Last month, a female student was killed at a college in the northwestern Nigerian state of Sokoto over allegations of blasphemy. The student, Deborah Samuel of Shehu Shagari College of Education, was lynched by an angry mob who stoned her to death and later set her on fire for making "derogatory comments" about Muhammad on a WhatsApp platform shared by students.
American Family News spoke to journalist Douglas Burton, who refers to the incident as "a shocking murder of a Christian student." Burton, a former U.S. State Department official in Kirkuk, Iraq, explains that "the young woman was reportedly killed because a social media post she made was considered an insult to the [so-called] prophet [Muhammad]."
Burton points out that "the atrocity has been condemned by the institutional leader of Islam in Nigeria, the Sultan of Sokoto, as well as thousands of Nigerian Muslims." To that end, he considers the woman's death to be "a vicious public murder of [a] martyr to free speech" and "an illustration of Nigeria's long-term war against women and against Christianity."
The veteran journalist deems it important to note that "there are no examples of Christians murdering a Muslim student for insulting Christianity, and the ruling administration of president Muhammadu Buhari has turned a blind eye to jihadist atrocities since it came to power in 2015."
Sadly, the former State Department official points out, "the Christians of Nigeria are among the most persecuted group of any nation outside China."
According to Burton, the U.S. Mission in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, "must be called to account for ignoring the rampant persecution of Christians." He contends they haven't made "meaningful efforts to remediate [persecution] or even to dignify the deaths of tens of thousands of victims of the genocide happening all around the busy foreign service officers reporting copiously back to their superiors in Washington, DC."
Just last week AFN quoted the group International Christian Concern identifying Nigeria as the "world's scariest country to be a Christian."
