Sadly, religious intolerance is making a comeback today, including in the U.S. One need only recall the shootings at places of worship: 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, 2025 at the Church of the Annunciation Minneapolis, and at the Chapel of the Church of Latter Day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan. One reason for the broad scope of this persecution is simple geography: while there are few Druze outside of their homelands in the Levant, the Alawites reside nearly only in Syria, Jews in Israel (having been expelled from many countries across the Middle East) and Yezidis in northern Mesopotamia (excepting diaspora communities outside the region), there are established Christian communities across the region, from Nigeria to Indonesia, from the Atlantic to the South China Sea. According to Ebenezer Obadare, Senior Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, Trump’s statement was long overdue, given the dire circumstances: “Since 2009, a militant Islamist terrorist group called Boko Haram has killed more than 52,000 Nigerian Christians, displaced over 2 million people within the country, and destroyed more than 19,000 churches and 2,200 Christian schools.” While the BBC has raised doubts about the precise numbers, the State Department’s 2023 Religious Freedom Report stated: “Terrorist groups, including Boko Haram and ISIS-WA, continued to attack population centers and religious targets, including churches and mosques, and maintained an ability to stage forces in rural areas and launch attacks against civilian and military targets across the North East and elsewhere in the country, according to observers.
Author: December 9, 2025
Published at: 2025-12-09 00:00:00
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