Human Rights Activist: Islamists Murdered 70,000 Christians in Nigeria over Last 20 Years

massacre
Pius Utomi Ekpei / AFP / Getty Images, file

Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern, told Breitbart News that Islamists murdered 70,000 Christians in Nigeria over the last 20 years. He joined Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Dylan Gwinn.

“We don’t always get the press,” said King of many news media outlets’ disinterest in persecution of Christians. “It is absolutely the case [that Christians are the most persecuted faith].”

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King added, “A lot of people don’t know that … in Nigeria, probably 70,000 Christians have been murdered in the last 20 years by Islamists, and that’s just scratching the surface. It’s going on all over. There’s a spectrum to the oppression.

On March 16, Breitbart News reported of Nigerian Muslim militants killing 120 Christians over a three-week period, saying, “The recent death toll of Christians in Nigeria has reached 120 with this week’s slaughter of more than 50 by Fulani Muslim militants in the Kaduna state of Nigeria, the Christian Post reported.”

Breitbart News Rome Bureau Chief Thomas Williams contrasted “mainstream media” coverage of the mass murder of Christians by Islamists in Nigeria with the mass murder of Muslims at a New Zealand mosque by a white racial nationalist:

Political leaders and public figures were falling over themselves this weekend to condemn the mosque attacks in New Zealand, while dozens of Christians were slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria to the sound of crickets.

Without exception, the mainstream media gave top billing to the shootings, with newspapers carrying the story on their front pages and television news channels leading off their broadcasts with the story.

The bizarre aspect of the coverage was not, in fact, the attention paid to a heinous crime committed in New Zealand, but the absolute silence surrounding the simultaneous massacre of scores of Christians by Muslim militants in Africa.

Last Monday, Dede Laugesen, director of Save the Persecuted Christians, told Breitbart News that “anti-Christian bias” across America’s “mainstream media” drives news organizations to downplay the mass murder of Christians by Islamic terrorist groups.

Laugesen described a “narrative” being pushed by “mainstream media” in America:

People don’t believe that Christians can be persecuted, that they could be slaughtered. Here in the United States, we just have a different sense of who Christians are, but out in the greater world, Christians are viewed as a threat to control and power. What you have operating in Nigeria, which is Africa’s most populous country — 200 million people living there with 50 percent Christians, 50 percent Muslims  — you have two of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups operating — Fulani militants and Boko Haram, now affiliated with ISIS Islamic State in West Africa — and they are driven by radical sharia supremacist ideology, seeking to spread shariah across the entire country of Nigeria.

Islamic terrorist movements, concluded Laugesen, are pursuing an ethnic cleansing strategy against Christians in Nigeria and across Africa.

“The long-term strategy is to clear the Christians from the land and to take the resources underneath them” assessed Laugesen. “There are valuable metals and stones in northern Nigeria that can be mined for quite  bit of income, and that will only further be able to fund the caliphate that both of these groups is determined to establish in the ungoverned territories of Nigeria and the Lake Chad region.”

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

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