Terror in the Fields, Indifference at the Helm
On Saturday, storming in on motorcycles, a group of Islamic extremists rounded up farmers at rifle point.
They should have been in the fields working. Instead, the village men, shoulders sagging, were plowing the ground for something else: graves. Stretchers, filled with the bodies of their Nigerian sons and brothers, lay spread out in quiet rows — the gruesome proof of a war that won’t go away.
It had started the day before. The harassment, locals would tell you, was routine — not that anyone got used to it. A life of terror is what the people of Koshobe — and so many others — were forced to live with. The simple act of fetching water, families know, could be a life or death mission. In the Borno State, gunmen were known to ride into town, threatening the farmers. But on Friday, when an armed rebel showed up and demanded food, the men decided they’d had enough. They tied up the outsider and called security forces.
The farmers, Danielle Paquette insists, were trying to fight back. Sick of being tormented by Boko Haram and the Fulani, tired of watching their crops burned to the ground or stolen, they saw a rare opportunity to bring one of their tormentors to justice. But in the end, they paid a horrible price. “Boko Haram,” a local politician told Pacquette somberly, “came back to retaliate.”
On Saturday, storming in on motorcycles, a group of Islamic extremists rounded up the farmers at rifle point and tied their hands and feet. One by one, they slit their throats. Another 30 were brutally beheaded. No one is quite sure how many died, since so many of the villagers are missing. As of Sunday, no one had seen or heard from at least 10 Koshobe women and girls. “We have recovered 43 dead bodies, all of them slaughtered, along with six others with serious injuries,” said a militia leader. But as many as 70 or more may have been murdered.
A thousand miles away in the capital of Logos — with its modern skyscrapers and fancy hotels — stories like this one feel a half a world away. The more primitive northeast, where Christians are butchered in the middle of the night and women are raped and burned in front of their children, is a far cry from the bustling government buildings where President Muhammadu Buhari issues statement after statement about the violence. “The entire country is hurt by these senseless killings,” he insisted over the weekend. And yet hurt, after 30,000 deaths in 11 years, has still not translated into action.
Instead, Buhari has tried to claim that the terrorists are “technically defeated.” Tell that to the mourners, who are standing over a fresh burial site, wondering how they will survive. The rich agricultural land — their one hope for survival — was destroyed. Burned to the ground before the executioners left town. Desperation, the governor of Borno warned, is rising. “If they stay at home, they may be killed by hunger,” he told reporters. “If they go out to their farmlands, they risk getting killed by insurgents.”
The West, who watches on with alarm, has tried to pressure Buhari to do more — to contain the violence. Ambassador Sam Brownback has said repeatedly, “Nigeria’s government needs to step up and start acting like a real government that provides basic protections for its people… and the U.S. government should encourage them to do that.” President Trump has certainly tried, flexing America’s economic and diplomatic muscle. In one meeting with the president, Buhari says Trump looked at him when they were alone and said, “Why are you killing Christians?” “I tried and explained to him, this has got nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. It is a cultural thing…” This is genocide, pure and simple and the Nigerian government is facilitating it by their indifference.
In just the first few months of 2020, the Fulani herdsman “hacked to death… no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians,” and engaged in the “wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning.” And too many of these atrocities, people on the ground say, “have gone unchecked… [T]he country’s security forces and concerned political actors [are] looking the other way or colluding with the Jihadists.”
FRC’s Lela Gilbert, an expert on global persecution, said it’s still not clear whether this attack was religiously motivated. “But, there is beyond a doubt an anti-Christian, pro-Islamist nature to much of the killing that goes on in Nigeria. That reality should not be pushed aside and replaced by explanations of tribal conflict, climate change or competition for resources. There is too much evidence otherwise.”
That evidence should not only drive the West to act — it should drive us, as fellow believers, to our knees. Join us in praying for our hurting brothers and sisters in Christ and calling on our government to increase its effort on behalf of those being targeted for their faith in Jesus.
Originally published here.
The Election Went Down to Georgia…
While the media’s looking ahead to January, some states are still trying to sort out what happened in November. No one is busier than Georgia, where election officials aren’t just working through two Senate runoffs but a critical presidential recount. If anyone doubted Georgia’s political importance before, trust me: they aren’t doubting it now. With one congressional chamber in the balance — and the possible fate of Trump’s legal challenge — this one is for all the marbles.
People on the ground, like election law attorney Cleta Mitchell, are hoping that what happens with the recount at least gets some of the mess cleaned up before next month’s races. Right now, she says, the state’s process is in complete shambles. “I can make this simple statement. The election in Georgia was not conducted in accordance with the legislative enactments of duly enacted laws, the election code of the state of Georgia.” Mitchell, who’s been working as a volunteer with the campaign’s legal team in Georgia, has seen enough to make anyone question the outcome.
The Left may be ready to move on, but for the sake of every voter, she argues, Republicans should not. “The entire absentee ballot program [was rewritten] by the secretary of state — not the legislature,” Cleta pointed out on “Washington Watch.” As a result, no one is ensuring that the absentee ballot applications “match the signatures on file on the voter registration cards and… ballot envelopes.” The Trump campaign has made the simple request that this is corrected. “And so far,” she says, “[Secretary Brad Raffensperger] has refused to do that.”
Right now, Cleta argues, Joe Biden is winning by less than .5 percent. In a typical year, a safeguard like signature matching usually means that anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 ballots would be tossed out because the information didn’t correspond. This year, because the secretary refused to authenticate the ballots, only a tiny fraction of the votes were rejected. That’s even fishier when you consider that there was a six-fold increase in the number of absentee ballots. The rejection rate got smaller (.3 percent), even though the number of ballots got higher? “It’s not even statistically possible,” Cleta insists.
Nor is it in keeping with any other election in the state, including the primary election year, the 2014 general election, and so many more. The numbers don’t lie. And while they may not necessarily point to fraud — it’s certainly the smoke that leads to the fire.
“We should have zero tolerance for violations of the law,” Cleta said. When the Constitution empowers the legislature to determine how an election is handled, she went on, and those provisions are violated “over and over in a myriad of ways and producing votes that are contrary to the statute,” Americans should care — and Americans should fight back. Right now, she and the legal team have evidence of at least 25 provisions of the election statute that were violated — including how ballots were accepted, cast, and counted. “And so we’re going to be filing an even more robust petition later this week,” Mitchell promised.
In the meantime, Georgia’s Secretary Raffensperger isn’t the only one in the hot seat. In a press conference yesterday, he came out swinging at Fulton County for the Atlanta area’s “dysfunction” in the recount process. He slammed their “compounding errors,” the biggest of which, he insisted, was refusing to follow “the procedures that my office laid out … Fulton County once again cut corners, the biggest one being he backed up the election project on the server itself instead of on an external backup. Because of that decision, they lost the ability to upload hundreds of thousands of scanned ballots.” Adding to the drama, a district judge just stopped three Georgia counties from erasing their Dominion voting machine data so that officials could take a closer look at some irregularities.
The plot is getting thicker, while the stakes are getting higher. The process matters. And as Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told listeners Monday, “exercising all of your rights under the process matters too.” Not just for Donald Trump, but for every American who cares about fair and honest elections.
Originally published here.
COVID: The Devil’s in the Retails
Are super stores the super spreader? That’s the question El Paso Mayor Dee Margo is asking. In a Texas city that’s been so ravaged by the virus that they’ve had to bring in mobile morgues, Margo thinks it’s time people take a long hard look at the data. While everyone’s trying to shut down churches, the real culprit might be industry no one’s bothered to regulate.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, the mayor talked about the alarming numbers. “We did a deep dive in our contact tracing for the week of November the 10th through the 16th and found that 55 percent of the positives were coming from shopping at large retailers — what we’d term as ‘the big box stores,’” Margo said. “And those are considered essential under CISA guidelines under homeland security.” And, like most local leaders, he said, “I don’t have any control over any limitations there.”
In El Paso, one of the COVID hotspots that actually reached hospital capacity, Mayor Margo thinks more stores should be putting “voluntary limitations” on the number of shoppers. Interestingly enough, those companies have been virtually untouched by the restrictions. Instead, far-Left governors and state officials have been too busy targeting houses of worship to keep the real problem in check. It’s not the people in the pews but the shoppers on the produce aisle that pose the greatest problem of spreading the coronavirus.
Of course, this is even more infuriating when you consider that most of these church gatherings haven’t led to coronavirus outbreaks. That’s part of the argument several people have made in court when their congregations are treated unfairly. “Nobody’s saying that the government can’t take steps to try to stop the spread of the pandemic,” Becket attorney Joe Davis said on Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “Of course it can, and it should. What we’re saying is that it’s entirely inappropriate for churches and synagogues, houses of worship, to be effectively shut down entirely while all sorts of… secular activities are allowed to go forward. There’s been no evidence that religious worship is sort of uniquely contributing to the pandemic by any stretch.”
And yet, the government — in places like New York City — tried to reduce 1,000-person capacity sanctuaries to 10-25 people. It’s absurd, especially when people step on an airplane, and passengers are jammed in like sardines, sitting elbow-to-elbow for hours. Why can they wear a mask and it’s fine, but we can’t sit in a church for an hour taking even more precautions and socially distancing?
It’s a good illustration of the overall problem, Joe said, which is “you’ve got government officials sitting back and saying, ‘Well, this activity is essential, and religion is not essential. And that’s just not a judgment that the First Amendment allows the government to make. Religious worship is a core part of this country. The First Amendment is the First Freedom. And so, to say that it’s not essential is just not something that the Constitution allows the government to do.”
Frankly, I’m not for shutting anything down. I’m for governments allowing people to use common sense in protecting themselves and others from the virus. What I am against in no uncertain terms is government treating a place of worship as less essential or important than the super spreader Walmart store down the street. We will only keep these fundamental freedoms if we protect them — by using them.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
