Nigeria needs help if it is to crush Boko Haram
by Julian Mann – Friday, January 6, 2012
It would be better for Nigeria, and indeed the West, if Christianity wins against Islamic extremism
When Nigeria’s Islamist terror was confined to its northern states, politically correct Western opinion was able to get away with spinning the violence as six of one and half a dozen of the other.
An outrage in Jos, for example, would be put down to ‘religious tensions’ between the Muslim and Christian communities. It was almost as if elements in the Western media were desperate for stories of Christians behaving badly.
But the politically correct spin is now becoming increasingly untenable following Islamist terror group Boko Haram’s Christmas Day attack on St Theresa’s Roman Catholic Church in central Nigeria, close to the federal capital, Abuja. It is now becoming clear that the group is moving its terror south.
And the closer the group takes its terror to Lagos, the more open US and UK opinion becomes to the view Nigeria’s Christian president Dr Goodluck Jonathan is keen to promote that Boko Haram represents a threat to Western interests.
Dr Jonathan faces massive internal political hurdles in his stated aim to ‘crush Boko Haram’. He needs Western help, particularly from US and UK intelligence agencies. The State of Emergency he announced on New Year’s Eve, including the closure of Nigeria’s borders with Niger, Cameroon and Chad, is welcomed by the Christian community but Christians know that the long-term security of the nation they love depends on co-ordinated and united action by the various arms of government.
