Yesterday, the Catholic League sent out an email announcing that Bill Donohue would be taking a short break from tirelessly defending the Catholic Church from any and all criticism regarding the sex abuse scandal in order to protest violence against Christians in Nigeria:
Please join the Catholic League on Wednesday, April 7 to protest recent massacres of Christians and others at the hands of radical Muslims. Bill Donohue will be speaking at the event as well as other religious and secular leaders. The protest will take place at 5 PM at the Nigerian U.N. Consulate.
Among the others who have endorsed this event are Gary Bauer, Harry Jackson, Frank Gaffney, Niger Innis, and Andrea and James Lafferty, all with the mission of highlighting the victimization of Christians in Nigeria:
On Wednesday, April 7th from 4:45 pm on, religious, civic and human rights leaders of many faiths and backgrounds will gather in front of the Nigerian Consulate in New York City to raise their voices of conscience about the continuing massacres of Christians as well as the ongoing barbaric persecution of non-Muslim minorities by jihadists in Nigeria and elsewhere across the globe.
While there are no official figures yet to confirm the numbers killed in the March 7th Massacre of Christians in Nigeria, we do know that many of the victims were children, women and the elderly. They were trapped in nets and hacked to death, slashed as they slept in their beds, beheaded, and set on fire. Those arrested reportedly belong to the Muslim Fulani terror group.
As I explained a few weeks back when Donohue first started commenting on this issue, the cycle of violence in Nigeria has been going on for years:
If you read this Human Rights Watch report on the recent massacre, it says that hundreds of Christians were murdered by “Muslim men speaking Hausa and Fulani” and that “the attacks appeared to be in retaliation for previous attacks against Muslim communities in the area … on January 19, more than 150 Muslim residents were killed in an attack on the nearby town of Kuru Karama.”
This Human Rights Watch report on the January massacre states that more than one hundred Muslims were killed by Christians in an attack that was set off by either “an argument over the rebuilding of a Muslim home destroyed in the November 2008 violence in a predominately Christian neighborhood” or an “attack by Muslim youth on Christian worshippers in the Nassarawa Gwom district of Jos.”
So the current massacre of Christians by Muslims is believed to be retribution for an earlier massacre of Muslims by Christians, all of which is wrapped up in a cycle of violence in which “more than 13,500 people have died in religious or ethnic clashes since the end of military rule in 1999.”
And according to a recent HRW report, the March 7 attack was part of this on-going cycle of violence. And do you recall Donohue, Bauer, Jackson or any of the others speaking out in January when Christian mobs murdered 150 Muslims?
Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that groups of armed men attacked the largely Muslim population of Kuru Karama around 10 a.m. on January 19, 2010. After surrounding the town, they hunted down and attacked Muslim residents, some of whom had sought refuge in homes and a local mosque, killing many as they tried to flee and burning many others alive. The witnesses said they believed members of the armed groups to be Christians.
I certainly don’t.
It would make sense of Donohue and others were hosting a rally calling for an end to the cycle of religious violence that has killed thousands of people over the last decade. But that is not what they are doing; they are merely protesting the violence against Christians.
Apparently, the related slaughter of Muslims by Christians is perfectly okay.
