Nigeria, a land being eviscerated by Islamic savagery

In all the lengthening list of atrocities and aggressions that are being carried out by Islamic groups throughout the world, the tragedy of Nigeria stands out. Although Muslims are killing Buddhists in Mynamar and Thailand, raping children in Rotherham and Oxfordshire and are murdering and oppressing non-Muslims across the world, it is the sheer unadulterated evil of Boko Haram in Nigeria that should not be forgotten or ignored or forgiven. The Boko Haram Islamic onslaught in Nigeria should not be disregarded, because what happens on the streets of Nigerian towns and cities today could be happening on your streets tomorrow. When the gloves are off, Islam as an ideology is violent, even if many individual Muslims are not. Too often, Islam creates violent, intolerant people and societies and it promises individuals spiritual and temporal reward for being violent and intolerant. It is Islam itself that is turning Northern Nigeria into a prison of no escape, Boko Haram are just the instrument of imprisonment. Although, as the Los Angeles Times article below says, corruption and bad governance has had a bearing on the problems facing Northern Nigeria, the primary cause of the violence in the North has been the ideology of Islam.

I defy anyone with a functioning brain to read this piece and get to the end and not come out of it hating the Islamic ideology that has created Boko Haram, that’s if you didn’t hate it before. Looking at the actions of Boko Haram in Nigeria is very much like looking at the mindless killings that occurred in Cambodia in the 1970’s, where an ideology without mercy murdered a quarter of the population. To see people targeted with violence because they carry a Bible or refuse to cover their heads, is eerily reminiscent of how the Khmer Rouge used to murder people for nothing more than wearing spectacles. There is no reason for this sort of violence other than to impose an oppressive ideology onto a people; Maoism in the case of Cambodia, or Islam in the case of Northern Nigeria. I fear that Nigeria will be one of the new killing fields of our age if Boko Haram and groups like them are not obliterated. I try hard not to hate, but sometimes it really isn’t possible to do anything but hate an ideology that can inspire people to do what the Islamic group Boko Haram are doing to the people of Nigeria.

The LA Times said:

“ When Boko Haram invaded her village last year, the Islamist extremists burned the churches, destroyed Bibles and photographs, and forced Hamatu Juwanda to renounce Christianity.

“They said we should never go back to church because they had brought a new religion,” the 50-year-old said. “We were going to be converted to Islam.”

The head of the village, a Muslim, presented her with a thick nylon hijab to cover her head and renamed her Aisha.

She submitted, smarting with rage. Women who didn’t wear the hijab were beaten.

“When I went to the market, I wore the veil,” she said. “But at home, I took it off and prayed.”

The gunmen returned time after time to the village of Barawa, shooting people, burning houses and wearing down the resistance of the villagers.

In September, the attackers came again: 30 turbaned men with covered faces, big guns and camouflage clothing. Juwanda’s husband tried to flee but was shot in the chest and killed.

Horrors became commonplace for Juwanda: She saw a young man shot in the head as he fled along a rural track. She watched a neighbouring woman weep bitterly as gunmen abducted her with her children.

“She was crying, but they told her not to,” Juwanda said. “The leader of the group told her, ‘If you cry, it’s useless. If you don’t cry, it’s useless.’ ”

This is what unfettered Islam has done to Northern Nigeria, it has turned it into a land of violent death and hopelessness. Where is the fabled ‘Islamic tolerance’ that we all keep getting told about, how come we don’t see it here?

The LA Times added:

“Haruna Zanga, 63, a farmer from a village called Gavva West, was lying outdoors on a mat when Boko Haram came in March last year. He was slow to see the danger. By the time he was running, militants were chasing close behind him in their SUV. He vaulted a wall into someone’s house, but the gunmen shot him four times.

“When they shot me, I just fell down. They thought I was dead,” he said. “They shot and killed four other people that day.”

As he recovered in a hospital in the northern city of Maiduguri, an old acquaintance who was a Muslim butcher offered a chilling warning.

“He told me to leave. He said, ‘Don’t go back to Gavva West, because if you go there, people are coming to attack that place.’

“I was terrified, but what could I do? I was feeling that they were wicked people bent on destroying society.”

The butcher told Zanga that the mountains near Gwoza were full of caves packed with Boko Haram insurgents.

When he returned to Gavva West a month later, the attacks worsened. His grandson Peter Biye, 18, was abducted and killed for refusing to convert to Islam. Many girls and women were also taken.

In September, insurgents surrounded and attacked the village at dusk, killing nine people. They burned 300 houses, leaving only 26 standing. Zanga and most other villagers fled the next day.

Zanga and dozens of others from the Gwoza area fled to Fuga village in the central of the country, where they have been offered refuge and land.

“The last attack was the worst,” Zanga said. “They burned the houses. Mine was the first one they burned.”

As Christian families left Barawa one by one, Juwanda stayed as long as she could, clinging to her house and land, but the attacks grew more frequent. The last straw was witnessing the abductions of women.

When she finally fled the village in May, she was so petrified that she forgot to take the only photo of her brother, her last surviving sibling. It was hidden under a mattress so the militants wouldn’t see it.

She crossed the border into Cameroon. As soon as she reached safety, she tore off her black-and-white-checked hijab, felt cool air on her throat and breathed free.

She was safe.

“I was very happy,” said Juwanda, who later made her way to Abuja. “I felt the good, fresh air as if I’d come to a marvelous place I could hardly imagine.”

Juwanda is relieved to have escaped Barawa. But she remembers the things she lost: her husband, her small plot of farmland, her house, her Bible, all her clothes, a beaded cross she used to wear before she was forced to take it off.

And the photograph of her brother.”

Take a look at the intolerance, the violence, the oppression of women, the wanton murders, the destruction of people’s houses, lives and livelihoods and remember, this is Islam. This is what happens when Islam rules or controls.

I came out from reading this piece with, of possible, an even greater utter disgust at Boko Haram and the ideology that underpins their vile actions. After reading this piece, I feel that I can no longer merely dislike Islam, or be opposed to it, I consider that having a visceral hatred for it and all it stands for, is the most logical and appropriate reaction. There is no other moral choice. What other answer is there? Hatred and disgust is how we in civilised nations treated Nazism and Communism, when we learned just what sort of ideologies they were. Disgusted at the wasted truncated lives of those imprisoned, oppressed or beguiled by these regimes and emboldened by the recognition that these ideologies were a threat to ourselves, the civilised world took them on. Because of those actions, Nazism is no more, Communism is no more and we need to wake up our politicians and those in authority to the similar danger posed by the ideology of Islam. We are already seeing the early stages and manifestations of this threat, the street violence, the mass rapes, the terror attacks, the corruption of our legal and governing systems and the growing number of ‘home grown’ jihadis. What we see when we look at Islam isn’t ‘religion’, it is gangsterism with a veneer of spirituality, with which it hoodwinks its members and convinces them that they are good people, even when they are doing bad things, like killing their daughters over an ‘honour’ ‘offence’.

Islam cannot co-exist, with others, we’ve seen that all over the world. We know that Islam’s core texts are stuffed with hatred for ‘the other’ and we know that Islam has often spread via violence. The Arabs of the Middle East, for example, have been offered peace loads of times but have nearly always turned it down. They were offered their own state in 1947 by the United Nations, but they preferred to attack Israel as soon as it was formed. Islam is NOT peace, it never has been and, until it reforms, never will be. We know this because information about Islam that would once have taken a trip to a specialist library and the ministrations of academics to get, is now available for all to read. We can read the Koran and the Hadith and documents like the Reliance of the Traveller. We can read early non-Islamic descriptions of Islamic violence. Information technology has made available many documents that previously were only seen by a few people and understood by even less. We’ve seen Islam’s violent and power hungry theological core and have seen how throughout history Islam has destroyed those civilisations that it has absorbed or encountered.

Now that we have this information about how violent and intolerant Islam is, all we need to do is have the courage to admit that fact, and to vote for and campaign for, those who also see that there is a growing conflict between civilised values of justice, freedom and equality, and the so-called values of Islam.

The only ‘peace’ that Islam and its violent manifestations has brought to Nigeria is the peace of the grave. That is not the sort of peace that anybody should wish for themselves, their children, their neighbour, or their country, and neither should it be the sort of peace that is suffered by all the millions of people who are currently trapped within Islam.

Let’s not beat about the bush, Islam is plainly evil and shows itself to be on a daily basis, it really is about time we called Islam evil more often and stopped using words like ‘extremists’, ‘militants’ and ‘fundamentalists’ to describe what can be truthfully described as evil on a global scale.