When I ended my update on the heartrending mass murder and abductions of the people of Woro in Kaiama LGA by calling attention to the Muslim identity of the victims, just so some screwdriver salesman won’t use “Google” to “verify” that they are Christians in the service of advancing a tendentious “Christian genocide” narrative, I came across to some people as being needlessly overdramatic. But I knew what I was doing.
Now, look at this headline from BarristerNG, a well-regarded, law-focused Nigerian news site: “Kwara Tragedy: Terrorists Kill Villagers for Refusing to Change Their Faith, 78 Buried in Mass Graves.”
It is based on Gov. Abdulrazaq Abdulrahman’s disclosure that the people, whom the governor was careful to identify as Muslims, were murdered because they resisted the extremist version of Islam the terrorists preach.
The headline is a devious, sinister, underhanded but visible rhetorical maneuver to give the impression that even in a communal mass slaughter where both the villains and the victims are Muslims, it was a “Christian genocide.”
When you pair “terrorists,” which invariably evokes the imagery of Muslim extremists, with murder as punishment for refusal to “change their faith,” you can’t help but conclude that the victims are Christians.
Faith is a synonym for religion. Since there are two major faiths in Nigeria, and since there has been a tyrannical, well-oiled, carefully choreographed, even if factually impoverished, amplification of a “Christian genocide” narrative that suggests that only Christians are being murdered in Nigeria, that Muslims are not only spared from this but are, in fact, complicit in this “genocide,” the headline basically implies that the mass murders in Woro were just another evidence of “Christian genocide.”
If the screwdriver salesman or his ilk come across this sort of story in a Google search, they will present it as yet another “evidence” of “Christian genocide.”
BarristerNG’s headline is similar in many respects to the December 24, 2025, headlines of many Christian-owned Nigerian news media organizations, which captured the mass murder of Muslims in a Maiduguri mosque with headlines that gave the impression that Christians were the victims.
Channels TV’s headline was: “BREAKING: Many Feared Dead as Bomb Blast Rocks Maiduguri on Christmas Eve.” Other Lagos newspapers had headlines like, “Christmas Eve Bombing Leaves 5 Dead, 35 Injured in Borno.” There was no mention of “mosque” or “Muslim worshipers” in the headlines.
Since most people only read headlines, you can imagine the impression these headlines created in the minds of people who reason like the screwdriver salesman, who fishes for and sees “Christian genocide” anywhere and everywhere.
There is an endemic mass murder of innocents in most parts of Nigeria, which I won’t hierarchize by religious affiliation because I think that’s cruel.
And I actually don’t have a problem with Christian communities that interpret their own experience of the nationwide sanguinary fury of bloodthirsty terrorists as religiously based genocide, since the villains self-identify as Muslims.
But I do have a problem with the dangerously divisive dimension this is now taking.
It increasingly seems that the basic humanity that binds us is becoming immaterial. There is now a growing, unreasoning, bigoted, pigheaded, and obnoxiously monomaniacal obsession with advancing the narrative of a Christian genocide that suggests that only Christians are being murdered, that Muslims are exempt from murder because they share a similar faith with the murderers (as if faith is all that matters in a person), that Muslim deaths don’t matter, and that every shocking death must be “Christianized” to make it worthy of sympathy and empathy–and, of course, a part of the rhetorical armory to prosecute the narrative of a “Christian genocide.”
If the facts don’t fit, force them. If you can’t force them, manufacture them. It’s distressing.
Every death diminishes and distresses me. We are, first of all, human before we’re anything else. Our ethnicity, faith, language, etc. are incidental to our humanity.
