Color me cynical, but every day brings fresh reminders that the very people who most loudly proclaim their love for suffering humanity tend to have a not-so-well-hidden agenda. Scratch the surface, and the only suffering they really care about is suffering that can be packaged to promote a political agenda or used as a cudgel to beat their political opponents over the head. Thus, this “humanitarian industrial complex” manipulates the feelings of good-hearted souls everywhere, serving up a diet of lies and calumnies, while ignoring crises that absolutely cry out for attention.
Watching the latest episode of Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN current affairs show, The World Over, I was reminded once again of just such a crisis, the ongoing — ongoing now for many years — persecution of Christian farmers in Nigeria. Arroyo’s guests for the Nigeria segment were my friend Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute, arguably our leading expert on the persecution of Christians in Africa, and Steven Wagner, president of the advocacy organization Solidarity with the Persecuted Church.
The discussion highlighted some of the most recent horrors, notably the massacre of some 200 Christian “internal refugees” by Muslim Jihadis of the Fulani tribe, while a nearby encampment of Nigerian government soldiers stood idly by. “Internal refugee” is a significant term. For years now, the Fulanis have repeatedly attacked Christian farming villagers, killing wantonly, but also driving the villagers away from their homes and into the parlous existence of refugee camps, which, often enough, then become targets of further attacks.
While our State Department under Joe Biden perpetuated the lame narrative that this conflict was driven by “resource rivalry” exacerbated by “climate change,” the truth is that the Fulanis have been engaged in nothing short of ethnic cleansing, abetted and encouraged by other Muslim terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and the ever expanding “Islamic State-Sahel Province,” the latter very explicitly pursuing, in classic ISIS fashion, the creation of a “caliphate,” and, moreover, a terrorist enterprise that hates the U.S.
I’ve written again and again about the horrors inflicted on Christians in Nigeria, about how this makes a mockery of our every humanitarian pronouncement, of how it serves, sadly, as but one part of a larger pattern of foreign policy failure, something that will haunt us if it continues unabated. The geopolitical challenges are immense, and the threats from this quarter to our national security are increasing — it’s no accident that the Chinese and the Russians have prioritized influence operations in the resource-rich regions of Africa.
But set that aside for now. My concern today is with those among us who most loudly proclaim their love for humanity, those proud “progressives” with their “hate has no home” signs and their insistence on our obligations to the “less fortunate.” More specifically, I’m concerned with those who’ve fetishized protection of the “undocumented,” those who insist that the Trump administration’s deportation policies are a “crime against humanity,” that ICE agents are no better than “masked thugs,” comparable to “Nazi stormtroopers,” and that the “Alligator Alcatraz” should really be termed the “Alligator Auschwitz.”
This tendentious and ugly hyperbole would be bad enough, but what underpins it is far worse. At every turn, one encounters a misrepresentation of current deportation efforts, and this, in turn, has infiltrated every corner of social media, creating a pattern of half-truths and outright lies that confound any possibility that reasonable people could deal with the immigration question reasonably.
If one had only the mainstream media to rely upon, one would be left in total ignorance of how ICE has prioritized the identification and removal of violent criminals, murderers, rapists, child molesters and traffickers, as well as Muslim radicals on the terrorism watchlist and foot soldiers of the Mexican drug cartels. Instead, we’re treated to sanitizing headlines and, at best, an honest description buried many paragraphs inside the typical news story. Thus, infamously, the “Maryland Man” was a reputed human trafficker with documented MS-13 ties and “Children’s Chaplain” was a term used for a man flagged on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist, just a few among a long list of examples.
Similarly, the coverage of the recent ICE raid on a California cannabis farm focused on the “poor farm workers,” not on the child traffickers who worked as overseers, or the children, working in virtual slavery, who were rescued from their clutches. And while anti-ICE demonstrators violently attacked federal agents with rocks and even gunfire, we heard once again that this was “mostly peaceful.” What we didn’t hear is that the owner of the cannabis farm has contributed significantly in the past to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political campaigns and other California Democrats. Nor have the Antifa ambush attacks on ICE agents and other law enforcement personnel — nothing less than calculated attempted murder — been given the media attention they deserve.
Our anti-ICE humanitarians, it seems, don’t have a problem with children being trafficked or with slavery, and this brings me back to their indifference to conditions in Nigeria and across even wider swathes of Africa. I’ve written of the persistence of actual slavery in the nation of Mauritania, where Muslim Arabs perpetuate their centuries-long practice of enslaving blacks, something our own reparations grifters determinedly ignore. I’ve also written of the horrific exploitation of child labor in the cobalt mines of the Congo, exploitation directly tied to the needs of EV manufacturing. But climate change fanaticism quite clearly trumps caring about child slavery.
Of course, our comfortable and mostly middle-class or wealthier white progressives show no interest in the massacre of Nigerian Christians. No matter that these people are black, desperately poor, and horrifically mistreated, their plight doesn’t serve the domestic political narrative in the United States. Thus, the unconscionable becomes all too commonplace. Do black lives really matter to these people? Their almost contemptuous indifference to these particular black lives tells the tale.
At Mass yesterday morning, the Gospel message was the parable of the Good Samaritan. Regardless of our religious upbringing, virtually all Americans will be familiar with Luke’s telling of how a man was stripped, beaten, and left for dead by robbers, of how the man was ignored by pious passersby, until finally, a Samaritan, a hated outsider, stopped, rendered aid, and then left money to ensure the man’s continued care and recovery.
Coming away from the church service, I couldn’t help but reflect on how this parable has been colonized by the “progressive” leftist humanitarians. After all, the parable concludes with the famous admonition to “love thy neighbor,” and, for these people, “love thy neighbor” has been reduced to “no human being is illegal,” and regardless of their documentation, all those who’ve made their way into our country must be loved, equally and indiscriminately.
It reduces one of the most powerful of all Christian messages to a vapid feel-good trope. Illegal immigrants are not our only neighbors, and their presence has quite frequently disadvantaged other neighbors, notably poor Americans with whom they compete for jobs and, significantly, for government benefits. But more, it totally ignores the other portion of Christ’s message. The parable, after all, invites us to love the neighbor who is, in this case, a victim of a criminal attack. Christ doesn’t ask us to love the robbers who attacked him. Quite the contrary, as any thoughtful reading of the Gospels will tell us.
Or for those Americans who’ve become resistant to moral lessons couched in Christian terms, let me offer a maxim from another noted moralist, Michael Connolly’s fictional LA police detective, Harry Bosch. Bosch’s take-no-prisoners approach to dealing with the high and the mighty comes down to a simple statement: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”
That, for me, is a message worth taking to heart. Don’t drape yourself in humanitarian virtue, while caring only for causes that promote your political agenda. Don’t measure your love for mankind only in terms of what serves your emotional need to despise Donald Trump, or the prospects for Democrats in the 2026 elections.
If you truly believe in alleviating the plight of suffering humanity, then you might extend your love and support to Nigeria’s Christians. You might raise your voice on behalf of persecuted Christians everywhere, in Sudan, Central Africa, and yes, sometimes, closer to home — Christian churches and communities have become a top target for hate crimes. You might take off your keffiyehs, dispense with your shallow pro-Hamas rhetoric, and focus your attention and resources on true suffering.
And you might consider the plight of trafficked children, the victims of the fentanyl trade, and the depredations of criminal gangs who hide themselves within the larger mass of the previous administration’s tidal wave of uncontrolled immigration. You might make the effort to consider illegal immigration’s true victims, and lend your support to taking their victimizers off the streets and out of the country.
If you can’t sign up to that, then perhaps it’s time you gave yourself a good, look in the mirror. You might ask yourself why some people count in your world, while others count for nothing to you.
“Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
‘Truth, Justice, and the American Way’ No Longer: The End of Superman
The Mission Is Never Accomplished
Frederick Forsyth: The Better Craftsman
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. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk find the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.