TDThe following is a transcript of my, Emmanuel Ogebe’s, exchange with American citizen, Mike Arnold, over the recent developments in Nigeria. Enjoy:
If I may, come in real quick with a couple of thoughts. I, really appreciate, the insight you provided, Doug, on the similarity between the KKK and what we’re seeing, and what’s happening in Nigeria now. Now, I was struck by the parallels when I visited a church in Nigeria that was bombed on Christmas Day near the capital of Nigeria.
Theresa’s Church, Madalla, and, over two dozen Christians worshiping that Christmas morning were killed. The most heart-wrenching case was a man who came to church with his five kids, and the wife said, “Look, I’ll stay home and make Christmas dinner. You go on with the kids.” So, sorry, he went to church with five kids, and four of them died in the bombing.
He came back home with one child. He lost four daughters. One of the four daughters was his, oh, two of the children of the daughters were his, a pair of twins, and one of the children, one of the four daughters’ names was Cynthia. And I said to myself, “what, does this remind me of?”
And then I remembered the bombing of, 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham Alabama – and in, in America, and four girls in Sunday school were killed in a bombing by the KKK. And one of those girls was Cynthia. And so literally we’re seeing, the same thing happen that happened in America many years ago happening right now in Nigeria, and we should have the same sense of outrage.
So that’s the first point I wanted to make real quick. The second is this. Mike, you were talking about the, the mullahs who came out in support and everything. One of the most stunning things that happened was the former vice president of Nigeria, who is considered a liberal Muslim, who is running for president again now, he tweeted condemning the attack, the killing of, Deborah, and can you imagine what happened?
There was outroar against him for condemning the killing, and so he fired his assistant, who he said tweeted without his permission. That’s how egregious it is that someone who wants to be president of the country can’t even condemn the arbitrary slaughter of this girl. Yeah. Now, the third and final point I want to make about this whole mess is that, these people were not terrorists.
These were literally college students. So we’re not talking about ISWAP and Boko Haram. We’re talking about people who were having an education. Yeah. Her classmates. Now, this was not a, an attack that happened in Sambisa Forest. It happened in plain sight, in front of the military, of the police and all of that.
These people recorded themselves on video. There was a guy who showed the matches which he used to set Deborah on fire. Yes. And guess what? The… a couple of people were charged to court. Over two dozen lawyers showed up to defend them. Lawyers were lining up pro bono to defend these killers, and of course the case went nowhere.
Okay, this is a crime that was recorded on TV, on video. You can’t get any better proof or evidence to make a case, and they walked away scot-free. So let me just, wrap up my thoughts here by saying, something. Doug, you were really very graphic and clear about the circumstances that led to her, premeditated lynching.
Now, here’s the thing. In 2011, we had the post-election violence, in quotes, where across a dozen Nigerian states Muslims came out systematically, destroyed 700 churches. It was the largest single attack on Christendom in contemporary history. 700 churches destroyed in 48 hours. Now, here’s what’s interesting.
Our investigative team went in. We found a community where a police officer came to the church compound and said, “Hey, how many of you are here?” And they, told him. He said, “Oh, we just want to secure you.” He walked right out, went to the mob that was waiting by, and told them, “This is the number of Christians in there.”
And they came there and attacked them and raped them and all of that. Now, one of the survivors of that attack reported to the police, and nothing ever happened to the guy, the, who acted as their scout. The final thing I will mention is this. It’s actually a kid I know when I was doing my national service in Nigeria. I got to know him, and many years later he was posted to the north for his national service.
And the Muslims brought in underage kids to rig the vote, and he was one of the election managers, and he said, “No, not on my watch.” And that night he went back home and he posted online, “I’m so proud of standing for truth in Nigeria today.” The next day a bunch of Muslims went to the house of the young people who were doing their national service to attack them.
They fled to a police station and got into the police station, and they ended up dead. Eyewitnesses said the police turned them over to the mob and five of them were killed in Nigeria. Till this day, no one was prosecuted. So the level of complicity, I, I think, were very clear. I really love the parallels you make to the KKK because these people are in government, these people are in law enforcement, and they are at-and eliminate Christians in Nigeria.
Just to say with regard to Favor’s Point, I think Nigerians are the Americans of the black race, they travel a lot, they’re adventurous, they’re gregarious, and all of that.
And unfortunately, we see ourselves being held back by this futile bloodthirsty system that is depriving us of the potential and the dreams of Nigeria.
We’ve seen a great Nigeria before in the past.
You know, the Saudi royal family used to come to Nigeria to do their medicals in the sixties.
And all of that has been, you know, flipped backwards.
The Saudi royal family thought that Nigeria’s health care and professionals were so good, they came to Nigeria for treatment.
Now the country is destroyed.
So, we’ve seen what radical Islam has done to Nigeria.
FULANI TERRORISM IS THE LONGEST RUNNING WAR AGAINST OUR PEOPLE AT OVER 200 YEARS
Mullahs proclaimed that they could pillage and rape indigenous peoples as infidels
MIKE ARNOLD:
It’s one jihad that’s killing people today, and it’s gone unbroken. When you look at it that way, it’s the longest running genocide in history, and one of the largest. It certainly rivals the German Holocaust. Am I seeing this wrong? Emmanuel, you probably know more about Nigerian history.
Am I seeing this wrong? Did this really just start in 2009 with, the statistics, or did this start in 1804 unbroken?
EMMANUEL OGEBE:
Yeah, so it’s fascinating that you have latched onto something that I recently came to conclude myself. In remarks, at a parliamentary briefing in, at Westminster in March, I said, “this is actually the longest running war.”
The fact of the matter is that we have an ethno-religious colonial force occupying Nigeria, and what you described in Biafra was the preceding colonialist banding with the existing colonialist to crush the secessionist. And essentially, the North has felt, since then that the Igbos are a conquered people.
Now, here’s something very interesting. President, who… Not president, Head of State Yakubu Gowon- Actually really saved, what was Biafra from, obliteration. He happened to be the son of a pastor, and so he formulated a policy called, reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction, something of the sort, and he declared no victor, no vanquished.
He enunciated principles that helped heal the country. Otherwise, if it had been a Muslim who was head of state at that time, they would not have given a quarter. They would have wiped out the Igbos. And there are many of them who do not forgive, General Gowon for being accommodating. In fact, it is reported that General Gowon secretly had an Igbo girlfriend.
Huh. He was a dashing young man, and that he, when he was being pushed to war, he kept saying, “How can we fight against our own people?” So he, a lot of that is in the background. But having said that, we now see a situation where Igbos politically now are so marginalized in Nigeria that they literally don’t have a say or a role in the governance of the country.
We have a situation now where we have a Muslim president and a Muslim vice president. And fairness says that at some point we should have had a Christian president or vice, and an Igbo president or vice. That hasn’t happened since the ’80s. And yes, Biafra, that war was a reinforcement and a reinstitution of the caliphate.
But let’s go back to the 1804, jihad because till this day, the Fulanis insist that Nigeria belongs to them arising from conquest. So they’re not even relying on the Biafra War as the basis for their oppression. They’re relying on the 1804 jihad. And, maybe I should say this, as I wrap up my thoughts.
In my research, and I think I included this in some of my congressional testimony, we found out that, there were a lot of tribes that resisted their conquest. And at a point, the Fulani scholars sat down, and mullahs, they issued a fatwa saying, “You know what? Let’s stop attacking these pagans, because if we conquer them and they become Muslims, we will not have the ability to loot, pillage, and rape them. So let’s ease up and allow some infidels remain so that we can do this to them.” So everything we see now is orchestrated. It’s not about climate change. It wasn’t climate change in 1804 when they came charging on horses and killing innocent people. And so that excuse is new and manufactured. It’s Western mumbo jumbo.
20,000 MEMBERS OF ONE CHURCH KILLED DESPITE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT ON PEACE-BUILDING IS NOT SUSTAINABLE
Sunday Jackson was punished for surviving
Mike Arnold:
And how does a Christian in Nigeria survive? what’s the way forward here?
Emmanuel Ogebe:
That’s a good question, and I did want to say a couple of things, again, piggybacking on what, Doug said. Firstly, it’s not sustainable. A war in which one side is doing all the killing and the other side is doing all the dying is not a war.
That’s genocide. Now, in 2015 when I testified before Congress, one church in Nigeria alone, the Church of the Brethren, EYN, had lost 10,000 members. This is the largest single loss of any church on the globe at present. 10,000 members killed. This was 2015. I presented the data in Congress. In December, I reached out to the leadership of that church and I said, “Hey, what are the updated numbers? All I have is from 2015.”
And the figure is now 20,000! This is not sustainable. Now, here is part of the problem we have. The Church of the Brethren in America is pacifist. They’re so pacifist that at a point they didn’t believe Christians could be lawyers. Guess what kind of theology trickled down to their people in Nigeria?
You can’t defend yourself. But here is what is even more egregious. USAID had peace building, programming in Nigeria on which they spent millions of dollars. And two years ago, I said, “I want to see what you’re doing because it’s not having any effect.” It turns out that an American Christian organization was hired as contractors for USAID to do peace building in Plateau State.
And what was their peace building program? Calling Christian survivors of massacres and lecturing them that they should not retaliate. And so I, I wrote back to the, USAID administrator for Africa. I said, “You are literally setting up my people to be killed. You’re not training them on justice mechanisms. You’re not training them on self-defense. You are revictimizing them by making them feel as if they are the problem for seeking justice.”
Now, fortunately, Trump has, deleted all of that senseless programming, and so at minimum, our people are not being prepared as sheep to the slaughter, which is what the US government was literally spending money tenderizing them for death in Plateau State.
In the northeast, they spent millions of dollars again on interfaith dialogue. My question to USAID, how many of these conferences did Boko Haram show up for? And they thought I was being facetious. So this is the nonsense that has been going on. And so I am at the point where I feel it’s no longer sustainable.
There has to be a line in the sand. Communities have to defend themselves. And this brings me to the, quick point I want to make about, Sunday Jackson. There was a young man who was attacked on his farm, he was in his 20s, by, a Fulani Muslim herdsman who stabbed him.
Jackson, stabbed him back. He seized his knife from him and stabbed him back. And a Fulani judge sentenced Jackson to death for a classic case of self-defense. So it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. We were in court on March the 7th last year. The Supreme Court confirmed his death sentence.
And I said, “This is a travesty. You are punishing this man for the crime of surviving an [00:04:00] attack. You are finishing him off where the herdsman left off.” And so we fought this, and we fought it, and we fought it. And of course, we were attacked, we were threatened. There’s nothing that, was not said against us.
And I said, “I’m willing to lose my bar license on this case.” I staked it on national TV. I said, “the Supreme Court can take my license, but this is wrong.” And so we do have a situation where in Nigeria you have the right to death and not the right to life. And I think that we, have come to the point where we must defend ourselves — because no one is coming to defend you.
