Muslim militants are murdering thousands of Christians but the mainstream media won't reveal it

By Edward Era Barbacena 

If 16.2 million Muslims had been displaced in sub-Saharan Africa due to violence by Christians, what would be the level of coverage in a Western news outlet such as the BBC? One imagines it would be quite substantial.

Open Doors, a charity which supports persecuted Christians around the world, is trying to draw attention to the displacement of this number of Christians in the region by Islamist violence. But it faces an uphill task in generating interest in the mainstream Western media.

Open Doors has produced a film featuring Pastor Barnabas, who ministers to a Christian congregation in a displacement camp for Christians who have fled Islamist violence in Benue State in northern Nigeria. He is shown saying: “Millions of Christians are displaced, here in Nigeria. Millions of Christians are displaced in Africa. The news doesn’t care about it, politicians don’t talk about it, governments don’t talk about it, global politics don’t talk about it. Nobody talks about it.”

The film shows Pastor Barnabas stooping down and indicating the tent in which his family of eight has been living for nearly five years. Their home is made of palm leaves and mosquito nets with some cardboard evident. “It’s smaller than a double mattress,” he says.

Open Doors reports:

Last year, and for many years, more Christians were killed for their faith in Nigeria than the rest of the world combined. The same violent persecution is quickly spreading across other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as Islamic extremist ideology spreads: as well as these murders, huge numbers of believers are injured, abducted, sexually assaulted or forced to flee from their homes.

Pastor Barnabas describes the attack by militant Muslim Fulani herdsmen on his family farm: “I was on the farm with my brother, Everen, and his wife, Friday. We heard shooting. We saw people running in different directions. We didn’t know what was happening.

“My brother was shot by the militants, and my brother’s wife was also shot and then macheted and killed by the militants.”

Earlier this month, Christian Today publicised a report by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA) which says nearly 17,000 Nigerian Christians lost their lives because of violence between 2019 and 2023.

The reports says that over half the deaths (55%) were at the hands of radicalised Muslim Fulani herdsmen. “Islamist extremists enjoy relative freedom to carry out atrocities against civilians in large regions of Nigeria,” ORFA observed. 

The study records that there were Muslim fatalities in the violence but the number of Christian victims (16,769) more than doubled the number of Muslims killed (6,235).

“In states where attacks occur, proportional loss to Christian communities is exceptionally high. In terms of state populations, 6.5 times as many Christians are being murdered as Muslims,” said ORFA. 

Senior ORFA analyst Frans Vierhout said: “Millions of people are left undefended. For years, we’ve heard of calls for help being ignored, as terrorists attack vulnerable communities. Now the data tells its own story.”

The BBC does occasionally cover the violence in Nigeria. For example, in June 2022 BBC Verify did a feature on ‘Are attacks on Christians in Nigeria on the rise?‘

But it would appear that the general lack of journalistic interest in the current crisis in sub-Saharan Africa is down to the woke mind virus that has infected the Western media. If the story were about Muslims or LGBT people rather than about Christians, wouldn’t Western news organisations be putting a lot more resources into covering it?