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