By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 2, 2003

As a young woman in 1968, I worked briefly with Christian leaders to fight mass starvation inflicted on Biafra’s Ibo people. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan also raised money for the afflicted Biafrans. In this, my family and I followed the late Father Aloisius Dempsey, a Jesuit priest who had spent his life tending to sick and impoverished disaster victims worldwide, may he rest in peace. Never did Father Alo or his peers call on peace activists to engage in “resistance.” Peace activism then consisted of marching and raising funds to feed the starving.

Not that Biafra lacked cause. Nigeria’s so-called “civil war” actually constituted a Muslim jihad genocide that felled one million victims. Biafran Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu explained in his June 1969 Ahiara Declaration, the Ibo were threatened with “total destruction,” and their secession resisted “the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries.” Nigerian troops in 1966 slaughtered 50,000 “like cattle.” In one village, in 1968 they murdered the entire adult male population. Nigerian Lieut. Col. Murtala Mohammed declared in September 1967, “My destination is Onitsha, brothers and sisters. Let nobody stand on my way, for anything that stands on my way would be crushed.” Indeed, the Ibo people were crushed. As Karl Maier expertly describes in This House Has Fallen (2000), Nigeria’s Islamization continues today and the Ibos have become its second class citizens.

Now “peace activism” ironically sides with jihad, at least as embodied by the International Solidarity Movement, which claims a Palestinian Arab “right to resist” “via legitimate armed struggle,” including murder by suicide. ISM is just ending its six week “Freedom Summer Palestine Campaign.” Ostensibly to “challenge Israel’s brutal occupation policies,” this sought to halt construction of Israel’s security fence, which ISM derisively labels an “apartheid wall.”

To Israel, the fence represents a life-saver to keep suicide killers out. ISM wants them to get in. A fence can be removed; lives cannot be replaced. Continue reading “Enemy With A Human Face” →

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