Monday, 29 September 2025

Hypocrisy on display: World cries for Gaza but ignores massacred Christians in Africa

 Why are massacres of Christians treated as background noise while Gaza dominates headlines for months? The answer is ugly: global outrage is selective, manufactured,  deeply politicized and biased in favour of the Islamic world.

   Leaders who rage against Israel for killing Muslims in Gaza remain strikingly silent when their co-religionists butcher Christians in Nigeria or Congo. Turkey’s Erdoğan, who postures as a defender of Muslims worldwide, does not mobilize rallies against Boko Haram. Iran’s mullahs, who accuse Israel of genocide daily, do not denounce ISIS-linked killers of Christians in Africa. Arab media outlets that run wall-to-wall coverage of Gaza seldom spare more than a passing line for the slaughter of African Christians. Solidarity, it seems, only runs one way.

 Even human rights organizations display the bias. When Christians are massacred, the reports are dry, perfunctory, couched in vague language of “communal violence” or “clashes.” When Palestinians are killed, the reports are urgent, fiery, and amplified. Victims are categorized not by their humanity but by their political utility.

Massacre in Gaza: Global Outrage Ignites

 The world has rarely seen such waves of outrage as it has in response to Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. For months, images of bombed-out apartment blocks, lifeless children pulled from rubble, hospitals reduced to smoking ruins, and desperate families fleeing with nothing but the clothes on their backs have circulated across the globe. Demonstrations have erupted in London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Sydney, Jakarta, Mumbai, and virtually every other major city. University campuses in the United States have turned into battlegrounds of protest; European parliaments have been disrupted by activists unfurling Palestinian flags; Western capitals have witnessed hundreds of thousands of people in the streets.

 The sheer scale of the devastation in Gaza is undeniable. Tens of thousands of civilians — overwhelmingly Muslims — have been killed, according to various human rights groups. Whole neighbourhoods have been flattened. The blockade has choked food, water, electricity, and medical supplies, leaving hospitals overwhelmed and children malnourished. International organizations from the United Nations to Human Rights Watch have accused Israel of collective punishment, indiscriminate bombing, and possible war crimes. Even allies of Israel in the West are increasingly uneasy, facing pressure from their citizens demanding an end to what they see as nothing short of a massacre.

 The narrative has gripped the world’s conscience. Celebrities write angry posts on Instagram. Politicians deliver fiery speeches in parliament. NGOs churn out reports. Editorial boards dedicate front pages and primetime coverage. In cafes, universities, workplaces, and dinner tables, Gaza dominates conversation. To oppose Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is to stand with humanity, or so the loudest voices claim.

  Of course, much of this outrage is justified. Civilian slaughter is a moral horror wherever it happens, and Gaza’s suffering cannot be denied or dismissed. Innocent people are dying in large numbers, and that tragedy must be recognized. But here is where the hypocrisy of the global protest industry is exposed with brutal clarity: the same outrage that explodes over Gaza vanishes into thin air when equally horrific massacres take place elsewhere — particularly when the victims are Christians butchered by Islamist extremist groups in Africa.

 The question is simple: if human lives are equal, if oppression is to be condemned, if massacres deserve global outcry — why then is there near silence when Christian villages are torched in Nigeria, when worshippers are slaughtered in Congo, when children are abducted, raped, and executed by Islamist militias? Why does the moral compass suddenly break when the victims are Christian, the perpetrators Muslim, and the continent Africa?

Massacres of Christians in Africa ignored

 Let us step away for a moment from Gaza’s bombed streets and look instead at northern Nigeria. In the last decade, Islamist extremist groups — Boko Haram, Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP), and armed Fulani militias — have carried out massacres that dwarf many of the conflicts which make front-page news. Villages razed. Churches burned. Congregations wiped out during Sunday service. Women taken as sex slaves, men hacked to death, children shot or kidnapped. According to Open Doors, a Christian watchdog organization, Nigeria is the most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian. Between 2009 and 2023, more than 50,000 Christians were killed for their faith in Nigeria alone. That is not a typo. Fifty thousand.

 In 2014, the world briefly noticed Boko Haram when the group kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls from Chibok. The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls trended for a while, Michelle Obama held a placard, celebrities chimed in, and then the noise faded. But the killings continued. Mass abductions became routine. Villages disappeared overnight. Thousands of children remain unaccounted for, enslaved in camps deep in the forests. Yet, outside of niche human rights reports, there is barely a whisper. No million-strong marches in Paris. No universities shut down in protest. No city councils voting to rename streets. Silence.

 Move further east to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a jihadi group linked to ISIS, has left a trail of horror. Entire Christian communities have been slaughtered. In 2021 alone, over 1,200 civilians were killed in Ituri and North Kivu provinces, most of them Christians targeted deliberately by Islamist militias. Mass graves are uncovered regularly. Families flee into the forests with nothing, their villages burned to ash. Where is the outrage? Where are the UN resolutions? Where is the viral social media storm?  Nowhere.

 Even beyond Nigeria and Congo, the pattern repeats. In Mozambique, Islamist insurgents aligned with ISIS decapitated children, torched churches, and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. In Burkina Faso, Christian villagers are lined up and executed by extremists who demand conversion or death. In Sudan, decades of persecution continue with little interruption. The Christian minority across large swathes of Africa faces an existential threat. This is not sporadic violence; it is systematic, ideologically motivated massacre. And yet the silence is deafening.

 Why does the world avert its eyes? Why are massacres of Christians treated as background noise while Gaza dominates headlines for months? The answer is ugly: global outrage is selective, manufactured, and deeply politicized.

Time to confront this hypocrisy without apology

 Western media, which prides itself on moral clarity, has chosen its narrative. Palestinians fit neatly into the “oppressed vs oppressor” script, while African Christians do not. Coverage of Africa is sporadic, often buried in the back pages, framed as “tribal conflict” or “local unrest” rather than religiously motivated extermination. The scale of suffering is minimized, the pattern ignored. There is no sustained coverage, no relentless primetime focus, no celebrity hashtags. The dead are too poor, too African, too Christian to count.

 Western politicians are no better. They thunder against Israel, not merely out of compassion but because it resonates with their electorates, their activists, their identity politics. Condemning massacres of Christians in Africa, however, wins no votes, earns no clicks, stirs no protests outside their offices. It is politically useless. So they turn away.

 The hypocrisy reeks. If the principle is that innocent lives matter, then the silence over Nigeria and Congo is a moral scandal. A Nigerian child hacked to death in front of his burning church is no less human than a Palestinian child pulled from the rubble. A Congolese mother watching her family slaughtered by Islamist militias is no less deserving of compassion than a Gazan mother mourning under bombardment. To grieve selectively, to rage selectively, to march selectively — that is not solidarity, it is cowardice.

 What makes this double standard especially grotesque is that the numbers are not marginal. According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, more than 5,000 Christians were killed in Nigeria in 2022 alone. By comparison, the widely reported death toll in Gaza in 2023 stood at around 20,000. The scale in Africa, stretched across years, is staggering — yet absent from the world’s conscience.

  Why? Because the protest industry thrives on spectacle, not substance. Gaza provides a clear villain and victim, an oppressor and oppressed, a narrative that aligns with ideological battles in the West. Nigeria and Congo provide none of that. They are messy, distant, complicated, and lack the emotional branding that fuels hashtags. The victims are Christians — unfashionable, unglamorous, inconvenient. And so, they are erased.

 This moral bankruptcy corrodes the very foundation of human rights. By turning massacres into a selective commodity, activists and politicians cheapen the meaning of outrage. They turn compassion into theatre. They transform solidarity into a partisan game. In doing so, they abandon thousands of voiceless victims whose only crime was belonging to the wrong faith in the wrong continent.

  It is time to confront this hypocrisy without apology. If Gaza deserves outrage — and it does — then so too do Nigeria, Congo, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Sudan, and every other place where innocent lives are massacred. To scream about Gaza while ignoring Africa is not justice; it is selective morality dressed up as virtue. It is easy outrage, fashionable outrage, outrage that flatters the protester rather than honours the dead.

 History will not be kind to this silence. One day, when the graves are counted, when the testimonies are written, when the true scale of slaughter emerges, the world will be asked: where were you when Christian villages were burned to ash? Where were your marches, your placards, your hashtags? Where were your celebrities, your speeches, your resolutions? And the answer will be shameful: you were busy, apparently, outraged elsewhere.

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