Christians are Murdering Muslims in Nigeria

Well, well, well, if it weren’t obvious already, it turns out that no religion has a monopoly on mob violence:

 

Christian mobs in this southern city attacked Muslim motorists and traders Wednesday, leaving more than 30 people dead, according to witnesses, as religious riots sparked by the publishing of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad continued into a fifth day in Nigeria. Nationwide, the death toll reached at least 80.

Hordes of angry men marauded through Onitsha armed with machetes, guns and boards with nails pounded into their ends, witnesses said. The mobs burned two mosques and looted and destroyed Muslim-owned shops as they sought vengeance for similar attacks against Christians in two predominantly Muslim cities in northern part of the country. (link)

 

The justification for this holy pogrom?

 

"They've been killing our brothers and sisters in the north," men shouted Wednesday morning….

 

The attacks in Nigeria began this weekend, almost six months after the cartoons were first published in a Danish newspaper and weeks after they ignited a wave of unrest in Muslim countries from Egypt to Indonesia that left about 28 people dead -- almost all of them shot by security forces -- in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Libya. But the clashes in Nigeria, this continent's most populous country, have been the deadliest, and the first involving counterattacks by Christians.

 

Religious violence has flared in recent years in this West African nation, which is split roughly in half between a Muslim north and a Christian and animist south, but with most areas containing a mixture of all three religious groups. More than 1,000 people were killed in fighting between Christians and Muslims in 2004.

 

Abdul Arwa, 25, a Muslim from the north, who for the past two years sold tomatoes at a roadside stall in Onitsha, said men stole about $60 from him Wednesday afternoon and tried to stab him before he fled across the Niger River with only the tattered clothes he was wearing.

 

The mob, he said, made clear that the attacks were reprisals for the killings of Muslims in previous days. (link)

 

Perhaps this is a demonstration of the so-called higher ethical standards that Christians possess over their Islamic counterparts, although it sounds very much the same: get revenge on any member of the opposite religion regardless of their lack of personal culpability in committing a crime.   

 

Christian mob violence results in reports of “burned and dismembered bodies” strewn along roadways, decapitation (and here I thought that was only a Muslim pastime), mutilation, and drowning people in rivers.

 

It’s endemic to all self-proclaimed superior groups.  They eventually forget their founding profundities:

 

“Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1).