By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — Amid the deluge of bizarre and vile ideas platformed by Tucker Carlson on his podcast was one recent episode that sought to claim that there was no persecution, let alone genocide, of Christians in Nigeria. The person making the claim was international lawyer Robert Amsterdam, whose firm has extensive interests in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.
This flatly contradicted the assertion of President Donald Trump only weeks earlier when he posted on social media that, “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria” and said he was designating it a “COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN.” By the end of November, in a Fox News Radio interview, Trump referred to the campaign in northern Nigeria as “genocide.”
Those claims were disputed by the Nigerian government, a rather dubious position echoed by liberal media, as well as Carlson’s program. Trump’s critics were skeptical that he would actually seek to do anything about the crisis in Nigeria, but this week we learned that he wasn’t bluffing.
As is his wont, Trump announced the airstrikes on targets in Nigeria on social media, saying: “The United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!”
It must be conceded that even if the strikes were successful, by themselves they are not going to alter the situation in that part of Nigeria. But the administration’s willingness to take up this cause has implications well beyond that troubled country.
More importantly, it illustrates that the threat from Islamists, which a bizarre coalition of Marxists, right-wingers and Muslims are at such pains to downplay or deny, threatens more than just Israel.
The discussion about Nigeria also highlights the gross hypocrisy of supporters of the Palestinian cause throughout the West. They have done their best to promote falsehoods and blood libels about Israel committing genocide in Gaza, which is a deliberate mischaracterization of a war aimed at Hamas terrorists, in which the Israel Defense Forces have achieved a historically low level of civilian casualties compared to combatants. Yet the vast anti-Israel propaganda machine has no interest in true genocides of Christians in countries like Nigeria and Sudan, where Islamists are ruthlessly targeting religious minorities.
When that episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” aired, even many fans of Carlson who tune in for the Israel-bashing from a wide variety of guests may have been puzzled by the program devoting any of its time to minimizing the well-documented suffering of Christians and other non-Muslims.
But given Carlson’s relentless promotion of the idea that Islamists are not a threat to the West, whether in Qatar, which pays for the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities and influence, or elsewhere, it wasn’t much of a stretch to think that this might extend to what is going on in Africa.
Interest in the horrors of Islamist terrorism in Africa was briefly aroused in 2014, when 200 Nigerian Christian girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram. No less a personage than first lady Michelle Obama took up the cause of the victims. But the focus on that crime was a passing phase, with few if any of those who joined Mrs. Obama subsequently paid much attention to the broader problem of Islamist persecution of and terrorism against African Christians.
It almost goes without saying that when more than 250 people were kidnapped by Palestinians during the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, neither the former first lady nor most of those who spoke up about the abducted schoolgirls said a word about the Israeli hostages.
When it is only Jews who are the victims, the discussion almost immediately shifts to one dictated by the false narrative about Israel being a settler-colonial or “apartheid” state oppressing Palestinians, regardless of the facts. That is why it is important that Americans wake up to the global threat that Islamist ideology and terror pose.
The plight of Christians in Africa is appalling in and of itself, and the steadfast refusal of most of the international media to cover it is a scandal.
It also makes it painfully clear that the post-Oct. 7 war against a coalition of Iranian-funded terrorists is not an isolated series of battles. Rather, it constitutes the front lines of a global conflict between Islamists and the West in which the stakes are far higher than most Americans realize.
As Trump has articulated in the past year, the foundation of his “America First” foreign policy isn’t isolationism, but rather a serious effort to sort out real threats to American security. He rightly understands that Islamist terror in Africa is linked to those same concerns.
Those elements of his conservative coalition, like Carlson and others, who strangely echo the anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric of the far left and Islamists, and accuse those who care about these issues of being “Israel firsters” or “neoconservatives” (in today’s political parlance, a term that is shorthand for Jews), aren’t just out of sync with Trump. They undermine the defense of the West against a deadly threat that seeks the destruction of the United States, as well as of the one Jewish state on the planet.