While we wished each other a “Merry Christmas,” and went about our caroling and exchanging presents, at least 140 Christian farmers — and probably 200 or more — were murdered by Moslem herders in the Plateau State of Nigeria. If you missed this amidst our holiday festivities, don’t be too hard on yourselves; coverage in our mainstream media was cursory, and, in large part, quickly disappeared. The reported circumstances were horrific, and everywhere heartbreaking. Furthermore, this represents only the latest in a decades long bloodletting. Open Doors, an international organization dedicated to protecting threatened Christian communities, has documented years of brutality and repeated massacres, mainly targeting Christian farming communities, but also moderate Moslem farmers. 

Nigerian security forces have been notably useless in addressing the ongoing crisis. Although the recently elected president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, took office with promises to bring an end to the slaughter, as well as to address repeated human rights violations by Nigerian internal security forces, little has been accomplished. The most notable recent intervention, a misguided drone attack by the Nigerian military, destroyed a village of Moslem farmers, at the cost of approximately 100 innocent lives. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Expect the Worst in 2024)

The perpetrators of these multiple horrors, going back over a decade, are several. The most prominent has been the radical Islamist group, Boko Haram, which became notorious not quite a decade ago for kidnapping 276 school girls, and the kidnappings have continued, sometimes attributed to Boko Haram, sometimes to ISIS’s so-called “West Africa Province.” In recent years, the primary perpetrators of massacres such as the one over Christmas, have been Moslem “herders” of the Fulani tribe. 

I quote the term “herders” because it figures prominently in the nonsense promoted by many outside observers, including our own State Department. Over and over again, the massacres, overwhelmingly targeting Christians, have been attributed to land use conflicts between nomadic herding populations and sedentary farmers. For American ears, this evokes the range wars of the late 19th Century between cattlemen and sheep farmers. Interestingly, President Tinubu’s predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, also served as the president of the Fulani Cattlemen’s association. We should resist the temptation to “contextualize,” to use a term made popular recently by Ivy League presidents. What is happening in Nigeria cannot and should not be reduced to some kind of West African episode of “Yellowstone,” or, more apposite, its “1923” prequel. By all accounts, the total number of deaths in our decades-long range wars amounted to scarcely one-fourth of those Christian farmers murdered over the past holiday weekend. This isn’t Rip taking someone to the “train station.”

Instead, as documented by the group Genocide Watch, what we are seeing is a concerted effort, on the part of Islamist-motivated Fulani terrorists, to eradicate the Christian farming communities of Nigeria. As Genocide Watch noted at the end of 2022, more people die in Nigeria every month than in Ukraine, over 6,000 in the first three months of 2022, overwhelmingly Christians massacred by Fulani militias. The organization also observed that our State Department refused to acknowledge the religious nature of the massacres, preferring to attribute it to the scarcity of arable land and the effects of “climate change.” One might as well view the Holocaust as nothing more than Nazis efforts to achieve Lebensraum, “living space” for Aryan agriculturalists. 

As recently as yesterday, Truth Nigeria.com described how the Nigerian army is, in effect, providing cover for the Fulani terrorists as they move into the devastated villages and take control of yet another critical asset in the Plateau State, the now-abandoned scattered tin mines — so much for poor cattlemen simply looking for a few more acres of grazing land. Let me repeat. The Fulani “militias” are Islamist terrorists, pure and simple, and while they might not be in league with Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Houthis, while they might not be supported by Iran or bent on establishing a caliphate, they are Islamist terrorists who massacre Christians on a scale comparable to that of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen. (READ MORE: ‘If Only in My Dreams’: The Poignant Context of a Christmas Classic)

And the world pretty much ignores this. In previous American Spectator articles I’ve made plain my disgust at the Hamas monstrosities of October 7, and my further disgust at the emergence across Europe and here in the United States of a massive wave of anti-Semitism and blatant support for Hamas. The very idea that this should be “contextualized” is abhorrent. I’ve made clear my support for Ukraine in the face of Putin’s unprovoked and criminal assault. Similarly, I’ve also made clear my support for Taiwanese independence and the need to prepare for the very real possibility of a Chinese invasion in the near future. Right now, and across the globe, and very much here at home, across our porous southern border, a world filled with hostile actors is converging upon us, from a flood of fentanyl from China to missile attacks on critical shipping in the Red Sea.

So yes, much is happening, and it’s easy to set aside the crisis of the Christian community in Nigeria as not worthy of our attention. I think that this is profoundly wrong, albeit typical of what passes for leadership in our country these days. We need to stand up for ourselves and for our values, both here at home and abroad — the two are not nearly as severable as some would have you believe. Instead of standing for order and for the values of Western civilization, instead of standing strong for our Judeo-Christian heritage whenever and wherever it is under attack, we seem bent on inflicting our worst “woke” dysfunction on the world at large. This has to stop, and hopefully the 2024 elections will signal our renewed commitment to defending American greatness in all of its manifestations.

Protecting the West and Christianity

We are faced, on multiple fronts, with assaults on our culture and our civilization, many of them from the ideological brethren of the murderous Fulani militias. Order matters, whether it’s in the face of riots here at home or massacres abroad. And the Christian communities of Nigeria should matter. We don’t have to chase every conceivable overseas involvement, and we shouldn’t go looking, willy-nilly, for trouble. But trouble has a way of coming after us, and ignoring genocide diminishes us in ways we haven’t even begun to measure. And, dare I say it, Christianity matters and Christians deserve our support, no matter how unfashionable that may seem to some. What is happening around the world, and, very much, in Nigeria, is not all that far removed from many other challenges, including challenges made manifest every day here at home.

Last summer, in only my second article for American Spectator, I evoked The Magnificent Seven in connection with the plight of the Christian communities in Nigeria. I acknowledged that there were no easy answers in a country where corruption is rife, where the security forces are compromised by Islamist sympathies, and where the Christian communities are defenseless. I insisted then that we needed to speak up for these communities, we needed our government to honestly face the fact of a Christian genocide underway. I insisted then that, instead of hiding behind climate change and other fantastical explanations, we recognize their real plight, and exert every possible pressure upon the Nigerian government. This, at least, didn’t seem too much to ask. (READ MORE: ‘Holocaust Envy’ and the New Anti-Semitism)

I also suggested, however wistfully and against the position of the Biden administration, that the Christian villagers had the right to defend themselves. I further suggested that they deserved being given the means and the skills to do so, even as I acknowledged the near-impossibility of making this happen within a nominally friendly country, albeit one apparently unwilling to stop the genocide against Christians. I’m currently working on my next thriller novel, and while the main plot once again involves a challenge from China, I’m building a subplot in which some ex-special forces operatives go into these Christian communities, bringing the weapons and training that could thwart the Fulani militias. Sadly, it’s much easier to do this in fiction than in the real world. 

I re-watched The Magnificent Seven recently, and focused on the four graves, the four members of the seven who lost their lives in protecting the farmers. I listened yet again to the final words of the Yul Brynner character as he and Steve McQueen ride away. “Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” Perhaps that summarizes our dilemma, as played out over and over again in our interventions around the world. Even on those rare occasions when “the farmers” win as the result of our intervention, we tend to lose.

I’m not a fan of the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven, but its concluding message is worth pondering. Emma Cullen, the character who engaged the services of the Seven, remarks of their efforts and their sacrifice: “Whatever they were in life, here, at the end, each man stood with courage and honor. They fought for the ones who couldn’t fight for themselves, and they died for them too. All to win something that didn’t belong to them. It was — magnificent.”

We may not be able to defend these Christians with weapons in hand, but, at the very least, perhaps we can speak for them, over and again, until the world finally pays attention. At the very least, as I observed months ago, we should respect their desire to defend themselves, to “deal in lead” if that’s what it takes. 

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. His doctoral dissertation on the early history of the Gestapo can be accessed online by searching “James H. McGee, III” and “The Political Police in Bavaria, 1919-1936.” Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.