A dispatch from Nigeria:
"President of the Senate, Chief David Mark; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Dimeji Bankole, yesterday jointly condemned the riots in Jos, in which over 200 people have been confirmed killed.
Senator Mark and Bankole who both spoke at the adult harvest thanksgiving service of St Mulumba Catholic Chaplaincy, Apo, Abuja described the Jos riots as the handiwork of fanatics who themselves do not belong to any religious faith.
Mark specifically called for the prosecution of the people that are behind the riot.
He said: 'People just go under cover of religion to commit crime. Truly, what is going on in Jos has nothing to do with religion.
'I totally condemn religious fanatics. I am not aware of any faith that advocates violence. Every faith that I know of condemns killing. So, when you go out of our way and kill in the name of religion, you should be punished,' he said."
Nota bene: "Every faith that I know of condemns killing."
But this is false. Read the Qur'an, and the gloss on the Quran, the Hadith and the Sira, and one finds quite quickly that Allah commands violence against Infidels, that Muslims have a duty to engage in Jihad against non-Muslims (and in seventh-century Arabia, and for more than a millennium following, the weapon of Jihad was qitaal or combat), in order to push back the boundaries of Dar al-Islam, and the Model of Conduct, the Perfect Man, Muhammad, was a warrior who approvingly witnessed the decapitation of 600 to 900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza, who received with pleasure the notice that those who mocked him --- Asma bint Marwan, Abu Afak -- were killed, who attacked the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, for the sole purpose not of spreading Islam but of seizing their property and their women.
In 1967, having endured massacres by Muslims in north and central Nigeria. the Christians, consisting mainly, but not only, of the large and industrious Ibo (Igbo) tribe, rebelled finally after one particularly large massacre by Muslism, and declared the independent state of Biafra. It was entirely an effort to defend themselves against the Jihad, but neither Jihad, nor Islam, was ever mentioned in any of the reporting in the Western world on Biafra. And of all the accounts, only two were intelligently sympathetic to the Biafrans: those by Frederick Forsyth and Renata Adler. The rest were all about these "separatists" who for some quite incomprehensible and selfish reason simply wanted to "break up" what was always described as "Black Africa's most populous state."
Only a handful of Black African states, and Israel, recognized the state of Biafra. And aid came to the southern Christians only from Israel. The Westeern countries would not interfere, as the Muslims of the north received all kinds of aid from Arabs, including not only money and arms, but also Egyptian pilots who, in their Soviet-supplied MIGS (and with the support of the Egyptain government) cheerfully strafed Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands. About a million Christian civilians were killed in the Biafra War,. And it was Colonel Ojukwu, the leader of Biafra, who in his Ahiara Declaration of 1969 described the Biafran War as an attempt to fight back against the "Jihad" conducted by the Muslims against the Christians.
For years the Muslims have been pushing down into territory formerly Christian. And in the northe where Muslims -- chiefly Hausa -- are in the majority, they have in one state after another been imposing the Shari'a. It is they who have moved into Christian Jos, and multiplied, and tried to take control. And the Christians of Black Africa are not nearly as compliant and yielding as the Christians or post-Christians of Western Europe. They fight back. They give as good as they get.
If, whether in countries where the Muslims dominate, or in countries where there are a sufficient number of Muslims to feel they can act with impunity, non-Muslims find themselves either accepting the persecution and daily humiliations and even attacks and murders – the Copts in Egypt, the Assyrians in Iraq, the Christians in Pakistan, the Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh – or, in some cases, goaded beyond endurance, fighting back, as in Nigeria, or in India, then one is entitled to find fault not with Hindus or Christians or Jews or Buddhists or any other non-Muslim group, but with the common denominator of the trouble: those who carry within themselves the ideology of Islam.
It is understandable that Chief Mark, President of the Senate of Nigeria, should utter the same pious platitudes that Bush and Blair and Rice and so many others, in the much more powerful and less threatened West, have done. But does it make sense, in the end, for him to do so? Should non-Muslims be misled by their own leaders, so that they, who depend on those leaders to instruct and and protect them, will never quite come to grips with the meaning, and menace, of Islam? Where has this ever worked? Where?
