nigeria. A Monday Times article, “After U.S. Strikes on Christmas, Fear Grips Muslims in Rural Nigeria,” represents a master class in creative misdirection, all in the service of indicting Donald Trump’s long-awaited action to punish the Muslim terrorists for the ongoing mass murder of innocent Christians.
The Times article is a narrowly conceived human interest story, quoting a handful of Muslim villagers from the Nigeria’s Sokoto State, long a hotbed of ISIS and Boko Haram terrorist activity. It finds these villagers fearful and confused by a nearby Tomahawk cruise missile strike, one of the dozen launched on the night of Christmas from a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Guinea.
The fear, no doubt, is real. The Muslim terrorists who operate freely throughout the region have long viewed themselves as able to operate with complete impunity; no one, not the ISIS and Boko Haram gangsters, certainly not the impoverished villages in which they nestle, have experienced anything like the strikes that took place on Christmas night. If the terrorists were caught off guard by these strikes, how terrifying must it have been for ordinary villagers. But to focus on the fear of these few is to utterly ignore — and willfully minimize — what has been going on in Nigeria for over a decade.
I’ve been writing about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria for nearly three years, and studying the problem for a lot longer. The slaughter of poor Christian farm families has been going on for over a decade, becoming more brutal and widespread with each passing year. The numbers have been appalling, tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands forced from their homes into refugee camps, a litany of brutal murder of the innocent, accompanied all too frequently by rape, torture, and the widespread destruction of Christian churches and Christian livelihoods.
Is it “genocide” or merely “ethnic cleansing?” The authoritative international study group, Genocide Watch, does not hesitate in describing Nigerian Christians as being subjected to genocide, labelling the situation a “severe genocidal crisis.” Truth Nigeria cites Nigerian Catholic leaders in describing a “hidden genocide” being conducted by Fulani Muslim terrorists, in which thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands chased from their homes into refugee camps, and over 335 Catholic churches destroyed. For all the notoriety of ISIS and Boko Haram, it’s the Fulanis who have taken the lead recently in murdering Christians.
The simplest of Google searches offers a long list of articles describing the horrific situation of poor Christian farmers in those regions where Islamist radicals are attempting to create a caliphate. Or start with another of Ellie’s comprehensively researched articles, something the Times writers apparently cannot bring themselves to do. But if the authors of the Times article cannot condescend to reading The American Spectator, perhaps they might at least have studied Nina Shea’s recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa.
Shea, the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, is arguably the foremost American expert on religious persecution worldwide. She has taken a particular interest in the plight of the Nigerian Christians. Her documentation of the horrors being inflicted on these Christians is impeccable and her condemnation of the Nigerian government’s failure to protect the Christian communities is scathing.
Significantly, Genocide Watch and Shea both acknowledge that moderate Muslims have also been targeted by the terrorists, particularly by ISIS and Boko Haram. But they also make it clear that the disparity in numbers is massive. Still, had the Times chosen to ask the right questions, they might have discovered that, particularly in the region afflicted by these particular groups — the region targeted by the Trump missile strikes — Muslim villagers have more to fear from their radical co-religionists than from an errant cruise missile strike.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at how the Times gets it wrong. Back in 2019, the first Trump administration designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” with respect to religious persecution. In 2021, the Biden administration rescinded this designation, an action all of a piece with its contention that the conflicts in Nigeria were merely disputes over land use between Fulani Muslim cattlemen and Christian agriculturalists, a conflict exacerbated by “climate change.” But the overwhelming terrorist focus on killing Christians has long put the lie to this narrative.
When the Trump administration recently reinstated the “country of particular concern” designation, it came with a warning — if Nigeria continued to fail its Christian communities, the U.S. would take matters into its own hands. The failure continued, with the run-up to Christmas marked by fears of a fresh round of terrorist attacks. The Christmas evening missile strikes followed, as promised.
For thoughtful observers, the real concern about these strikes is less, as the Times would have it, the fear engendered in a handful of Muslim villages. The greater concern is that there will be no meaningful follow-up, no more pressure on the Nigerian government to finally defend its Christian citizens, or, if that fails, no more punishment meted out from above to the Muslim terrorists.
In fairness, the problem is extremely difficult, and more concrete U.S. action fraught with danger, as I’ve detailed elsewhere. But instead of quibbles about missile parts being scattered across the landscape, the Times might have engaged more forthrightly with these larger issues. It might even have recognized that the missile strikes, if properly followed up, could save thousands of Christian lives.
That, however, would have failed to serve the all-powerful narrative. So instead, and quite perversely, the Times eschews enlightening its readers about a true humanitarian crisis. Instead, by highlighting the fears of the handful of villagers while ignoring the larger massacre of Christians, it goes from willful ignorance to outrageous distortion of the true situation. All this in the service of a single purpose, finding yet another cudgel with which to beat Donald Trump.
But why should we be surprised. As Ellie and I have both written, repeatedly, over the last several years, the mainstream media cannot bring itself to consider Christians as victims. And as these two recent articles demonstrate, when it comes to ignoring an ongoing genocide, the New York Times is leading the pack.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk finds the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian backed Venezuelan terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.