Rim Village Attacked As The U.S. Government Continues in Denial

On April 24, Rim Village was attacked by Muslims leaving five dead and two wounded. Rim village is named for its place on the rim of the large plateau for which Plateau State is named. It is on the Jos-Abuja road, and the Jubilee Campaign team passed through it four times during our trip to Nigeria early this February. The pictures we received in connection with this update are too graphic to show you, but we can tell you that these Christians died in their houses, resting on their beds. Some of the slain appear to have been preparing food for their children, who were also butchered.

Our contacts in this village are strong enough that within 24 hours we received the names of the dead and wounded. We ask that you please remember the families of the dead in prayer.
The Martyrs: Rose Ralyop, Dinatu Danbwarang, Simi Joseph, Christiana Samuel, & Japhet Samuel.

Please also pray for the wounded that they will recover physically as well as spiritually. Note from the family names that Patience lost her mother, and Jenipher lost her mother and brother.
The Suffering: Jenipher Samuel & Patience Joseph

To us at Jubilee Campaign, this story serves to illustrate the difference between the roles of the Christian and the Muslim communities in this conflict. Unfortunately, Westerners tend to presume that both sides are equally guilty in conflicts like these. This concept is called moral equivalency and more and more I am convinced that it is a lie used by evil to beget more evil.

These Christians had nothing against Muslims. They had not attacked anyone. They were sitting peacefully in their homes, unaware that death was coming for them. Their only crime was to be Christian, and to be near a major highway giving the killers easy access to their village. In the future, I am sure that the Christians in this area will set guards. If Muslims come to kill them again, they will defend their homes and families and some of the Muslim attackers may die.

The concept of Moral Equivalency, which is clearly one of the core dogmas of the U.S. State Department, will claim that the deaths of the Muslim attackers are in some way equivalent to the deaths of these innocents who died in their homes!

It makes me ashamed to be an American to say this, but the U.S. State Department has denied the self-evident fact that this conflict is religious, as they have done in other conflicts between radical Muslims and their victims. They have asserted that the problem is poverty and their self-proclaimed intent is to give millions of U.S. aid money into the hands of the very Muslim communal leaders who are fostering this strategy of hate. Meanwhile, they have sabotaged every effort by the Government of Nigeria, or the Christians living in the Middle Belt to accurately and effectively address this violence.

I want to be clear, the looming religious war with genocidal overtones which will splinter Nigeria, destabilizing West Africa, and polarize the continent along religious lines is not inevitable. Yet every day that our nation continues on this foolish and false policy of denial, empowering the aggressors and punishing the victims, we make war and even genocide that much more likely. I pray that we recognize our errors soon and change course before it is too late.

Recognizing Reality: The Slaughter of Nigerian Christians is Religious

Jubilee Campaign and other human rights groups gravely concerned with the US State Department’s ill-informed statements

A group of human rights and religious liberty organizations in Washington condemn the barbaric multi-city Easter Sunday bombings in Kaduna and Plateau state that claimed dozens of lives. Attacks on northern and central Nigeria’s Christian community come as no surprise in light of Boko Haram’s genocidal declarations to kill Christians in the North, yet sadly they were avoidable. Despite the fact that the world has been on notice about religiously motivated terrorism in Nigeria due to sustained terrorist activity occurring against perceived “Western” concepts including churches, schools and even the United Nations, governments at home and abroad have largely ignored or underestimated the growing problem of interreligious strife and terrorism within Nigeria.

In the past few years violent groups like Boko Haram, which claimed responsibility for the equally deadly multi-city Christmas church bombings, have increased attacks on Christians as a way of destabilizing the country. As US officials continue to ignore the threat to religious liberty posed by religiously motivated terrorism within Nigeria we should expect more gloomy religious holidays to threaten the country’s fragile democracy as well as our own national security.

We particularly denounce the Assistant Secretary for Africa, Ambassador Johnnie Carson’s ill-informed and exceedingly insensitive remarks that the crisis in Nigeria is not “religious.” How the senseless serial killings of innocent worshippers during church services by a group whose publicly stated mission is to islamize the nation and abolish democracy can be anything but religious is to willfully blind oneself to objective reality. It goes against all available evidence and even the pleas of the Nigerian government.

It is deplorable that the US has neither offered humanitarian assistance nor pressed the Government of Nigeria to provide compensation to the hundreds of families who lost loved ones in Nigeria’s post-election violence that targeted faith communities in 12 states. Rather one year later, victims remain without succour while the US glosses over the massive human losses sustained during the 2011 elections.

We believe that the US should be more forthright in its assessment of the facts. With the largest political section in Africa, it is bewildering that there is such a huge disconnect between the realities on the ground and the conclusions coming out of the US Department of State. The US Department of State must declare Boko Haram a terrorist organization and place the Boko Haram and related organizations on its terrorist list. International travel by anyone associated with Boko Haram must be banned.

Nigeria is today closer to a civil war along religious lines than ever before in its history. The US government cannot afford to be asleep at the wheel as Africa’s most important country totters on the verge of implosion.

ORGANIZATION NAME

AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE

THE BECKETT FUND FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

THE INSTITUTE ON RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY

JUBILEE CAMPAIGN

INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIAN CONCERN

THE WESTMINSTER INSTITUTE

THE JUSTICE FOR JOS PLUS PROJECT