150,000 Dead and Counting: Christians Killed for Their Faith EVERY Week

By Selwyn Duke

The Roman arena, where Christians might be thrown to lions, is long gone. But though the tormentors and methods have changed, this doesn’t mean such persecution has ended. In fact, 100,000-150,000 Christians have been slaughtered worldwide by Muslims (often jihadists) during the last two decades. One of the worst killing fields is Nigeria, where approximately 52,250 Christians were killed from 2009 to 2023 alone, according to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law. Holy Week hasn’t meant a break from this unholy phenomenon, either, with 51 Christians killed in Nigeria mere hours after Palm Sunday.

This is religious persecution — some would say genocide — the mainstream media generally don’t report, even though it’s savage and continual.

Unholy — and Unheard

The Washington Stand introduces the recent story, putting a human face on it and providing some background, writing:

It didn’t matter how soundly she slept, Salamatu would wake up at 2 a.m. every night — her body remembering what her mind wished she could forget. It had been that same hour, months earlier, when Boko Haram stormed into her village, rewriting her future forever.

For Salamatu, terror was a way of life. In an earlier wave of violence, the jihadists had swarmed her Nigerian church, shooting the pastor in cold blood. Then, she says quietly, they came for her family. “My husband told me we should pray,” Salamatu remembers of that horrible night. “We said a short prayer and then ‘Amen.’ As soon as we said ‘Amen,’ we heard people pulling at the handles of our gate.” Quickly, her husband ushered her, the children, and grandchildren upstairs. “Don’t cry,” he told them. “Don’t make a noise — not even if you hear gunshots.” He walked outside to face the armed men, and it was the last time she saw him alive.

The militants jumped the fence and opened fire on her husband where he stood — killing him instantly. He was one of six victims that night and one of hundreds slaughtered every month in the bloody farmlands of Nigeria. Just this past weekend, as the world stopped to observe Palm Sunday, 51 people were massacred in an early morning attack on the community of Bassa — many burned to death in their homes by the savage Fulani herdsman.

No Help Coming

Tragically, there’s no end in sight to the carnage, either. For the official response ranges from, apparently, impotence to indifference to, perhaps, even complicity. As the Stand also informs:

Even the landscape is scarred by the horrors. Across seven predominately Christian regions, houses are reduced to rubble and ash — signs of yet another Boko or Fulani rampage. The attackers destroy everything in their path, looting and setting fire to entire areas in a systematic genocide that the government sees but does nothing about.

Watchdog organization OpenDoors adds further detail, writing:

Nigerian organisations came to offer help and support — only for Christians to be discriminated against. “Everyone received coupons to collect food,” says Salamatu, “But when they discovered we were Christians, we didn’t receive the coupon.

“There was a Muslim lady whose name appeared on the list three times. She received three coupons and gave one to me, so at least I could collect some food. When I do, I bring her some of the food I have received and then share the rest with my own family.”

After this second attack, Salamatu, her children and grandchildren had no choice but to leave home — putting them among the 16.2 million Christians displaced in sub-Saharan Africa by violence and conflict. Most villagers have not returned….

[“M]ost of us don’t want to go back [says Salamatu]. Boko Haram let us know that we will be murdered if we come back.”

A Sadly Old Story

While many people know Islamic jihad is nothing new, most may not realize how long its history actually is. For example, no part of the world is more associated with Islam than the Middle East. In reality, though, Christianity was the dominant religion in that region, and in North Africa, by the 400s A.D. (At the time, do note, there were more Christians in North Africa than Europe.) What happened?

Shortly after Islam’s birth (622), jihadist armies conquered these old Christian lands. Known as the “early Islamic conquests” (632-750), they would in a mere 118 years create a Muslim empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Asia. In fact, the Muslim forces pushed into Europe and got within 125 miles of Paris by 732. Had they not been stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitier (or Tours) that year, Europe itself might’ve succumbed to Islam.

And it was later incursions into Europe, mind you, that ultimately inspired the oft-mischaracterized Crusades. These events, though complex, were essentially defensive actions designed to stave off jihadist aggression.

A more recent relevant example of jihad success is Lebanon. It was a majority Christian nation at the time of its independence (1943). But this changed as a result of Muslim migration facilitated by external powers and of warfare.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that from “the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword,” wrote history professor Thomas F. Madden in 2002. “Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered.”

So will Nigeria — approximately 52 percent Muslim and 47 percent Christian — go the way of Lebanon? Certainly, the sword may not have good reasoning ability but is quite convincing.

Of course, it may occur to one that the Christians could defend themselves were they universally armed. But Nigeria requires hard-to-obtain gun licenses, making firearm acquisition difficult for rural villagers. This doesn’t stop the jihadists from being well armed, though, often with military-grade weapons. (This raises a question: Who’s funding them?)

Hopefully, this power imbalance will be remedied. After all, as G.K. Chesterton noted, “War is not ‘the best way of settling differences;’ it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.”

In Nigeria, and elsewhere for far too long, differences have been settled for Christians. And trading the “for” for a “by” can be the difference between life and death.

Addendum: For those interested, the CBN News segment below outlines the Christian persecution in Nigeria.

                   This article was originally published at The New American.