by Gimba Kakanda
You even said that no atrocity is more than that going on in Gaza, and I ask: is there an experience worse than having minors abducted, savagely raped and impregnated by terrorists?
Dear Friend,
Before you accuse me of finding nothing worth praising about you and yours, let me quickly empathise with you, and of course myself, over the killings in Gaza. You, as a humanist, one whose empathy has no border, are a citizen of the world, one of the reasons the earth is still habitable by the sane. It would be morally irresponsible for anyone to frown at your frantic advocacy which seeks an end to the killings in Gaza, only that commonsense demands a man whose house is on fire to rush for the extinguisher for his own dwelling first, before attending to a similar fire elsewhere.
London stands up for Gaza, because London is not bereaved. New York Stands up for Gaza because New York isn’t being threatened by hurricane-somebody now. Palestine would not stand up for Chibok because they also have a strip of misery in which they are just as worthless: Gaza. And the young Malala Yousafzai who came and roused the conscience of her fathers in Nigeria, was not here as a Pakistani as you have announced in defending your geographically insensitive activism from my “secular advocacy”. She was here as a Birmingham, England-based NGO owner, to stand with the girls of Nigeria in whose education Malala Fund has invested thousands of dollars. She has, as the news says, even “offered to partner with the UN efforts to mitigate the impacts of the abduction and help the girls (whose welfare is a responsibility of her NGO) return to school.”
You see, it’s not the way you internationalise your empathies that disturbs me, it’s this seeming pretence that all is well in your backyard while you weep over the blazing fire in faraway Gaza. If you, and others like you, had been half as passionate and emotional in your reaction to local tragedies as you are over the killings in Palestine, the troubles in the northeastern Nigeria wouldn’t have escalated to its present extent. The Palestinians, and their global solidarity soldiers, have gone berserk over the burning of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair, their citizen, and you, amnesiac activist of a burning nation, have also been losing sleep over Khudair, ignoring the tens of Khudairs who die in your backyard every day!
It’s not the internationalisation of your empathies that disturbs me, it’s your lack of wisdom to understand that Khudair has his fighters — and he’s fully named, his age too revealed –while all the killed and abducted Dantalas and Asma’us and Johns and Naomis of Yobe and Borno are seen as mere statistics, unworthy of collective advocacy by you.
Ours is not a criticism of the northern establishment, but that of its hypocritical allegiance to “brotherhood of faith”, which is what you say in your solidarity with the Palestinians, ignoring that we’re just as bereaved here, and unknowing that Palestine is also a home for non-Muslims. But, wait, what sort of a human being is responsive to the tragedies that fall upon just the people of his faith?
Ours is a criticism of the collective, not of a specific group. This is a reminder that we have not done enough, not a declaration that we have not done anything at all. It’s a criticism of me and you who, safe from the bullets of Boko Haram, have not done anything comparable to the emotions shown in the sensitivity of our countrymen to the happening in Gaza. Are you, my dear global citizen, trying to say that we, especially resident northerners, need CNN and Aljazeera to remind us that there are carnages going on in our backyard before we acknowledge them?
Haven’t we all lost friends and friends of friends and relatives and relatives of relatives in this madness? What media is more effective than being actually bereaved? The most effective media is our emotions, and on this I dare say that we haven’t shown and done enough. My participation in #BringBackOurGirls shows me the hypocrisy of our Muslim brothers and sisters who, dismissing our hashtags as a gimmick, are now loud champions of #FreePalestine.
See, we are as bereaved as the people of Palestine and it’s quite ironic that, instead of gathering our lots to empathise with ourselves first and demand solutions and justice, we pretend as though all’s well in our house. Why are the people of Palestine not empathising with the people of Borno if our “brotherhood of faith” is actually reciprocal? Why? I repeat: why aren’t the people of Palestine extending their “brotherhood of faith” to us in the hours of our bereavements? The Palestinians have never stopped fighting. They have their men up and running against oppression. Who’s up fighting for us, especially for Chibok and the larger northeast? Why leaving these campaigns against Boko Haram’s terrors to just the members of Civilian JTF and #BringBackOurGirls campaigners?
You even said that no atrocity is more than that going on in Gaza, and I ask: is there an experience worse than having minors abducted, savagely raped and impregnated by terrorists? Saying that no atrocity is as bad as that in Gaza means that the sanctity of a Palestinian’s life is higher than that of a Nigerian’s. And that, fellow countryman, is an unfortunate and disturbing utterance.
Similarly, you have to be really careful in your advocacy. At least get relevant history books to properly understand the religious and political complexity of the territorial conflicts that have turned Gaza into a prison-mortuary. Your alignment with the Palestinians, your brothers-in-faith, may lead you into something called antisemitism. And you also need to understand that it’s the peak of such misguided hatred that resulted into the formation of a racist ideology that once sought to promote the “Aryan” German race as the best of humans. Nazism, consequently, championed the killings of the innocent Jews, who were considered threats to proposed German nationalism.
In your analyses of the happenings in Gaza, you have, quite sadly, pandered to a way of the Hitler-led Aryan racists who considered the Jewish race abolishable pests.
Do have restraint in understanding that the happenings in Israel is not a crime perpetrated, and supported, by the whole of Jews. It’s a crime perpetrated by a monstrous ideology championed by a people of Jewish identity, just the way Nazism was not supported by the whole of Germans, but by a small but powerful National Socialist party clique. If you’re to adopt this form of flawed thinking in portraying ethnic or religious groups, obviously the whole of Muslims should be similarly persecuted for the crimes of Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabbab, the Taliban and even Boko Haram who all pretend to be advocates of rights for the Muslim!
Hate the Israelis who, under zionism, did to Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, but do not go close to hating the whole of Jews. Saying I hate the Jews means I hate some significant figures that shaped me, mine and the larger world. Saying I hate the Jews means I hate Jesus, who in my theology is Isah (AS), needed to authenticate my belief; saying I hate the Jews means I hate Moses (AS), similarly needed; saying I hate the Jews is an ingratitude to Albert Einstein’s contribution to science; saying I hate the Jews is an ingratitude to Sergey Brin, the founder of Google, whose invention has redeemed me in ways I’m incapable of repaying; saying I hate the Jews is also an ingratitude to Mark Zuckerberg whose innovation is the reason you and I are “friends” – even though we’ve never met – sharing thoughts on the ways of the world.
As long as you’re on Facebook, and employ Google to aid your quests for knowledge, both creations of inventors of Jewish identity, declaring that you hate the Jews is a contradiction, a joke clearly on you. And, as Muslims, your faith is threatened the moment you withhold your love for Jesus and Moses.
Don’t let a criminal be a representative of his race, religion and nationality. This approach, this dangerous stereotyping, has been the reason for these many conflicts we are still unable to resolve in this damned world. We must embrace our humanity, the only thing we all have in common, if we’re indeed interested in resolving our racial, religious, political, regional, territorial and ethnic conflicts!
Unlike you, whenever I see a group of people, the first identity that strikes me is the human, not the religious, not the political, not the racial, and obviously not the ethnic. Aside from my immediate family, my next closest family are the righteous people, people always in pursuit of Justice without discrimination, and of their other identities I’m unmindful.
I’ve long overcome the naiveté of hating a people based on the crimes of a group of which they are non-compliant members, just the way I don’t owe any non-Muslim and southerner apology for the atrocities of the Boko Haram. I only owe them explanation, defence, solidarity and empathy. My seeming silence over the killings in Gaza is simply because I’ve also been mourning, and also holed up in a mess of immeasurable depth. The Palestinians, I know, have global solidarity soldiers fighting for them. But, beyond hashtags, who are actually fighting for the redemptions of this place in which we don’t need a visa to reside?
This week, at our Abuja’s #BringBackOurGirls sit-in, as I listened to Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, a woman whose public service records never really attracted my curiosity, but I’ve come to like as a humanist and patriot of impressive resilience, lament on the fate and conditions of the abducted girls and the dysfunctionality of the system in charge of our safety, something within me collapsed. So I withdrew from the crowd, hoping that could stem it, but I still couldn’t fight the tears. And that was how I left the sit-in, broken. This is because, in the cruel politics of migrations in this century, I have no home other than Nigeria, and the tragedy that befalls a fellow countryman, irrespective of his/her religious and ethnic and regional affiliations, is a shared grief.
I’m not inconsiderate to your reference to “brotherhood of faith” in standing for the people of Gaza, but I will never ever stand for them simply because we’re of the same religion. My own version of that excuse of yours is: “faith in the universal brotherhood of Man.” I only empathise with them because of a shared humanity. As for those who rightly explain that humanity has no border, which I also endorse, my belief in yours may only be confirmed if you also recognise the conditions of the Iraqi Christians who’re now fleeing Mosul, for they have been told by the ISIS animals to convert to Islam or lose their lives. Many of you are in Abuja, but participating in #BringBackOurGirls is seen as a “waste of time”, insulting those who defy the tasks of their 9-to-5 daily to be a part of the campaign, ignorant of the impending dangers, the danger of becoming refugees in your own city!
Yet, some of you have sought to typify my refusal to label corpses in order to know which deserves my empathy as simply a bid to earn a medal from the non-Muslims I’ve been struggling so hard, according to you, to impress; some of the same non-Muslims who, in a spark of mischief, have in their turn called me an “Islamic propagandist”, whatever that is, for condemning the profiling of northerners in the East, for endorsing a Muslim as presidential candidate… But I’m indifferent to their malicious labeling just as I’ve been to yours because you’re both incapable of denying me the rights to such expressions.
Humanity is still a joke because of this army of cerebrally malfunctioned brothers and sisters to whom we’re seen as hypocrites merely trying to impress the non-members of our group, for exposing a form of oppressive hypocrisy. Well, my dear friend, I don’t write to influence or change you; my writing is a sport that seeks to prove that I don’t think the way you do, and that the way I think is independent of yours. I hope this would be taken in good faith. May God save us from us!
Yours faithfully,
Gimba Kakanda
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.
In as much as d article is intresting I don’t buy much into gimba’s view of the whole situation. When the issue of the abduction occured. It got a worldwide condemnation from the muslim world and the whole world showed their love for nigeria, though we’re not out of the mess but we shouldn’t think its the responsibility of muslims to bring back the chibok girls or the muslims are the only ones concerned, terrorism is terrorism and everybody is concerned. We are all aware of the obvious weakness of the present govt. Govt reaction to the situation Is not comendable in all sense.when the world showed their love for nigeria, its not that they can do much, but they feel showing concern can trigger appropriate reaction from the governt and the concerned authorities and we can see that resulted in the support of brother nations. Now back to gaza,which is a similar scenerio,we don’t have much to do for them other than supporting the campagein and praying for them. So I don’t see where condeming terrorism is a crime of the muslims just because the govt refuse to be proactive
Think of who you would be today if you would have been born somewhere else. If born in Iraqi, probably you would be Moslem, born in Italy, probably Christian, Born in Israel, you would be Jew. You as an individual had no role to play in terms of place of bit=rth, and little in terms of religion.
We have to embrace one another and forget the differences in us, respecting each other.
I am writimg from Kenya, we too are facing the same fate of people dividing people on religious and tribal lines, and ‘supporting’ the killings of others just because they do not belong to them, and sympathizing with those they consider their own.
We should rise above such differences and stand for humanity. We are humans first.
It would certainly not be a crime to speak against evil. The same me who is passionate about the evil of bokoharam can also speak against the Gazacaust. Mr Gimba should be fair.
This is the most intelligent article I have read in a while. It accentuates the hypocrisy in the way we practice religion. Despite the fact that everything we say and do is viewed from the prism of ethnicity and religion, we clearly do not understand the essence of religion. Thank you for such an objective piece. You made my day
you know what amazes me is the fact that Nigerian youths express all this campaign thoughts just because some1 started it and then iy transforms into a social media joke…deep dowm they dont even understand the gravity of the situatuion…anf after a while…whe it stopa trending on social media, the post stops coming and even the pictures…
then the question comes…are these the same youths, we call leaders of tomorrow…crises in Nigeria is a timely uproar…its only dos affected who feel the everlasting pain…not d social media pretenders or NGOs’ fakes…
i love your article…you’ve inspired my day
As much as I appreciate the idea of Gimba in choosing who to support and why to do so, it is wrong of him to have said Isah and Musa (Alayhim salaatu wa salaam) were Jews. I believe Gimba is a Muslim as he claimed to be. He should get his facts right. The duo were among the Prophets of Allah and were Muslims in their lifetime. Wallahu Musta’an!
Abdussalam, i think you should understand the difference between religion and ethnicity. Jews are an ethic group among which there are christians, muslims and judaisers. Not all jews practice Judaism. Islam on the other hand, like many others, is a religion, not an ethnic group.Whether we claim Isah and Musa were Muslims or christiansor judaisers does not strip them of their jewish ethnicity, as whatever you do does not strip you of being nigerian.
Jews are people not a religion. Moses and Jesus Christ were Jews by birth.
I absolutely agree with you Kakanda. Nigerian muslims should stop their ignorance of sympathising with other muslims especially the arabs as they dont care a bit about us. How many arab countries or nationals of note showed an iota of concern as terrorists kill us in the north on daily basis? Like you rightly stated, while the palestinians have those that stand for them, the north have not except for few like oby and bloggers. By the way, why do they show no respect for the dead by using them as a propaganda tools?
I’m highly impressed with the authours obvious open-mindedness and level of exposure. I hope we have more Nigerians who think like this. Our nation, our continent and even the world will be a better place. God bless you, Gimba.
I absolutely agree witth your article Kakanda. Nigerian muslims tend to blindly empathise with non-nigerian muslims more than their fellow nigerians, simply because they see them more as brothers than fellow nigerians. Ironically, while fellow muslims and other sisters and brothers are being slaughtered in the north east region, not a single islamic nation or muslim of note sympathised with us. Moreover, like you rightly observed, people of Gaza have people fighting for them, while the north east have not a single individual or groups standing for them other than the bring back our girls campaigners agitating for the rescue of the kidnapped chibok girls. Even the momentry outrage by the international community had gone down. Afterall, as far as i am concerned, Hamas are not helping matters. while they fully know that Isreal are more powerful than them in all ramifications, they still instigate conflict with Isreal, so that predictably, they will respond forcefully. When they do, Hamas will then commence the rituals of displaying corpses to the world with the hope of attracking support. What type of sickening strategy of attracting sympathy and support is this?