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07.12.2014 Feature Article

The Black Flag Of Terror and the Barbarians Of Our Time

The Black Flag Of Terror and the Barbarians Of Our Time
07.12.2014 LISTEN

36 innocent ''non-muslim'' souls were slaughtered in cold blood in Kenya on 2nd December by Al Shabab. Amongst them were defenceless women and children. The same thing happened in Kano, Nigeria four days earlier when over 200 innocent ''muslim'' souls were blown up in a Kano mosque by Boko Haram suicide bombers.

Three days before then 70 innocent ''muslim'' and ''non-muslim'' souls were killed by Boko Haram in the ancient cities of Maiduguri and Potiskum in Nigeria. It just goes on and on: the nightmare never ends and the shower of blood continues.

Every single day, somewhere in the world, the innocent are hacked down and cut to pieces by our modern-day jihadists who thrive on terror and who feed on human flesh, human blood and unmitigated and unrestrained carnage.

Africa and indeed the world is slowly bleeding to death and our sons and daughters are being slaughtered like flies by those that are best described as the lowest form of filth and vermin yet we still shy away from speaking the hard and bitter truth. And what is that hard and bitter truth?

Today, more than ever, the world is suffering from the grave error and manifest unbelief of the biblical Father Abraham who, when promised a son through his aged wife Sarah, refused to trust and believe God and instead entered the bonded woman Hagar, who took seed and brought forth a son for him by the name of Ishmael.

Ishmael was the father of Islam whilst Isaac, the promised child and the son of Sarah who came a few years later, was the father of Judaism and Christianity.

From the advent of time the seed of Abraham's two sons, the son of the bonded woman and the promised child, have either been at war or have viewed one another with the greatest suspicion and caution.

1,400 years after Islam was established came ISIL, ISIS, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Nosra and countless other terror groups that corrupted and perverted the original teachings of that great faith. And since the advent of jihad and Islamist terror the world has not known peace and the nations of the earth continue to suffer.

Babies have been cut into two, infants have been crucified, children have been butchered and beheaded, little girls have been sodomised and raped to death, women have been stoned and enslaved, men have been castrated, children have been orphaned, wives have been widowed, husbands have witnessed the violation of their wives, nations have been conquered, churches have been burnt to ashes, mosques and ancient sites have been bombed, towns have been ravaged and whole communities have been pillaged and turned into Nazi-like concentration camps where violence, fear, intimidation and pestilence is legal tender. They hate humanity and they fly the black flag of terror, death and destruction. That is the hard and bitter truth.

Permit me to share just one more example of that suffering with you here. On 28th November, the same day that no less than 200 innocent Nigerians were blown up in a Kano mosque by Boko Haram, over 314 innocent Muslim and non-Muslim civilians were skinned alive and crucified in the killing fields and inner cities of Syria and Iraq by the jihadists of ISIL. Such manifest brutality and such a heartless bloodfest has rarely been seen in the annals of world history yet it appears that these terror groups enjoy the covert support of many from all over the world.

The truth is that supporting violent islamist groups like Boko Haram and ISIL, for whatever reason, is the manifestation and expression of cruelty and evil in its purest and most perverse form. It is the glorification of carnage, barbarity and wickedness and it is the celebration of ethnic cleansing and genocide. May God curse those who do so.

So many questions need to be answered. In the Nigerian context some of those questions are the ones that were put by Mr. Egheomhanre Eyieyien, an aspirant for the Nigerian Senate from Edo state, who made the following contribution on his Facebook page on 30 November. He wrote:

''Now that Kano has an Emir who is an ....... himself, I find it rather curious that he FINALLY said something which is against Boko Haram and then the Mosque at which he usually preaches every Friday was bombed by suicide-bombers WHEN he was not in attendance. Several questions on my mind:

1. What led Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi to tell the worshippers at the Kano Central Mosque about two weeks ago that "Muslims should defend themselves against Boko Haram" when he knows that Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor was severely criticised when he called on Christians to defend themselves against the same Islamist jihadist terrorists after they bombed St. Theresa's Catholic Church in Niger State in 2011?

2. Why did Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi miss the Jumat Service last Friday at the Kano Central Mosque?

3. Did Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi know about the planned suicide-bombing of the Mosque?

4. If Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi had fore-knowledge of the attack, did he warn the security agencies?

5. If Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi somehow knew about an imminent attack on the Kano Central Mosque, what steps did he take to avert the attack or ensure that the Mosque was better secured?

The role that ...... played in instigating the riot which resulted in the beheading of Gideon Akaluka in Kano by a mob of Islamists is still very fresh in our memory. We will get ‪justice for Gideon Akaluka some day soon by God's Grace!''

These are profound and disturbing questions that have been put by a deeply courageous soul who has boldly spoken the minds of many. Kudos to Mr. Eyieyien. Yet there is one more question that needs to be asked and that question is as follows.

Why did the Sultan of Sokoto, the reverred and respected leader of the Muslim community in northern Nigeria, feel that it was appropriate to tell Boko Haram to ''stop killing Muslims?'' He did not tell them to stop killing ''Nigerians'' but rather to stop killing ''muslims''. What coded message and subterranean signal was he sending?

The logical implication of his directive and the inference that can be drawn from it is that he has no objection to the killing of Christians and other non-muslims. Are the lives of Christians and other non-Muslims not as important to the Sultan as the lives of Muslims? Again why did he see fit to write to ISIL and urge them to stop their bloody onslaught and war of terror against ALL the people of the Middle East and not see fit to write to Boko Haram to stop doing the same in Nigeria?

Given this, the admonition of the much-loved President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, that the Sultan ought to write a letter to Boko Haram as well was timely and appropriate.

In order to get a better grasp of the problem that we have been confronted with in Nigeria permit me to end Part 1 of this essay by quoting extensively from an interesting essay titled ''The Plot To Islamise Nigeria'' which was written by Pastor Jonah Isah and which was widely published on the internet on June 22nd 2014. He wrote,

''Promotion in the civil service depended on if a candidate had converted to Islam. The late Sardauna promised to “dip the Koran into the sea” meaning he will spread Islam from the far North across the country to the Atlantic Ocean before he was done.

This agenda of “dipping the Koran to the sea” has continued unabated till date by consistent terror attacks and killings in the middle belt followed by mass movement of new communities of Hausa Fulani into the middle belt all the way down to the south states near the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1960, the late Sir Ahmadu Bello said “The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great-grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities of the North as willing tools and the South as a conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future.” (Parrot Newspaper, 12th Oct. 1960; republished on November 13, 2002, by the Tribune Newspaper, Ibadan.);

• The Conference of Northern Chiefs, in response to a letter from the UK-based West African Students' Union (WASU) to the Northern emirs asking them to support the constitutional evolution of Nigeria into an independent nation, had declared “holding this country together is not possible except by means of the religion of the Prophet. If they want political unity let them follow our religion.” (Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom, London: Faber and Faber, 1947, p.51.);

• During military rule in the 1970s Christian missionary schools were forcibly taken over by government, and in many instances their names changed to Islamic ones;

• As late as 1997 under General Sani Abacha's rule, all Police Commissioners in Nigeria were Muslims;

• In 1990, all members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) were Muslims except General Ike Nwachukwu, an Igbo, whose mother was a Fulani Muslim;

• During military rule, General Ibrahim Babangida surreptitiously registered Nigeria as a member state of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) without tabling the issue before the AFRC. The then second in command, Rear Admiral Ebitu Ukiwe told the world that he heard about Nigeria's membership of OIC like everybody else in the media. He was promptly removed and retired from the Navy;

• Babangida hosted the first Islam in Africa conference in Abuja and donated Federal Government funds to its operations, including its vision of transforming Nigeria to an Islamic state and enthroning the Sultan of Sokoto as its “supreme ruler”.

• Under the presidency of General Olusegun Obasanjo, 1999-2007, the Sharia code of Islamic law was re-introduced in the North in an expanded format. Islamic Police (Hisbah) was introduced and Christian girls were abducted, forcibly converted and married off to Muslims in Bauchi, Kaduna, Niger and Zamfara states. The Sharia Commissions of the states merely write parents informing them that their daughters had converted and had been given out in marriage''. (TO BE CONTINUED).

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