For years, we’ve been lectured by the propaganda press and campus “activists” that Islamic terrorists are the real victims, while Christians — usually labeled “white” for good measure — are cast as the oppressors. We’ve all heard the routine. Remember when New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani suggested that the true victims of 9/11 were New York’s Muslims because his “Auntie” felt people looked at her funny on the subway? Apparently mass murder now ranks below awkward eye contact.
Those comforting fables collapse the moment you look at reality. Islamic jihadists show zero tolerance for coexistence with Christianity or Western civil society, and the evidence grows more undeniable by the day. From the ISIS-inspired attack at Bondi Beach in Australia to terror networks allegedly benefiting from unwitting American taxpayers, jihadist violence is not receding — it’s accelerating.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Nigeria. For years, corporate media either ignored or outright denied the systematic slaughter of Christians there. We were expected to know nothing about priests being beheaded, churches burned to the ground, or families hacked apart with machetes. We weren’t supposed to notice the destruction of roughly 19,000 churches, the live burnings of Christians, or the estimated 8,000 Christians killed this year alone — with more than 135,000 murdered since 2009.
Christians are, by a wide margin, the most persecuted religious group in the world today. Yet their suffering rarely fits the fashionable narrative, so it’s buried.
Modern Christian persecution largely comes from two sources: communist regimes like North Korea and China, and Islamic jihadist movements such as Boko Haram, Fulani militants in Nigeria, and the Taliban — all driven by the same goal of forcibly imposing sharia law. This reality was front and center at the recent panel “Persecuted and Prevailing: Addressing Christian Persecution in the Modern World” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
If unchecked, this violence will continue to spread. Brad Brandon of Across Nigeria warned that Nigerian Christians live in constant fear, never knowing when the next massacre will strike — like the June slaughter in Yelewata, where 260 people were killed in a single attack.
History tells us exactly how this ends if ignored. As the granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, I recognize the pattern all too well. First comes denial and media silence. During the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman perpetrators denied it, and the world largely looked away — despite warnings from figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. Today, Nigeria faces the same willful blindness.
Second comes extermination by attrition. Just as Armenians were dismissed as victims of “relocation” or “conflict,” Nigerian Christian massacres are lazily described as “farmer-herder disputes.” In reality, Armenians were targeted for who they were — and so are Nigerian Christians today. Different tactics, same objective: erasure.
Third comes plausible deniability. The Ottoman government relied on irregular terror bands to do the killing. Nigeria’s government now attempts distance from Boko Haram, ISIS affiliates, and Fulani militias — while Christians continue to die.
Kidnappings in Nigeria serve the same function deportations once did for Armenians. Families sell everything to pay ransoms. Survivors are left destitute, displaced, and crammed into filthy camps where disease finishes what the attackers started. This grim script repeats wherever jihadists gain ground.
It’s time to drop the childish “oppressor-oppressed” mythology. The truth is painfully simple: innocent people are being murdered for their faith. As Saul once said to Zuby, let’s be human for a moment and agree that killing innocent people is wrong. If that basic moral line can’t be drawn, silence becomes complicity.
The hopeful note is this: more Americans are finally waking up. Truth has a way of breaking through censorship, and under leaders willing to name evil plainly — not excuse it — awareness can turn into action. Speaking honestly is the first step toward protecting life, liberty, and the most basic human freedom of all: the right to live without terror.
