Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on media coverage of the Catholic massacre in Nigeria:
Father Andrew Abayomi was finishing his celebration of Mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo state (Nigeria) on Pentecost Sunday when terrorists shot the congregation and threw explosives at the church building, killing dozens of people. This was only the latest in a series of killings carried out by radical Islamists against Christians in Nigeria, though the media are reluctant to discuss the identity of the terrorists.
No one was better at describing what happened than Nina Shea, whose expertise is monitoring religious liberty worldwide at the Hudson Institute. “The massacre in a church while filled with Sunday worshippers is an atrocity that we’ve repeatedly seen in northern Nigeria over the years. Those were the work of Islamist extremists.” Mostly Muslims live in the north of Nigeria; the south is populated by Christians.
Among the media who did an accurate job reporting on the mass shooting was Christianity Today, Quartz Africa and Reuters. They made it clear that Muslim radicals were to blame.
The New York Times and the Associated Press made a passing reference to the role of Muslims (abcnews.com and the Washington Post picked up the AP story). Many others were worse.
The National Catholic Register branded what happened a “massacre,” and PBS spoke about “gunmen”; neither identified who they were. Catholic News Agency also ran a story on the “gunmen,” but also issued a report citing Shea.
Catholic News Service and the BBC were particularly egregious in covering up the role of Muslim extremists. They both referenced the Reuters story, which made it clear that Muslims were persecuting Christians, but neither made any mention of that fact, preferring to talk about “gunmen.”
CNN said the attacks against Christians had been orchestrated by “Boko Haram terrorists,” but did not identify them as Islamists. The Guardian wrote about “ethnic Fulani terrorists,” not mentioning that they are Jihadists.
Aljazeera misled the public by writing about violence committed by farmers and “nomadic herders.” Guess who the “nomadic herders” are? Muslims. The Muslim Fulani herdsmen are the same Jihadists named by Genocide Watch who were responsible for 100% of the 7,400 Christians killed between 2015 and 2020.
Regarding the killings, Nina Shea puts much of the blame on the Biden administration. “Kidnappers and murders of priests and pastors, enslavement of Christian girls, and mob lynching’s for alleged blasphemy against Islam” have gotten worse since Biden removed Nigeria from the United States’ “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) list of countries where egregious religious persecution is taking place.
Shea took aim at Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying he “needs to address this crisis, stop making excuses for it based on a climate change narrative and designate Nigeria as a CPC. Anything less is unconscionable.”
The media cover-up of the Muslims atrocities, coupled with the passivity of the Biden administration, is why this horror show continues.
