Islamists continue to massacre Christians in Nigeria. European Parliament suggests climate change is largely to blame.

Islamic terrorists butchered hundreds of Christians throughout Nigeria on Christmas Eve. In their hours-long attack, Muslim Fulani militants gunned down Christian farmers, hacked up defenseless women and children with machetes, and torched churches.

While willing to express "solidarity" with the victims, the European Parliament appears more than willing to displace blame from the savage ideologues responsible and to instead pin the atrocities on so-called climate change.

A genocide of Christians

According to Open Doors International, Nigeria is the sixth most brutal place in the world for Christians — bad news for its roughly 100.4 million Christian inhabitants. In and outside the country's northern Sharia states, Christians are routinely subjected to enforced Islamization, forced marriage, murder, torture, abduction, rape, and other ideologically motivated brutalities.

Nearly 5,000 Christians were murdered in Nigeria just last year, accounting for 82% of all Christians killed for their faith in 2023, reported the National Catholic Register.

In 2022, Genocide Watch indicated that jihadists slaughtered 6,000 civilians, mostly Christians, in the first three months of the year, then kept adding to their tally.

Nigerian Bishop Wildred Anagbe of the Makurdi Diocese reckons this bloodletting amounts to a genocide, telling CNA that the Christian population is being "gradually and systematically" reduced by Islamists through "killings, kidnappings, torture, and burning of churches."

Mark Lipdo, program coordinator at the Stefanos Foundation, a Christian charity that supports Nigerian Christians, told Christian Today, "These attacks are being seen by local Nigerians as a jihad, like the jihad of 200 years ago. This is why they are targeting Christmas and targeting churches."

"What is happening is a religious war," added Lipdo.

Genocide Watch indicated that terrorists killed over 350,000 in Nigeria between 2009 and 2022.

Climate change massacres

At least 200 Christians were reportedly murdered between Dec. 23 and Christmas Day, 2023, in a series of terror attacks in 26 Christian communities in Nigeria's Central Plateau State. Other estimates put the number at over 230 dead.

Magit Macham, who returned to the area to celebrate Christmas with his family, told Reuters, "We were taken unawares, and those that could run ran into the bush. A good number of those that couldn't were caught and killed with machetes."

After the marauders shot his brother in the leg, Macham dragged him into a bush, where they hid for the night.

Alliance Defending Freedom International noted that hundreds more were injured, eight churches were burned to the ground, and another 15,000 people were internally displaced by the attacks.

As the footage of the mass graves circulated online, Bishop Matthew Kukah of the Sokoto Diocese told Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, "You have no excuses before God or the people of Nigeria," reported CNA.

Empty gestures

Western outfits have suggested that while often acknowledged as an ethno-religious conflict, the attacks are largely driven by bad weather patterns.

Citing nameless experts, Reuters floated the notion that "the conflict is based on the availability of resources rather than ethnic or religious differences."

The International Crisis Group, whose work is supported by George Soros' Open Society Foundations and cited by the Biden State Department, claims that "climate change has aggravated" "farmer-herder violence."

"Increasingly, the security implications of changing weather patterns are visible in deadly land resource disputes between farmers and herders across the continent," added the group.

The European Parliament appears willing to similarly cast the persecution not as a sustained jihad but as a resource dispute caused by the specter of anthropogenic climate change.

Members of the climate alarmist political group Green/European Free Alliance introduced a motion for a resolution last week that grossly underestimated the Christian death toll and criticized the description of the conflict in religious terms. After all, "several factors are to be taken into account such as competition for land fuelled by rapid climate change."

The proposed resolution would have the parliament warn "against an instrumentalisation of the farmers-herders conflict for spreading religion-based hatred" and "cal[l] on the Nigerian authorities to take meaningful steps to identify and address all root causes of the violence in Plateau state, such as competition for scarce resources, environmental degradation and the disappearance of effective mediation schemes."

The climate alarmists' resolution would also have called on European authorities to make African migration to Europe easier and to "ensure humanitarian assistance for those affected and displaced by the violence and climate change."

The European Parliament ultimately passed a modified version of the resolution, which starts strong with an acknowledgement of the murder of Nigerian Christians by "Islamic terrorist groups" and the destruction of 18,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools since 2009. However, the resolution largely reverts to the language of the climate alarmists' original draft.

"Factors fuelling the clashes overlap and are rooted in, among other things, territorial disputes, ethnic tensions, access to scarce resources and environmental degradation," says the European resolution.

The parliamentarians also acknowledged "the role of climate change, competition for scarce resources and the disappearance of effective mediation schemes in aggravating the farmer-herder conflict."

ADF International highlighted that various parliamentarians have criticized the resolution.

Bert-Jan Ruissen, a Dutch politician and MEP, stated, "Saying that it is a mere conflict between farmers and herders fails to acknowledge the other causes. It is Muslim extremists causing death and destruction."

Hungarian politician and MEP György Hölvényi said, "Blinded by ideology, some people are totally insensitive to human suffering when it comes to Christians. The timing of the attacks, brutal killings, and destruction of churches cannot be misinterpreted and can only be understood as the persecution of Christians, and we should be able to say so."

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