From AP/ABCNews:
52 Killed in Central Nigeria Raids and Reprisals
By AHMED SAKA Associated PressJOS, Nigeria July 8, 2012 (AP)
Raids and reprisal attacks have left 52 people dead in Christian villages near a Nigerian city where authorities have struggled to contain religious violence, officials said Sunday.
Assailants launched “sophisticated attacks” on several villages near Jos early Saturday, said Mustapha Salisu, spokesman for a special taskforce made up of policemen and soldiers deployed in the area to curb years of violence.
“They came in hundreds,” Salisu said. “Some had (police) uniforms and some even had bulletproof vests.”
He said the special taskforce fought back for hours [!] and lost two policemen in the battle. Salisu initially said that 37 people were killed including 14 civilians and 21 assailants.
However, later in the day, Nigerian Red Cross official Andronicus Adeyemo said aid workers had counted 52 dead and more than 300 displaced people from the attacks. He did not give a breakdown.
He said a federal lawmaker and a state lawmaker were ambushed and killed Sunday afternoon on their way to a mass burial for the victims.
[…]
Mark Lipdo, who runs a Christian advocacy group known as the Stefanos Foundation, gave a list of the 13 villages where he got reports of attacks. He said they were all Christian.
[…]
Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people, is largely divided into a mainly Christian south and a predominantly Muslim north. Jos is located in the “middle belt,” at the meeting point of these two regions.
Human Rights Watch says at least 1,000 people were killed in communal clashes around Jos in 2010.
However, the rise of a northern-based Islamist insurgency known as Boko Haram has added a new dimension to the long-running conflict, fanning religious tensions in this flashpoint area.
[…]
All previous Jos attacks have targeted churches, a deliberate move to trigger more religious violence, many have said. They all sparked reprisals.
Sts. Nunilio and Alodia, pray for us.
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There is a war going on between Islamists – not to be confused with Moslems – and Christians. For evidence, read the books authored by Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq.
Nice that these people took the time out of their probably “very busy” day to go ahead and slaughter some innocent Christians.
I can’t read stuff like this, it’s an occasion to sin for me…I get to angry and upset. I’ll stop there.
what is wrong with these people??
Sounds like the Christians may not be totally innocent…the report said that there have been reprisals to the attacks. I wonder if this conflict is about more than religion…
I don’t know…honestly, I just don’t understand any of it. I don’t understand why people wake up in the morning and decide to kill people. I just don’t. I can’t seem to grasp the concept.
We need to resurrect and consolidate devotion to those that converted from Islam or died for the sake of fighting Islam under our Lady by her titles Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of Lepanto. Saints like Nunilo, Alodia, St. Casilda, the Martyrs of Cordoba, Sts. Aurelius and Natalia, St. Adolphus, the Trinitarian founders and Saints (Sts. Louis IX of France, John de Matha, Felix of Valois, and Blessed Marc Criado), St. Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua for their desire to convert the Muhammadans, Bl. Anthony Neyrot (the strange case of a Dominican who apostatized then repented and was martyred for it), St. Abo of Tiflis and others.
theidler, the god of Islam believes that the murder of those that oppose his prophet are infidels or polytheists or apostates, and since they will not submit, they are worthy of death. I make no mistake. Islam is a monotheistic religion, but we do not worship the same God.
strike that… it isn’t murder… but merely killing.
We in European Civilization (what Americans call “The West”) should not forget that religious toleration among us was hard won. The 1st Amendment, the Catholic Emancipation Act, and Nostra Aetate were written with the the Act of Supremancy, Tilly at Magdeburg, and Cromwell at Drogeda firmly in mind. We should expect it to be hard won in Nigeria.
Western Mainstream press will largely ignore these escalating and mounting attacks specifically against Christians. Heck, the Obama administration even chooses to ignore atrocities against Christians in the reports it receives. For them these people do not exist and Muslims do nothing wrong. Or rather they redefine the atrocities against Christians as not being religious, but ‘tribal.’ Millions of dollars will go to fund more ‘investigation’ into what the reasons are because Obama likes to ignore the obvious, or rather he is just dishonest.
http://taberstruths.com/obama-administration-denies-religious-extremism-is-cause-of-church-bombings-in-nigeria-88834/
You will not know from just watching your news outlet of choice that Christians are killed every Sunday in Africa.
“You will not know from just watching your news outlet of choice that Christians are killed every Sunday in Africa.”
Because it is politically incorrect.
It’s a serious error to foster an illusion that the jihad waged against Christians since the foundation of the Mohammedan religion is merely a case of misunderstanding and intolerance, it is fundamental to their cult, and those who don’t practice it are either restraining themselves for best advantage, or are “cafeteria muslims”. Read your history.
Our Lady of Victory, Pray for us.
Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (1938):
“It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.”
” . . . the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain the complicated instruments of modern war? Where is the political machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world?”
“In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine–or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe . . . The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power may be delayed:–but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed. . . . There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war. . . . there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now ALONE give us superiority over it–whereas in FAITH we have fallen inferior to it.”
“Now it is probable enough that on these lines–unity under a leader–the return of Islam may arrive. There is no leader as yet, but enthusiasm might bring one and there are signs enough in the political heavens today of what we may have to expect from the revolt of Islam at some future date—perhaps not far distant.”
Hilaire Belloc, 1939.
Interesting quotes in the above post. I am currently reading Belloc’s “How the Reformation Happened”, will have to check out “The Great Heresies”. It is amazing how different history looks when you see it from a Catholic viewpoint – too much of our history has been written by Protestants who have slanted things to fit their perceptions.
One thing that I learned from his history of the Reformation was how the threat of a Muslim invasion of Europe that was constantly present in the 15th and 16th centuries weakened the German Emperor thus preventing him from responding to the initial rumblings of Protestantism. So to some extent the Muslims have some responsibility for the breakup of Christian unity in Europe, although there were many other factors of course.
Dorcas, I have been following several Christian sites for about eight years online. I can assure you that reprisals are extremely rare, but do happen. This is all about the growth of sharia law in Mali, the Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, and now, Egypt. Christians, some who are Copts and even missionaries from Europe of other denominations are killed weekly.
Do not be fooled by the secularist media which is in the hands of the Islamists. I taught Islam at the college level, and after studying it for years, I can assure you it is not a religion of peace.
By the way, if a man or woman is not a violent Muslim, that have departed from some tenants of their own faith. It is all there in the Koran and in the hadith.