Giulio Meotti
Giulio MeottiCourtesy

Manga is a Christian in Nigeria, the most dangerous country in the world, where a Christian is killed every two hours. Manga had to be one of them. Twenty years old, Manga was returning home like every night after university. His mother was preparing dinner.

Men from Boko Haram, the Islamist group that has sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda, raided his home. They took Manga, his father and brother out, while his mother and younger brothers locked themselves in another room. "Then they asked my father and the two of us if we were ready to deny Jesus and embrace Islam", Manga testified to the NGO "Open Doors". Manga's father refused. "So they told us, 'We will kill you.' I answered them: 'If you kill us, what do you gain?'.

Manga was then hit with the butt of a rifle and his father brutally murdered. 'They beheaded him and put his head on his stomach, in front of my eyes.' says Manga. 'Then they tried to behead my brother.' Manga watched helplessly as his family was slaughtered. Then his turn came. 'They took a knife, with serrated teeth and tried to cut my neck.'. The young man was left on the ground, before his eyes the bodies of his father and brother. As if that were not enough, those of Boko Haram hung a bomb at the gate of the house, where Manga's mother and brothers smaller ones were screaming in terror. They were rescued by neighbors.

But for the second year in a row, Nigeria has just been dropped from the US State Department's list of countries committing the worst religious freedom violations in the world. For more than twenty years, the President of the United States has been required to annually review the state of religious freedom in every country in the world and designate those governments and entities that perpetrate or tolerate serious violations of religious freedom.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced this year's designations on Dec. 2: No Nigeria. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said it was "outraged" by Nigeria's exclusion. Jude Arogundade, bishop of the diocese of Ondo, southwestern Nigeria, noted that "every time the US Democrats are in power they look away from the killings of Christians. It was very visible during the Obama administration." And it is under Joe Biden, guarantor of the Emir of Qatar.

Every day in Nigeria 17 Christians are killed for their faith. Nigeria's Silent Slaughter report reveals that from January 1, 2000 to January 31, 2020, there were 96,309 total deaths in Nigeria. Open Doors speaks of 13,000 churches destroyed. 43,000 Christians killed in twelve years.

And where is the European Union on these 100,000 dead? Nowhere.

What about the UN Human Rights Council? It is silent, on the other hand Qatar is part of it and is the 18th country in the world that most persecutes Christians.

And the UN Commissioner for Human Rights?

What about Amnesty International? Nothing.

They are all too busy attacking Israel.

“The investigation into acts of corruption within the European Parliament is an essential revelation: our institutions are in the crosshairs of Qatar, the main financier of political Islam in Europe, a drift that explains many of the battles we face... ”, wrote the French philosopher and MEP François-Xavier Bellamy.

Perhaps then the Brussels investigation into pro-Qatar corruption will also be able to shed light on the silence of the European Parliament on the persecution of Christians and more precisely on the case of the young Nigerian Christian Deborah Samuel, killed and burned by Islamists. Within the group of European Socialists & Democrats, shaken by the "Qatargate", all the MPs refused to shed light on a "genocide" of Christians committed in the name of Islam.

And the same people in the European Parliament voted to condemn the killing of the journalist of Al Jazeera, a Qatari organ, and not that of Deborah Samuel. The European Parliament also voted a resolution on the persecution of religious minorities. But not before deleting this sentence about Christians: “Christians are estimated to make up the majority of all religiously persecuted and that 340 million Christians worldwide suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination, with over 4,500 Christians killed in 2020 alone because of their religion”.

So Marc Fromager, director of Aid to the Church in Need, is right when he writes in Le Figaro that Christians "think they have been sold for 30 barrels of oil by the political authorities of the West. They didn't expect to be forgotten even by their brothers." Oil barrels, gas pipes and now we also discover rooms full of cash. In Brussels, these days, we have seen to what level of corruption the "official Europe" has fallen.