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Media whitewashes Jihadist essence of the brutal massacre of 500+ Christians (mostly women and children) by Muslims in Nigeria

JOS, Nigeria — Nigerian troops were patrolling villages near the northern city of Jos Tuesday after the massacre of more than 500 Christians there on Sunday 7 March that sparked international shock and outrage.

But survivors of the latest wave of inter-ethnic violence, in which women and children were hacked to death or burned alive in their homes, denounced the authorities for having failed to intervene in time.

Relatives of the dead meanwhile attended funerals Monday for the victims of the three-hour orgy of violence in three Christian villages close to the northern city of Jos.

Witnesses have blamed the massacre on members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group, and according to media reports Muslims villagers were warned two days before attack via text messages to their phones.



The security forces said they had detained 95 suspects in the violence.

"We have over 500 killed in three villages and the survivors are busy burying their dead," said state information commissioner Gregory Yenlong.

"People were attacked with axes, daggers and cutlasses -- many of them children, the aged and pregnant women."

Around 200 people were being treated in hospital, said the information ministry.

The explosion of violence is the latest between rival ethnic and religious groups. In January 326 people died in clashes in and around Jos, according to police although rights activists put the overall toll at more than 550.

"The attack is yet another jihad and provocation," the Plateau State Christian Elders Consulatative Forum (PSCEF) said.

One survivor in the video relates, "Suddenly, I heard the window shatter and fire was thrown into our house - and I could hear the people screaming outside. I quickly doused the flames in the house and I heard them saying "an Infidel must be inside the house!"    - AFP

Update 10 March: Melanie Phillips, columnist in The Spectator, considers this a "jihadi pogrom"
It is but the latest episode in what the media persist in characterising as inter-ethnic violence, but which is in fact a systematic attempt by Muslims to murder and ethnically cleanse the Christian community. The onslaught is described as ‘retaliation ‘ for violent attacks in Jos last January, in which the majority of the victims were Muslim. But as the Barnabas Fund reports, there is evidence that those January attacks were in fact Christian retaliation against Muslim aggression -- in particular on that occasion an attack on a church -- which has been going on for years.

The fact that the jihad in Africa is widely ignored in the west is not just a moral dereliction of duty. It is a refusal by the west to understand what it is actually up against. What is happening to Nigeria’s Christians makes a mockery of the frenzied western obsession with Israel. To understand the real cause of global tumult we should look carefully at Africa, and the appalling suffering of those upholding the religion that underpins the western world.
Please read: Nigeria: Religious Violence in Jos – The Christians Speak Out
Amidst international reports of the recent Christian-Muslim violence in Jos, the capital of Nigeria’s Plateau State, Nigerian Christians are presenting a different and disturbing picture