Defending Nigeria’s Christians from Islamist Genocide

If you haven’t read our colleague Ellie Gardey Holmes’s recent article describing the western media’s predictably lame and misleading response to the genocide of Christians in Nigeria, then stop reading right now, follow the link, and read her article before continuing. It’s that good, and it also covers the essential background for the question I mean to address here. (RELATED: Media Denies Christian Genocide in Response to Trump’s Threat of Military Action in Nigeria)

As Ellie notes, President Trump’s recent re-designation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” with respect to religious persecution has ignited yet another round of special pleading from the usual media suspects. It’s not really a genocide, they argue, not really aimed at Christians. Instead, following the Biden State Department’s tendentious narrative, it’s a competition between herders and farmers for scarce agricultural land, a scarcity supposedly driven by — you guessed it — climate change. (RELATED: Off the Radar: Christian Genocide in Africa)

But what has really exercised the media — and also the Nigerian government — is that Trump sounds angry enough to back up words with concrete action. He’s spoken of sanctions levied against various Nigerian government officials, but the real excitement followed his threat of military action to protect the Christian communities, warning on Truth Social that the U.S. might go into Nigeria with “guns-a-blazing” to protect the Christian population. (RELATED: What Is America’s Role in Africa?)

Amidst the immediate pearl-clutching and complaints that Trump has gone off the rails once again, it’s easy to miss the immediate positive effect of Trump’s declaration. Suddenly, the plight of Nigeria’s Christian farmers moved from the margins to center stage. Suddenly, the Nigerian government felt called upon to defend its record with respect to protecting these communities, inadvertently exposing itself as having utterly failed by any meaningful metric. (RELATED: The Left Ignores Nigeria’s Suffering Christians While Proclaiming to Be Perfect Humanitarians)

In the final analysis, the very facts of this failure validate the need for something more than pressure on the Nigerian government to deploy its own military to stop the marauding Islamist terrorists. Firstly, while once respected — and certainly well-funded — the Nigerian military no longer displays the foundational professionalism essential to waging effective warfare against well-armed terrorists. Secondly, the military, indeed the entire Nigerian government, is riven with corruption. Thirdly, and of the greatest importance, the Nigerian power structure, including the military, has become increasingly infected with the very Islamism that animates the Christian genocide.

There’s much to be said for exerting pressure on Nigeria, if only to encourage those elements in the government who sympathize with the Christians to step up to the problem. After all, so long as the genocide has been ignored internationally, those Nigerian leaders who would oppose it have felt isolated and neutered. For all the immediate pushback by Nigerian officialdom, for all the insistence that there’s “nothing to see here,” Trump’s words offer encouragement to those who have hitherto felt powerless. (RELATED: Nigeria: The Most Dangerous Place To Be a Christian)

International attention matters. A decade ago, after the international media shone a spotlight on the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, the Nigerian government, astonishingly, brought in a cadre of former South African Army mercenaries to help bring the terrorists to heel. This only lasted a few short months — the embarrassment was too great, not only for the Nigerian government but also for the South African government, the United Kingdom, and the Obama administration, none of whom wanted to see success attributed to white mercenary veterans of the old Afrikaner regime. But while it lasted, it made a difference, as even an unlikely source like the liberals at The Guardian seemed willing to concede.

Could something like this be replicated today? In one of my very first articles for American Spectator, I invoked the history of U.S. Special Forces as an example of what might be done. Although we’ve come to think of Special Forces in terms of direct action missions such as the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the original mission involved teaching indigenous forces to defend themselves — thus, the official SF motto “de opresso liber,” to “free the oppressed.” Following the insight offered by an SF veteran friend, I used the movie The Magnificent Seven to illustrate this concept in action.

I’ve returned to this theme in subsequent articles for the simplest of reasons, namely that no amount of pious sentiment can make a difference in the face of brutal violence. Sadly, there are times when the only meaningful response to violence is countervailing violence, and that at a level sufficient to bring the cycle of violence to an end. It’s clear that President Trump understands this — if his initial threat is a diplomatic ploy meant to put pressure on Nigerian leaders, then the world has learned not to doubt his willingness to use force, be it against Iranian nuclear sites or Venezuelan drug cartels.

Moreover, the Trump administration’s energy policies have changed the framework for dealing with Nigeria. Back in 2015, when Boko Haram could no longer be ignored, the fact that Nigeria was a leading oil-producing country gave it immense leverage, not least against a U.S. government seemingly hell-bent on surrendering its position as a leading oil and gas producer. The promise of unleashed U.S. energy production has already proven central to reshaping Middle East diplomacy, and it can have the same impact in dealing with Nigeria.

So if it comes to the use of force, how might this be applied? While President Trump declined to rule out sending American troops to protect the Christians, this seems an obvious non-starter. “Boots on the ground” represents the highest threshold, and one that, quite rightly, the president has been reluctant to cross. And even if the president were willing, it could only happen at the invitation of the Nigerian government, which may still be a bridge too far.

In my recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, a subplot describes an effort similar to 2014’s use of mercenaries against Boko Haram, the employment of teams to arm and train Christian communities to defend themselves. But even in fiction, such an effort assumes at least a tacit tolerance on the part of the Nigerian government. Again, given the extent to which Islamist influence has expanded in the last decade, one has little reason for hope.

But in one scene from the novel, a nearby firefighting aircraft, a “waterbomber’ in the vernacular, intervenes to save a Christian village by dumping five tons of water on a marauding band of motorcycle-mounted Fulani Muslim terrorists. Herein lies a potential model, “death from above,” not from a single aircraft, but in the form of a concatenated wave of drone strikes, an option already hinted at in the first discussions following Trump’s announcement.

Significantly, while the Nigerian government has resisted the president’s characterization of the crisis as an anti-Christian genocide and while it further insists on respect for its sovereignty, Nigerian representatives have not ruled out working with the U.S. in dealing with the terrorists. Perhaps Nigerian amour-propre could be salved in this manner, enabling U.S. action while preserving the appearance of a joint response. And thoughtful Nigerians — there are still many such — must blanche at the thought of the Muslim caliphate that the Islamists are trying to carve out within their nation.

The overriding conclusion, however, must be that this is a situation that can no longer be tolerated, that the ethnic cleansing being perpetrated against Christians, so eloquently described in Ellie’s article, must be confronted — and it must be confronted in terms unmistakable to the Islamist terrorists. No more hand-wringing, no more hiding behind the fashionable dismissal of Christianity as unworthy of defense, in Nigeria and in all the other places where Christians are now under attack.

I’ve often invoked the phrase attributed to George Orwell, that “people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” The Christians in Nigeria deserve to sleep peacefully once again. One way or another, the time for rough men has come on behalf of suffering Christianity.

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James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.

By mfnnews