Rally for Nigerian Christians in NYC – April 7th, 2010

On March 8^th, Muslims in Nigeria killed 500 Christians near the city of Jos and no arrests were made. On April 7^th, approximately 50 of us gathered in NYC to pressure President Obama to bring attention to the worldwide attacks on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Infidels by Muslims in general, and the attacks in Nigeria in particular.

Bill Donahue of the Catholic League explained that the killings in Nigeria started when a woman walked past a mosque on a Friday when men were praying. The North of Nigeria is ruled by Muslims. The South has a largely Christian population. Jos, where the attacks happened, lays in the middle. The woman’s crime was the trigger, but JIhadi’s desire for Islamic dominance was the fuel.

A Nigerian woman from Jos at the demonstration privately validated this story to me. She said that the Muslims came in the area and were welcomed as they seemed to be just another group. After their numbers were significant the bullying of the Christian population began. She herself had been beaten for crossing the path of prayers. She wouldn’t speak to the crowd because the Muslims in would kill her family back in Nigeria. In the program, the Nigerian Reverend John Okur Okan noted that Catholics do not kill those who disrupt their prayers.

The most obvious characteristic of this gathering was its international make up. The first speaker I saw was Narain Kataria of the Indian American Intellectuals Forum. He told of being hounded out of his part of India when it became Pakistan. Ashraf Ramdah told how the Copts in Egypt were given the choice of paying special taxes, converting or dying. He warned that if we were not rich, we would be in big trouble. A white woman told of how post-911 the Jihad has been infiltrating America. The variety pointed to the fact that the Nigerians were not engaged in an isolated case of sectarian clashes, but part of a 1400 year long jihad against infidels of all stripes.

The crowd’s two chants were “Help Them Now” and “Stop Sharia, Stop it now.” The rally took place in front of the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations. The idea being to get the U.N. to spend as much attention on Nigeria as it does on Israel. Another hope was that Obama would pressure the Nigerian President to prosecute just one person involved with the massacre and provide protection to Nigeria’s Christians. The crowd wanted America to wake up. That would require that we recognize the global nature of Jihad that this rally represented so well. That would require that we all shine the spot light on massacres such as the one that claimed 500 lives in Jos Nigeria.

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