Don't Like The Results? Burn A Church

Most Americans liked the movie Mississippi Burning,, though there was some serious grousing from the "civil rights establishment" that the FBI agents who were portrayed as solving the murders of three civil rights workers were all white. The movie was based on a true story, and truth confuses liberals.

Somehow, though, I don't think Hollywood will be putting out a movie entitled Nigeria Burning, even though there's a whole lot of church-burning going on.

All the church-burnings in the American South during the civil rights movement don't add up to a day's worth of torching in Nigeria since its recent presidential election, even if you add in the ones that Bill Clinton imagined. In no more than three days after the election, over sixty Nigerian Christian churches were burned to the ground, many with parishioners and congregants still inside. Thousands, yes thousands of Christian homes have been burned. Muslims on the continent of Africa don't need much pushing to start burning Christian, Jewish and pagan worshipers. But the excuse in Nigeria is that the Muslim candidate should have won.

That story isn't sexy enough for Hollywood. After all, drooling moron white bigots burned the black churches in Mississippi. Here, largely black Muslims burned largely black Christian churches. That screws up the oppressive white Christian mantra. Pastors, priests, church workers, church attendees (and pretty much everyone near a targeted church) were killed, either in the fires or rifle and machete attacks.

Liberals in Hollywood and the MSM won't be having much to do with this round of mass murders. That's because the murderous supporters of presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari are not only Muslims, but members of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). Progressives have to stick together, after all. And the word "progressive" is about as meaningless in Nigeria as it is in America.

America is still working on accomplishing what Nigeria has already done. In Muslim-majority states, sharia law applies. The Christian President, elected by a 59-32 margin nationwide believes that Nigerian law should be uniform throughout the nation. The Nigerian nation is largely broken up into the northern Muslim-majority states and the Christian-majority southern states. But it is mostly in the sharia states that church-burning and other brutal forms of mayhem are taking place.

If this were a case of the Christian majority oppressing the Muslim minority, the rage might be a bit more understandable. But Nigeria is 50% Muslim and 40% Christian, and the Christian central government has largely allowed the Muslim-majority states to institute the law they have chosen. Nigeria has a complicated presidential electoral system which provides that any candidate who wins outright election in the first round doesn't have to face a runoff so long as he wins the largest number of votes nationwide and at least 25% of the votes in two-thirds of the states. President Goodluck Jonathan succeeded in doing so, which means that Muslim votes were a major part of his victory.

Even in Muslim-majority Adamawa state, which is not a sharia state, Jonathan won by 56-38. None of this prevents angry Muslims from being, well, angry Muslims. International observers have declared the election to be substantially fair, which is a major accomplishment in Nigeria. Past elections were badly-tampered with by the Christian military junta, and there was reason to expect at least some of the same this time. That didn't happen. But that hasn't stopped CPC from violently protesting the election results because Jonathan's victory was "bigger than should be the case."

These vandals are something considerably more than simple political sore-losers. This is a serious battleground for African Muslims. Unlike Islamic-dominated nations to the north, Nigeria has a strong Christian presence and that is unacceptable to Islamists who cannot tolerate infidels in their midst. Again, this demonstrates the inextricable intertwining of religion and politics which is at the heart of Islam. The Muslim fanatics are angered even further by the fact that many Muslims voted for the candidate who was not Muslim. But the "unfaithful" mosque-burnings will have to wait. Right now, the important thing for them is to resolve a political dispute by going after those of a different religion.

The MSM will continue to ignore this story while telling us how intolerant Christians and Americans are. Most mainstream reports have spoken of "political turmoil" in Nigeria, and a "disputed election." Few will dwell on the simple fact that the Islamists have made this all about religion. And when they don't get their way, they burn things. In 2010, about 2,000 Christians were murdered in Nigeria's northern states. Nigeria burning. The next question this raises is "will Nigeria go the way of Ethiopia and Sudan?"