Catholic Clerics protest in Nigeria

America magazine has even found that “Christians are being explicitly targeted in the ongoing violence,” and wishes that “prominent archbishops in the United States and Europe” would speak out about this persecution. But that’s America magazine in 2020. In 2018, it was worried about “so-called experts seeking to spread misinformation and fear” about Islam. These “so-called experts” included me, and even though I had left the Catholic Church a considerable time before that, I was producing “misinformed and ill-intentioned content on Islam, for Catholic audiences in particular.” Some of this alleged “misinformation” was apparently the idea that “Muslims’ faith tradition is responsible for violence.”

America magazine is not being inconsistent. Even though America’s Kevin Clarke identifies Boko Haram as made up of “Islamic militants,” it is absolutely certain that he and his fellow America magazine writers would insist that Boko Haram was misunderstanding the beautiful and peaceful religion of Islam. They would no doubt affirm, with Pope Francis, that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”

But still, the magazine calls the persecutors “Islamic militants” and notes that Christians are being “explicitly targeted.” When America magazine demonizes analysis of the motivating ideology behind this persecution, they make people afraid to speak out. The bishops in the U.S. and Europe that America magazine wants to speak out against the Muslim persecution of Christians now have been teaching for years that any discussion of such matters is “Islamophobic,” and will harm the “dialogue” between Muslims and Christians.

In 2013, Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester, Massachusetts canceled my scheduled address to a Catholic Men’s Conference and explained: “Spencer’s talk about extreme, militant Islamists…might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.” So you see, even talk about “extreme, militant Islamists,” and Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen are quintessentially “extreme, militant Islamists,” is out of bounds.

America magazine has been at the forefront of the efforts to silence such discussion by demonizing and stigmatizing those who engage in it. And now they want the bishops to speak out? The bishops know better. If they do, they’ll be denounced as “Islamophobic” themselves, probably by America magazine among others, and may even be disciplined by that learned imam Pope Francis, who has made it a superdogma of his Church, enforced far more stringently than any actual element of Catholic faith, that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists.

Whisper anything to the contrary and the U.S. Catholic Bishops will move ruthlessly to silence you. They’re going to speak out now? You’re dreaming, America mag, and you’re to a large extent responsible for the present situation. “Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14) “Are Nigeria’s Christians the target of a genocide?,” by Kevin Clarke, America Magazine, July 2, 2020: