(JNS) In northern Nigeria recently, Islamic militants slit the throats of 27 Christians outside a burned church. The story barely made the news.
Not because it was unusual, but because it has become routine. Mass killings of Christians by jihadist militias in Nigeria are now so frequent that most of the media have stopped covering them. Since 2009, more than 50,000 Nigerian Christians have been murdered by groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), according to the Nigerian-based watchdog Intersociety. More than 17,000 churches have been destroyed. Thousands of Christians have been abducted or displaced.
And yet, according to Al Jazeera, this isn’t genocide. It’s just “complicated.”
The network published an op-ed last month titled “No, Bill Maher, there is no Christian genocide in Nigeria,” dismissing concerns about systematic anti-Christian violence. The author, Nigerian presidential adviser Gimba Kakanda, reduced more than a decade of massacres and church burnings to “climate change,” “land disputes” and “banditry.”
This rhetorical maneuver is now familiar. When Christians or Jews are the victims, and the attackers are Islamic extremists, terms like genocide or terrorism suddenly become too “loaded,” too “Western.” Instead, we’re told to consider the “context.”
But when Hamas, a US- and EU-designated terrorist group that embeds among civilians, uses human shields and recruits teenagers, is targeted by Israel in a war it started with the massacre of nearly 1,000 civilians in one day, the word “genocide” is hurled across headlines, campus rallies and UN speeches without hesitation.
This is narrative apartheid: The segregation of human suffering, not based on facts or law, but on political utility. It’s not about justice. It’s about who gets to be the “right kind” of victim.
According to the UN Genocide Convention, genocide includes acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group through killing, serious harm or imposing conditions meant to destroy the group.
Now, apply that to Nigeria: Is a religious group being targeted? Yes. Are they being killed for their faith? Yes. Are the killings systematic and intentional? Absolutely.
Boko Haram’s slogans of death to Christians and kill every infidel make their intent explicit. Their actions confirm it: razed churches, murdered pastors, entire communities wiped out. That’s not a land dispute; that’s genocide.
Now, compare that to Gaza. Despite endless accusations, even Hamas’s numbers show most of the dead are men of fighting age. Independent estimates put the civilian-to-combatant death ratio between 1:1 and 2:1, among the lowest ever recorded in urban warfare. That’s not genocide; that’s war.
So why the double standard?
It’s not just ideological, it’s institutional. Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, a monarchy with no elections, no free press and deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological parent of Hamas. For years, the network has served as a polished propaganda outlet: Glorifying Hamas “resistance,” whitewashing violence against Christians and Jews, and rebranding jihadist atrocities as political grievances.
The editorial math is simple. If Al Jazeera admits the mass slaughter of Nigerian Christians by Islamic militias driven by Muslim Brotherhood ideology is genocide, it blows up their moral framework. That narrative depends on the idea that Islamic violence is always a reaction and never aggression, and that it must be explained away, while Jewish self-defense is inherently criminal.
Worse, it punctures their Palestinian narrative. Because once you acknowledge what’s happening in Nigeria, then you must face what would happen to Israel’s Jews without the Israel Defense Forces. And Al Jazeera, acting as the media arm of a regime that supports Hamas, cannot allow that.
So, the story gets whitewashed. Boko Haram’s genocide becomes “sectarian tension.” Burned churches are reframed as the result of “herder-farmer disputes.” The murder of more than 50,000 Christians? Just another tragic misunderstanding.
This isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda. And it works because too much of the media prefers tidy narratives over hard truths.
That distortion has real consequences. When major outlets and international bodies refuse to call the persecution of Nigerian Christians what it is, genocide, they sap urgency and paralyze response. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly urged the designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern”under the International Religious Freedom Act. But the pressure has been weak because few are paying attention.
Meanwhile, Israel is dragged before the International Court of Justice, at the request of a corrupt South African government, and accused of genocide for defending itself against a group that openly calls for Jewish extermination and intentionally murders and kidnaps civilians, including infants. The irony would be laughable if it weren’t obscene.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s moral inversion: A world where Jews are demonized for surviving while Christians are massacred in Africa and the global press shrugs.
So, let’s ask some uncomfortable questions: Why is “genocide” so freely invoked when Jews defend themselves against a recognized terror group but avoided when Christians are slaughtered by Islamic militias with openly genocidal intent? Why do so many treat Al Jazeera, a Qatari-run propaganda network, as a legitimate news outlet, while it dictates whose lives count and whose don’t? And why are international bodies, NGOs and progressive media outlets complicit in this apartheid of compassion where some victims are sacred and others invisible?
There’s no moral coherence in a world where Hamas, which hides in hospitals, stores weapons in schools, and denies civilians access to tunnels, is cast as a genocide victim, while Boko Haram, which boasts of killing Christians by the thousands, is excused by “context.”
If we care about human rights, our legal definitions and moral outrage must apply equally, not based on identity politics, but on truth.
The persecution of Christians in Nigeria isn’t complex. It’s targeted, and it’s ideological. And it meets the definition of genocide. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make you a truth-teller. It makes you a coward—or a propagandist with a press pass.
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