✍️ When I put hours of research into my tweets, I get low engagement, but when I spend a few seconds on a dumb, edgy tweet, it gets high engagement. FUCK YOU.
@Krispijnpunt Het is jouw tijd, Jonathan.
Hij heeft voor ons iets achtergelaten om voort te zetten en groter te maken.
Rust in vrede, Jensen.
Laten we zijn dood niet alleen als verlies zien.
Waar iets eindigt, ontstaat ruimte voor iets nieuws.
No, I’m not a Muslim, but to be fair..
When a Muslim prays on the street, we call it asserting dominance, but when a Jew literally prays or does his whatever ritual in the damn White House, we should applaud it?
😩 NO, BULLSHIT! We are being told a fake story.. A story in which Nigeria is nothing more than a Muslim attack on Christians. A religious genocide, supposedly fuelled directly by the Koran. A story that is eagerly repeated in neo-conservative circles: "See, Islam is evil."
But anyone who looks at Nigeria sees a very different picture.
Nigeria is not a simple two-part country of Muslims and Christians. It is a country of 230 million people, with more than 250 ethnic groups and more than 500 languages. Religion there is not as we know it in the West. A Nigerian Christian may pray in church, but also wears an amulet against witchcraft. A Muslim visits the mosque, but also consults a traditional healer. The idea that we see two pure blocks here, Muslims on one side, Christians on the other, is an illusion.
The reality is harsher and more complicated. Nigeria is a state in chaos. The country is in the top 20 most fragile states in the world and ranks high on corruption lists. Almost 133 million Nigerians live in poverty. Schools are failing, hospitals are empty, jobs are non-existent. Many who survive do so through crime, drugs, prostitution, gangs. And where the state is absent, weapons like guns, knifes, etc reign supreme.
This explains why different forms of violence are intertwined. Yes, there are jihadists such as Boko Haram (the militant Islamist sect from northeastern Nigeria allegedly responsible for a christian genocide) who sow ‘religious’ terror. But that is only one layer. In the north-west, you see banditry: criminal networks that burn down villages and kidnap people purely for ransom. In the Middle Belt, you see farmers and Fulani herders slaughtering each other, not because the Koran or the Bible says so, but because the soil is drying up, the cattle can no longer find grass and the boundaries between agriculture and livestock farming are blurring.
And who are the victims? Not just Christians. Not just Muslims. Everyone. In Plateau State, in Benue, in Kaduna: entire villages are disappearing. Farmers, herders, mosques, churches, everything is affected. In 2018, farmer-herder conflicts were even deadlier than the attacks by Boko Haram:
Boko Haram / ISWAP Insurgency:
1700 – 2000
Farmer–Herder Clashes:
1800 – 2100
The fact, and my point, is: Nigeria is a failing state where weapons from Libya and the Sahel circulate freely, where 3.9 million people are displaced, where the rule of law is absent. Religion is not a driving force there. Also, there are foreign influences, one which, i stumbled upon while doing some research, is very interesting; Boko Haram drew on transnational jihadist networks, al-Qaeda, ISIS, that provided ideology, training, and funding, and we know who is behind these groups, don’t we? 🇺🇸🇮🇱
The violence is primarily the product of poverty, population pressure, corruption and the total absence of order.
And that is why it is misleading to reduce Nigeria to a religious genocide. It is not a jihadist campaign, it is chaos. A chaos in which religious language is used, but in which the causes lie much deeper: in failing governance, in people with a lack of cognitive discipline, in land conflicts, in crime, in despair, etc.
So: i’m not a muslim by any means, but i want to prevent that politicians leverage this narrative to engineer consent for a military intervention.
the evidence that Islam is inherently evil does not lie in Nigeria. The evidence that a society without the rule of law, without order and without institutions inevitably descends into violence, that is what lies there.
Yeah right, I don’t owe you an explanation. You don’t know me, and my so-called “stubbornness” toward you does not reflect my approach toward faith in real life.
Here’s some advice: I can take criticism, but cheap moral grandstanding on Twitter won’t change my beliefs. Don’t preach to people or judge someone’s soul off a single tweet, it makes your message look weak, not holy. Respectfully