Jonathan S. Tobin
The U.S. strikes on Islamists in Africa ordered by President Trump put into perspective the hypocrisy and double standards of Israel’s critics on the left and the right.
Military personnel inspect the scene of the explosion at a mosque in the Gamboru market in Maiduguri on Dec. 25, 2025. An explosion ripped through a mosque in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri and killed at least seven worshippers on Dec. 24, 2025, witnesses and security sources told AFP. No armed groups immediately claimed responsibility for what anti-jihadist militia leader Babakura Kolo said was a suspected bombing. Maiduguri is the capital of Borno state, home to a years-long insurgency by jihadist groups Boko Haram and an offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province, though the city itself has not seen a major attack in years. Photo by Audu Marte/AFP via Getty Images.
Amid the deluge of bizarre and vile ideas platformed by Tucker Carlson on his podcast was one recent episode that sought, among other things, to claim that there was no persecution, let alone genocide, of Christians in Nigeria. The person making the claim was international lawyer Robert Amsterdam, whose firm has extensive interests in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.
This flatly contradicted the assertion of President Donald Trump only weeks earlier when he posted on Truth Social that, “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria” and said he was designating it a “COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN.” By the end of November, in a Fox News Radio interview with Brian Kilmeade, Trump referred to the campaign against Christians in northern Nigeria as “genocide.”
Those claims were disputed by the Nigerian government, a rather dubious position echoed by liberal media like The New York Times and The Economist, as well as Carlson’s program. Trump’s critics were skeptical that he would actually seek to do anything about the crisis in Nigeria, but as is often the case when it comes to his threats, this week we learned that he wasn’t bluffing.
As is his wont, Trump announced the airstrikes on targets in Nigeria on Truth Social, saying: “The United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!”
It must be conceded that even if the strikes were successful, by themselves they are not going to alter the situation in that part of Nigeria, where Islamist terrorists like the Lakurawa—a faction of the better-known Boko Haram Islamist group—are well entrenched. But the administration’s willingness to take up this cause has implications well beyond that troubled country.
It shines a spotlight on a problem that few in the mainstream media have troubled to report on.
More importantly, it illustrates that the threat from Islamists, which a bizarre coalition of Marxists, right-wingers and Muslims are at such pains to downplay or deny, threatens more than just Israel.
The discussion about Nigeria also highlights the gross hypocrisy of supporters of the Palestinian cause throughout the West. They have done their best to promote falsehoods and blood libels about Israel committing genocide in Gaza, which is a deliberate mischaracterization of a war aimed at Hamas terrorists, in which the Israel Defense Forces have achieved a historically low level of civilian casualties compared to combatants. Yet the vast anti-Israel propaganda machine—funded by the emirate of Qatar and other sources, like the left-wing billionaire philanthropist George Soros—has no interest in true genocides of Christians in countries like Nigeria and Sudan, where Islamists are ruthlessly targeting religious minorities.
When that episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show” aired, even many fans of Carlson who tune in for the Israel-bashing from a wide variety of guests may have been puzzled by the program devoting any of its time to minimizing the well-documented suffering of Christians and other non-Muslims throughout the continent at the hands of Islamists, including offshoots of the ISIS and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups.
But given Carlson’s relentless promotion of the idea that Islamists are not a threat to the West, whether in Qatar, which hosts and pays for the Muslim Brotherhood’s international activities and influence operations, or elsewhere, it wasn’t much of a stretch to think that this might extend to what is going on in Africa. One motive might have been that the Christian Zionists that Carlson so despises have been outspoken about the plight of Christians in Muslim countries like Nigeria. There’s also the fact that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the former Fox News host’s fiercest critics, has taken up this cause, with proposed legislation aimed at sanctioning Nigerian officials who have condoned these crimes. That helps clear up the mystery about Carlson’s interest in denying the persecution of Christians by Muslims.
Carlson again took up the theme that Muslims are no threat to the West in his speech to the Turning Point USA AmericaFest earlier this week to little effect.
More cogent, however, were the remarks of a one-time favorite of the commentator: Tulsi Gabbard, who now serves as Trump’s director of national intelligence. She pointed out that Islamists are a direct threat to American freedom, something made obvious by the 9/11 attacks. But, she added, it is now also being illustrated by the actions of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was founded as a front group by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and always treated as a civil liberties organization by much of the liberal media.
Gabbard further described the way Islamist clerics and their political allies are promoting this dangerous ideology in places like Patterson, N.J.; Dearborn, Mich.; Houston; and Minneapolis.
Interest in the horrors of Islamist terrorism in Africa was briefly aroused in 2014, when 200 Nigerian Christian girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram. No less a personage than first lady Michelle Obama took up the cause of the victims with her #BringBackOurGirls campaign. But the focus on that crime was a passing phase, with few if any of those who joined Mrs. Obama in promoting that hashtag subsequently paid much attention to the broader problem of Islamist persecution of and terrorism against African Christians.
It almost goes without saying that when more than 250 people, including men, women, children and the elderly, were kidnapped by Palestinian Arabs during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, neither the former first lady nor most of those who spoke up about the abducted schoolgirls said a word about the Israeli hostages. But as has been made obvious over the course of the last few decades, outrage against Islamist terror is at best sporadic.
When it is only Jews who are the victims, the discussion almost immediately shifts to one dictated by the false narrative about Israel being a settler-colonial or “apartheid” state oppressing Palestinians, regardless of the facts. When the victims are not Jewish, there is more interest in the victims; though, as we saw after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama seemed to be just as worried about not framing the conflict as one rooted in religion as they were in combating terrorism.
That is why, regardless of what the U.S. strikes in Nigeria accomplished, it is important that Americans wake up to the global threat that Islamist ideology and terror pose. That’s something that activists like Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser have been trying to tell the world about in recent years—something that was highlighted on my “Think Twice” podcast earlier this year.
The plight of Christians in Africa is appalling in and of itself, and the steadfast refusal of most of the international media to cover it is a scandal. So, too, is their unwillingness to point out that the threat is rooted in a popular variant of Islam, rather than a random collection of thugs with incomprehensible motives and obscure origins.
It also makes it painfully clear that the post-Oct. 7 war Israel has been fighting against a coalition of Iranian-funded terrorists in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Yemen is not an isolated series of battles involving only that besieged nation. Rather, it constitutes the front lines of a global conflict between Islamists and the West in which the stakes are far higher than most Americans realize.
As Trump has articulated in the past year, the foundation of his “America First” foreign policy isn’t isolationism, but rather a serious effort to sort out real threats to American security and its values from those that are peripheral to it. Trump rightly saw the Iranian nuclear program as a threat to the United States and helped Israel destroy or at least set it back several years. And he rightly understands that Islamist terror in Africa is linked to those same concerns.
Those elements of his conservative coalition, like Carlson and others, who strangely echo the anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric of the far left and Islamists, and accuse those who care about these issues of being “Israel firsters” or “neoconservatives” (in today’s political parlance, a term that is shorthand for Jews), aren’t just out of sync with Trump. They undermine the defense of the West against a deadly threat that seeks the destruction of the United States, as well as of the one Jewish state on the planet.
The current surge in antisemitism isn’t, as some have falsely called it, a debate about the U.S.-Israel alliance or the war in Gaza. It is part of an effort to disarm and divert Americans from the peril that Islamists pose to their country and Western civilization. The war against this ideology is one that must be fought across the globe. Like those who lie about Gaza and the siege of Israel, anyone telling us to look away from what is happening in Africa is part of a problem that cannot be ignored.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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Procession arrives at Place des Terreaux with a banner reading, “Against Antisemitism, for the Republic,” during the march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
