When Bill Maher recently declared that Nigeria is witnessing a genocide against Christians, citing the ongoing displacement of half a million Nigerians, and the approximate death toll of 62,000 people, he broke a silence that has gripped Western media for more than a decade. “If you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria,” Maher said, “your media sources suck.”
Silenced Genocide
Maher was correct, but to the last point, there is a reason why your media sources won’t show you the scale of Jihadism across the African continent, and for those with eyes to see, the magnitude of the deception is eye-watering.
Across Africa, jihadist violence has reached catastrophic proportions. According to the African Jewish Alliance’s recent meta-analysis of over twenty white papers and government counterterrorism reports, 22 African nations are now suffering active jihadist insurgencies, with another 13 becoming recruitment hubs. Movements such as Boko Haram, ISIS-Sahel, Al-Shabaab, and the Allied Democratic forces target Christians, moderate Muslims, and secular institutions with the same ideological fervor Hamas displayed against Israeli civilians on October 7.
Yet despite this immense crisis, Western NGOs, journalists, and governments remain largely silent. Why? Because jihadism in Africa does not fit neatly into the racialized “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative that dominates Western discourse. The progressive establishment has been conditioned to view any criticism of Islam, even of violent Islamist movements, as “Islamophobia.” That silence was briefly shattered when Maher spoke. But almost immediately, the propaganda machine went to work to muffle it again.
Qatar’s Disinformation Defense
Within days, Al Jazeera, the Qatari state-owned network long accused of promoting Islamist narratives, published a response by Nigerian writer Gimba Kakanda titled “No, Bill Maher, There Is No ‘Christian Genocide’ in Nigeria.” The piece sought to deny and obscure the reality on the ground by reframing jihadist massacres as “communal conflict.” This is what damage control looks like.
Kakanda currently serves as a Senior Assistant to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Muslim himself, who has repeatedly sought to suppress discussion of jihadist atrocities. As a product of an elite Western institution like the London School of Economics (LSE), Kakanda comfortably employs Western academic frameworks to downplay Islamist violence, echoing the same moral inversion that allowed LSE to host a 2023 book launch sympathetically titled “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters.” That event described Hamas as a misunderstood political movement, an extraordinary claim given Hamas’s record of beheading babies and slaughtering 1,200 civilians on October 7.
This kind of rhetorical laundering is entirely rooted in dogma and ideology, and Qatar has spent the last decade bankrolling the infrastructure that sustains it. From 2012 to 2015, Qatari officials and financiers were repeatedly linked to Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, the Al-Nusra Front, later rebranded as Jabhat Fath al-Sham. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post all reported on Qatari meetings with jihadist commanders, ransom payments to terrorist groups, and Doha’s role in creating the “Army of Conquest,” an opposition coalition in which Al-Nusra played a leading role.
Even after the U.S. government formally designated these groups, Qatar continued to harbor and protect known terrorist financiers, such as Abdul Rahman al-Nuaimi, a former Qatari government adviser who funded Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. When Al Jazeera tells its readers there is “no genocide” in Nigeria, it is not engaging in honest debate. It is protecting the global jihadist ecosystem that its patrons helped to build.
Why It Matters
A jihadist takeover of Africa’s Sahel region would have catastrophic global consequences, threatening Europe’s southern flank, destabilizing the Atlantic trade corridor, and exporting extremism across the globe. But even beyond geopolitics, this is a moral emergency. The same ideology that massacred Israeli civilians on October 7 is burning villages in Nigeria and enslaving Mauritanians, slaughtering civilians in Congo, among countless other atrocities.
Dr. Charles Jacobs
Human Rights Activist
