Christians are killed or abducted every day in Nigeria, and almost every morning a mass funeral is being held somewhere. Meanwhile, American Democrats, the mainstream media, and the UN refuse to call the violence a genocide against Christians. Photo courtesy of Truth Nigeria.
“They don’t just get the story wrong. They become accomplices to the cover-up.” That is how Truth Nigeria journalist Masara Kim described American left-wing media outlets and Democratic politicians who deny that Christians in Nigeria are being killed for their faith. Speaking to The Gateway Pundit, Kim said the refusal to acknowledge the religious nature of the killings enables continued violence while shielding the perpetrators from international scrutiny.
Three weeks ago, Kim was covering a mass burial in Nding, near Jos, when gunfire forced him and his colleagues to flee. The attack the night before had killed seven members of one family. Witnesses, including a local pastor and town leader, told him the attackers bypassed Muslim settlements, marched kilometers to Nding, and killed unarmed people, some holding only cutlery and clothes used to swat mosquitoes, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and firing 7.62 rounds.
That same day, three miles away, a separate group burned a church, destroyed a church elder’s home, and killed a Christian man running toward a Catholic seminary for refuge. Police inside the compound fought for three hours to prevent the seminary from being razed. It was sheltering 500 seminarians and more than 1,000 displaced women, children, and elderly people.
Witnesses said the attackers came from Lukfai, a former Christian town now occupied by armed groups, where a mosque stands on the site of the original church. Lukfai is one of more than 200 communities Kim says have been seized and converted into staging grounds for further attacks.
Three days later, on May 9 in Barkin Ladi, the county seat, eight Christians were killed. Attackers speaking Fulani and shouting “Allahu Akbar” bypassed Muslim homes to target Christian houses and attempted to burn a church. On May 13, a prayer-group leader and his pregnant wife, who was carrying twins, were killed in front of their home in a majority-Muslim neighborhood. No Muslims in the area were harmed, including those standing nearby.
The pattern holds across Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa, Southern Kaduna, and other parts of the Middle Belt. Survivors consistently describe assailants mocking their faith before killing them. A pastor told Kim that terrorists raped his congregants’ daughters in front of him while he was held at gunpoint, saying: “You claim to serve a living God. Let’s see how your God will save you today.” A widow in Plateau State said her husband and children were killed after attackers told residents they were being punished for refusing to convert.
No single incident answers the denial more completely than what happened on June 23, 2018, when more than 250 Christians were killed in an attack that began with an ambush on a convoy. During the assault, 80-year-old Imam Abubakar Abdullahi opened his mosque to hide fleeing women and children. When the attackers arrived, they told him: “This was not the plan. Release these infidels for us to kill as agreed.”
The imam fell at their feet and pleaded until they withdrew, spared only because desecrating a mosque with the blood of “infidels” was considered taboo. That night, 96 Christians were killed in Lukfai alone and every church in the town was burned. The graves of 250 victims in the Gashish district and the ruins of more than 30 churches remain. Many displaced Christians cannot return because their farms are occupied and only Muslims are permitted near them.
Kim said that he also personally knows Fulani individuals who were killed for converting to Christianity or for informing security forces of planned attacks.
The killings are statistically documented on a scale that leaves no serious ambiguity. Of the at least 4,849 Christians killed for their faith worldwide in 2025, 3,490 were in Nigeria, more than the rest of the world combined. USCIRF’s 2026 annual report puts the total number killed since 2009 at 53,000, with 21,000 killed in the last five years alone and millions displaced.
By any reasonable analysis, the killing of Christians in Nigeria constitutes a genocide. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
A coalition of human rights organizations has formally declared that the targeting of Christian communities in Nigeria meets that standard under Article II. Genocide Watch has issued formal genocide warnings, describing Nigeria as facing a “severe genocidal crisis” and stating that “despite overwhelming evidence of genocidal acts, both the Nigerian government and key international actors remain in denial, avoiding the legal and moral responsibilities that acknowledgment would require.”
The mainstream media are fueling genocide denial. The New York Times attributed the killings to “a battle for scarce resources” stirring “long-held tensions over religion and ethnicity,” while declining to identify the perpetrators’ religious identity or stated jihadist motivations. Reporting on the Palm Sunday 2026 massacre in Jos, in which at least 40 Christians were killed, the Times accused Rep. Riley Moore and other Republican lawmakers of “falsely claiming” there is an ongoing genocide, instead citing analysts who said the situation is “much more complex” and that “Nigerians of many faiths have been killed.”
Democracy Now! stated flatly that “Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed a Christian genocide is taking place in Nigeria,” while citing no supporting evidence. NBC News called the genocide framing “misleading and oversimplified.” Al Jazeera published a formal opinion piece calling the genocide framing “propaganda” driven by “foreign actors,” suggesting the narrative was motivated by Nigeria’s support for Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly.
Nigerian Christians are being killed for their faith, but Western leaders are afraid that calling it a genocide might offend the perpetrators. Photo courtesy of Nigerian journalist Paul.
International Christian Concern has documented how media outlets systematically deploy “acceptable buzzwords” such as farmer-herder tensions, climate change, and armed banditry to obscure the religious identity of both perpetrators and victims. The “complexity” argument, repeated by sources ranging from The New York Times to the African Union, functions as a device to avoid a legal determination that would obligate action.
This is precisely what Masara Kim witnessed in Barkin Ladi and Nding: attackers who bypassed Muslim homes, traveled kilometers past Muslim settlements, and declared their intentions in explicitly religious terms, only to later be described by Western editors as participants in a resource dispute.
President Trump designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern in December 2020. Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken reversed that designation in November 2021, determining that Nigeria did not meet the criteria for “systematic, ongoing, and egregious” violations. “The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom called the reversal ‘unexplainable.’”
At a subsequent meeting with USCIRF members, Blinken attributed the massacres to climate change, suggesting Fulani herders were simply searching for pasture land. USCIRF recommended redesignating Nigeria four consecutive years, from 2021 through 2024, stating there was “no justification” for the State Department’s continued refusal. The Biden administration ignored every recommendation while the killings escalated. In 2025, President Trump redesignated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern.
The historical record shows how important genocide designations are. From Cambodia to Rwanda, from Bosnia to Darfur, the international community has repeatedly recognized genocide too late or refused to recognize it at all. The Genocide Convention promised prevention, action in the face of risk rather than certainty, but prevention has consistently been its weakest point.
Darfur provides one of the clearest parallels. Africa Action wrote in The Nation: “We should have learned from Rwanda that to stop genocide, Washington must first say the word.” In July 2004, Congress passed a resolution labeling Darfur a genocide, followed by Secretary of State Colin Powell issuing a formal determination.
During the Rwandan genocide, the Clinton administration explicitly instructed officials not to use the word genocide because doing so could obligate action under the Convention. The United States later apologized for failing to intervene. Secretaries of state have formally declared genocide in at least six previous cases: Bosnia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Iraq (1995), Darfur (2004), ISIS-controlled territories (2016–2017), and Xinjiang (2021).
Each determination unlocked diplomatic, legal, and financial mechanisms that denial or refusal forecloses. Nigeria’s annual death toll now exceeds the rates recorded in several of those cases at the time they were designated.
Without formal genocide recognition by major Western governments, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine cannot be invoked, United Nations Security Council action remains foreclosed, sanctions lack legal grounding, and diplomatic pressure remains toothless.
A coalition of Nigerian Christian leaders has called on the Security Council and the International Criminal Court to dispatch investigators immediately, arguing that genocidal crimes cannot be dismissed through political statements and must instead be verified or refuted by investigators with legal authority.
Masara Kim, who stood before the bodies of children in Nding and later ran for his life while churches burned three miles away, put it plainly. The goal of these groups, he said, is not only to eliminate Christians “but to destroy the pluralism and democratic order that protects all faiths, including those who today choose to look away.”
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