Years ago, I volunteered as a guest speaker for a group that fights Christian persecution. My job was to go to various churches and tell congregations about just how prevalent and violent this issue is. Most people did not want to hear about it.
I have told you before about Sarah Liu, a young woman who published an underground Christian newspaper in China. One night, there was a knock on her door. Sarah was arrested and taken to a warehouse. She was beaten, burned with cigarettes, and had live wires shoved into her mouth. Then she was forced to walk in a circle throughout the night until her feet left a bloody trail behind her. Later, she was sent to prison, where she spent seven years making Christmas lights.
Another story I used to tell congregations was that of a Christian boy in Africa. One day, he saw the members of a Muslim militia headed his way and hid in the tall grass. The militia members knew he was there and correctly surmised why he was hiding. They set fire to the grass, burning the child over most of his body. Volunteers drove him to a hospital miles away while trying to get him to take some water from a bottle cap.
At the first of the year, Catherine Salgado reported on the horrific Christmas massacres that took place in Nigeria. The targets of those massacres? Christians. Two hundred people died. According to the Blaze:
Nearly 5,000 Christians were murdered in Nigeria just last year, accounting for 82% of all Christians killed for their faith in 2023, reported the National Catholic Register.
In 2022, Genocide Watch indicated that jihadists slaughtered 6,000 civilians, mostly Christians, in the first three months of the year, then kept adding to their tally.
What could be the cause of such senseless slaughter? Hatred of Christians? Islamic extremism? Not according to the European Parliament. As usual, the culprit is climate change.
The Parliament did give some heed to the religious impetus behind the continuing violence against Nigerian Christians, "some" being the operative word. A motion recently introduced to the Parliament by the Green/European Free Alliance does condemn the murders. But it also reduces the number of people killed in the Christmas attack to 150. And while it states that the violence is "increasingly described in religious terms," the motion goes on to say that the perpetrators have yet to be identified and cautions:
...several factors are to be taken into account such as competition for land fuelled by rapid climate change and the failure of authorities to hold to account those responsible for violence;
The motion also talks about the poverty rate in Nigeria, mentions the fact that the oil and gas industry accounts for 80% of the government's revenue, and the fact that Nigerian villagers live with contaminated food, water, and land. It goes on to warn against using the conflict between farmers and herders to spread religious-based hatred. It calls on authorities to "address all root causes of the violence in Plateau state, such as competition for scarce resources, environmental degradation and the disappearance of effective mediation schemes."
The Parliament released the text it adopted from the motion. It includes the phrase "Calls on the Nigerian authorities to take action against militant Islamist groups exploiting the farmer-herder conflict, and urges them to address its root causes; warns that the conflict may be instrumentalised to spread religion-based hatred; acknowledges the role of climate change, competition for scarce resources and the disappearance of effective mediation schemes in aggravating the farmer-herder conflict, pushing the herders to move south."
The adopted text can be found here. At least it mentions Islamist extremism. To back up the assertions that climate change is the root of Christian persecution in Nigeria, The International Crisis Group created an interactive map that places the blame squarely on the climate issue. The Blaze article quoted Dutch politician and MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen: "Saying that it is a mere conflict between farmers and herders fails to acknowledge the other causes. It is Muslim extremists causing death and destruction." Hungarian MEP György Hölvényi commented, "Blinded by ideology, some people are totally insensitive to human suffering when it comes to Christians. The timing of the attacks, brutal killings, and destruction of churches cannot be misinterpreted and can only be understood as the persecution of Christians, and we should be able to say so."
No one will argue that people in Nigeria are not suffering from poverty. But what do those issues have to do with Muslim extremists specifically targeting Christians? These people murdering Christians are not doing so because of climate change. They are committing these acts because they hate Christians, and they feel entitled and, for that matter, called by God to kill the infidels. But the world is afraid of confronting that issue. At the same time, there is money to be made and power to be gained by trumpeting the dangers of climate change — no matter how much blood is shed.
