Islamic jihad is raging around the world, piling up more victims practically by the day, and yet most Americans assume that it’s a much smaller-scale affair than it actually is. Sure, the “bad guys” got lucky on 9/11, and a few areas of the world are problematic, but there is no real ongoing global threat. Yet one principal reason why so many people assume this is because the establishment media simply doesn’t fully inform people about what is going on.
Back in January, a group of Catholic activists published a petition at the online petition site, CitizenGo: “ACT NOW: End the Mass Slaughter of Christians in Nigeria. Pressure your Government to intervene.” The petition states: “Nigeria is now the deadliest place on Earth to follow Jesus.”
Yet the Nigerian and Western establishment media consistently obfuscate what is really happening inside Nigeria. TruthNigeria, which describes itself as “a project of Equipping the Persecuted, a humanitarian-aid nonprofit chartered in Sioux City, Iowa,” reported last Saturday that “as Fulani-tribe terrorists slaughtered 25 sleeping Christians in Plateau State in August, state-influenced press pipelines sanitized the massacre into a minor communal clash, deceiving international newsrooms.”
This is a long established and oft-repeated pattern. TruthNigeria offers one telling example: “On August 18, 2026, armed Fulani ethnic militia invaded Binper village, a predominantly Christian community in central Nigeria’s Plateau State at midnight, moving house-to-house to execute sleeping women and children.” There is no doubt about the motivating ideology of the attackers: “Eyewitnesses described raiders chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ while hacking women children with machetes.”
Nevertheless, TruthNigeria notes that “within hours, the truth underwent a deliberate transformation.” A Nigerian news channel “breathlessly reported the attack on August 20 and deplored its cruelty at length, yet without a hint of embarrassment, neglected to report who the attackers were, although the attackers were speaking the Fulfulde language of the Fulani tribe.”
In the same vein, “to appease state broadcast regulators, local Nigerian newspapers sanitized headlines to read ‘fresh Plateau attack,’ completely avoiding any mention of religious targeting.” The Western establishment media obligingly followed along: “By the time the news reached Western wire services, the spin cycle was complete: the world was told the slaughter was merely a ‘farmer-herder conflict driven by resource competition,’ according to Reuters. (Oddly, Reuters on the scene: their story was filed by two men, one in Kano and another in Maiduguri, both cities far from Mangu County).”
TruthNigeria explains that “when American newsrooms repeat sanitized phrases such as ‘farmer-herder clashes,’ Washington policymakers receive a false narrative. Relying on flawed reporting, foreign officials fail to recognize that radicalized militias are systematically displacing native-Christian populations.”
Indeed. And that’s exactly the point of this whitewashing: to prevent Western government officials and media outlets from realizing the nature of the conflict, the identity and motive of the perpetrators, and the plight of the victims. Thus the jihad against the Christians of Nigeria can proceed unimpeded.
This doesn’t just happen in Nigeria, either. Coptic Solidarity reported on September 15 that “an explosive device was thrown at St. George Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Hama, Syria, on the evening of Sunday September 13, causing material damage to the cathedral but, fortunately, no casualties were reported. Christian monitoring organizations report that two masked men riding a motorcycle carried out the attack as the community was marking the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.”
The identities of the “two masked men” were not known, but given the state of Syria today, it was likely that they were Islamic jihadis. In line with that likelihood, Coptic Solidarity notes that the incident “was followed by anti-Christian reactions online. The Syrian Christian Observatory reported that after it publicized the cathedral attack, an individual responded with an explicit threat against Christians: ‘Worse and more bitter is yet to come, O worshippers of the Cross.’”
That kind of language — “worshippers of the cross” — is common among Islamic jihadis, as the Qur’an denies that Jesus was crucified (4:157). Islamic apologists insist that Allah would never have allowed one of his prophets (for that is what Jesus is in Islam) to suffer such a humiliating and ignominious defeat as to be nailed to a cross.
Coptic Solidarity adds that “Open Doors separately reported hostile online reactions to the attack, including comments describing Christians as infidels and expressing approval of what had occurred.”
However, despite all the evidence that this was a jihad attack, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) report “did not identify St. George Cathedral, mention that a Christian place of worship had been struck, or provide the accounts of masked motorcycle assailants reported by Christian sources.”
That was a notable omission, and it “prompted criticism from the Syrian Christian Observatory, which accused Syrian media of effectively erasing both the church and the Christian identity of the target from the story.”
Related: Azerbaijan Expelled 120,000 Armenians. Now It’s Erasing Their Churches.
Indeed, but here again, the Western establishment media ignored the attack altogether. The establishment media everywhere seems to have determined that it is a top priority for them to whitewash Islam’s image as much as possible. Any news that reflects poorly upon Islam must be reported as if Islam had nothing whatsoever to do with it; all aspects of Islamic jihad attacks that make them identifiable as such must be downplayed or ignored altogether. This is a consistent pattern I’ve observed repeatedly for 23 years of covering jihad news at jihadwatch.org.
No one ever breaks ranks, but the same establishment media outlets that regularly whitewash Islam also all turn around and wring their hands over “Islamophobia,” reporting with a straight face that Muslims and Islam are negatively portrayed in the media. The reality is that no one could wish for better media treatment.
