The Obama administration’s actions in Nigeria are one of its great unmentioned crimes against humanity.
The Obama-Biden regime did its best to block efforts to list Boko Haram as a terrorist organization despite its horrifying massacres of Christians. And did everything possible to bring down Nigeria’s Christian president and replace him with its former Muslim dictator.
Obama and Hillary resisted doing anything about Boko Haram because they believed that its root cause was the oppression of Muslims by the Nigerian government. Across the bloody years of Boko Haram terror, the State Department matched empty condemnations of Boko Haram’s killing sprees with condemnations of the Nigerian authorities for violating Muslim rights.
State Department officials responded to Boko Haram attacks over the years with the same litany of statistics about unemployment in the Muslim north and the 92 percent of children there who do not attend school. When Hillary Clinton was asked about the kidnappings by ABC News, she blamed Nigeria for not “ensuring that every child has the right and opportunity to go to school.”
Two years ago the New York Times ran an op-ed titled, “In Nigeria, Boko Haram Is Not the Problem.”
The op-ed contended that Boko Haram didn’t exist, that it was a peaceful splinter group and that the Nigerian army was worse than Boko Haram. Somehow these three claims were made on the same page. The editorial warned the US not to give the impression that it supports Nigeria’s Christian president or it would infuriate Muslims and suggested that Christians might really be behind the Muslim terror attacks.
At the end of April, Daniel Benjamin, from the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, testifying at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, denied that Boko Haram was affiliated with Al-Qaeda, while conceding that its members were probably being trained by Al-Qaeda. Benjamin then stated that the State Department’s response to the Islamic genocide of Christians by Jihadists in the Muslim north was “to press for a change to its (Nigeria’s) heavy-handed approach to the security threats in the north”.
Johnnie Carson, the Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of African Affairs, in his remarks on Nigeria, claimed bizarrely, that despite a campaign of violence focused heavily around attacks on churches, “Religion is not driving extremist violence in either Jos or Northern Nigeria” and warned the Nigerian government to “avoid excessive violence”.
The same old games are coming back during Obama’s third term.
Christian groups, a U.S. government panel and former senior U.S. diplomats are furious over Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to take Nigeria off a list of countries accused of engaging in or tolerating religious persecution.
Blinken’s decision was revealed last week just before he visited Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and one where Muslim-Christian tensions have long flared.
State Department officials gave no reason for the move other than saying Blinken, upon the advice of various department sections, decided Nigeria didn’t meet the legal threshold to be named as “country of particular concern” in an annual religious freedom list released by the secretary of State. They denied the decision’s unveiling was linked to Blinken’s trip but couldn’t fully explain the timeline.
The Jihad always gets a pass from the Obama-Biden boys.