Nigeria police said on Monday they are investigating no less than 15 murders over the past week in a rural farming community that was attacked by nomadic herdsmen.

Residents of four villages in the state of Nasarawa said they are “under siege” by the herders, who were reportedly enraged when one of their number was killed with a machete early last week.

Central Nigeria is the scene of a long-running conflict between the herders, who mostly hail from a nomadic Muslim tribe called the Fulani, and farmers, who are largely Christian. Christian groups were stunned last year when the Biden administration began insisting there was no strong religious dimension to the violence, and the Biden State Department removed Nigeria from its list of countries that severely violate religious freedom.

Ramhan Nansel, a spokesman for the Nasarawa state police, told Voice of America News (VOA) on Monday that the inciting incident in the current herder-farmer clash was the alleged killing of an 18-year-old herdsman who was struck in the head with a machete last week. Machetes are very common implements of both agriculture and murder in central Nigeria.

Nansel said the official count of reprisal killings stands at 15, although the villagers claim at least 38 people have been murdered, including a church pastor. Nigeria’s Vanguard reported on Monday that the Nasarawa state government supervised a mass burial for 38 victims over the weekend, most of them women and children.

Reas more at: www.breitbart.com

Church officials and Christian leaders in Israel blame a minority of Jewish extremists for the attacks. They say Israel’s far-right government has fostered a culture of impunity.

Upstairs in his monastery tucked in the Old City, Brother Matteo Munari heard a commotion at the Church of the Flagellation, along the path where Jesus is said to have carried his cross on the way to his crucifixion.

Munari, 49, went downstairs and found that a 10-foot statue of Jesus had been wrested off its pedestal and thrown to the ground, its face partially destroyed. When the church’s doorman tackled the man suspected of toppling the statue on Feb. 2, Jewish ritual tassels that had been concealed under his clothes emerged, the Franciscan friar said.

“He was kind of crying. Like, ‘We have to destroy all the statues and the idols in Jerusalem,’” Munari told NBC News last week as he gazed at the smashed face of Jesus, now awaiting repair at the church, which was built in 1929 on a site that dates to the 12th century.

“I just felt sad for him,” he added. “I think he wanted to do the right thing. So the problem probably was not the man himself, but who instructed him to think in this violent way.”

Israeli police confirmed that a U.S. citizen in his 40s was arrested at the scene, adding that investigators were “working diligently to maintain security, order and freedom of worship for members of all religions and denominations.”

Read more at: www.nbcnews.com

The state of Oregon is denying the application of a woman who wants to adopt because she is a Christian and will not agree to support gender transition if the child she adopts ends up being trans.

This is where the left has planned to take this argument from the start. It’s a backdoor way to openly discriminate against people of faith.

They don’t care about the welfare of children, they care about spreading their ideology.

Oregon officials put politics above children’s welfare

On behalf of a single mother of five wishing to adopt siblings from foster care, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Oregon state officials for denying her application because of her religious beliefs.

Jessica Bates began the process of applying to become certified to adopt a child from Oregon’s foster care system one year ago. The Oregon Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for the delivery and administration of the state’s child welfare programs, denied her application because individuals seeking to adopt must agree to “respect, accept, and support … the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of any child the department could place in an applicant’s home, and Bates could not agree to this because of her faith.

Read more at: www.thegatewaypundit.com

There was another college protest this week, and, as usual, narcissistic terrorists-in-training, who simply could not abide the notion that ideas other than their own might exist, were out in force to demonstrate their victimhood by being as nasty and cruel as possible to other people.

This time, it was Tuesday at the State University of New York in Albany. Turning Point USA had invited Ian Haworth, a conservative columnist, speaker, and podcast host to speak. The College Fix reported that the protestors were not just unruly, but cruel and destructive. Haworth tweeted this:

The most socialist thing I’ve ever seen is a bunch of deranged students screaming “no cops, no KKK, no @TPUSA” at a Jewish immigrant while also happily shoveling free pizza down their throats paid for by…@TPUSA!

That was part of the threads below. You will have to read the full threads to see just how ridiculous and potentially dangerous things were.

Read more at: pjmedia.com

The following are among the murders and abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of February 2023:

The Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Democratic Republic of Congo: On February 12-13, Muslim terrorists massacred 22 people in the 95% Christian-majority nation. The terrorists were members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), “a Ugandan armed group that has operated in east Congo for decades…. It has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and stages frequent deadly raids on villages.” Although Reuters claims that “There was no indication as to the motive” of the attacks, others are more forthright. Discussing the ongoing terrorization of the DRC, the human rights group, Open Doors, wrote:

“These predominantly Christian communities are attacked by an Islamic extremist group with a clear Islamic expansionist agenda…. The ideology, the agenda of establishing a ‘caliphate’ in the region, and the way they operate is the same, and we can see how they afflict terrible suffering on innocent people.”

Similarly, speaking of an earlier attack on his village, when the ADF slaughtered about 20 people, a Christian clergyman further shed light on their motivations:

“They tried to force some of our Christians to convert to Islam. They also tried to force my wife and our four children to convert to Islam, but when they refused to convert, they shot my wife in the head while our four children were cut into pieces with a Somali sword… the rebel militants intend to establish an Islamist state ruled by sharia [Islamic law].”

Read more at: www.gatestoneinstitute.org

The FBI is targeting Catholics who attend Latin Mass

The FBI has found a new gateway to declare Christians as criminals, a federal whistleblower said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

An internal document from the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office allegedly vowed to spy on “radical traditionalist Catholics and their ideology.”

“They have found a gateway in what they think is fringe Catholicism in order to move into Christians in general and declare them to be the actual criminals in this country or the potential terrorists,” federal whistleblower and former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin said.

Seraphin said the document is antithetical to Catholicism and was written by someone who believes abortion rights must be upheld and the LGBTQ agenda “has to be pushed down the American people’s throats.”

“I’m friends with people who love the Latin Mass,” the Catholic federal whistleblower told Fox News. “I grew up in a traditional school where I actually learned Latin in fifth and sixth grade and all the way through high school and it doesn’t seem reasonable, but it is the state of the FBI at this point that they are so desperate to find White supremacists that they’re going to look at the Catholic Church.”

Read more at: www.foxnews.com

Christians in Henan province, China, must complete an online form and receive approval to attend church services. Officials refer to applications for church gatherings as a form of governance for “Smart Religion,” but no legal basis has been provided for such a measure.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Henan has one of the largest Christian populations in China. According to the “Smart Religion” requirements formulated by Henan’s provincial religious department, if religious believers want to participate in religious activities, they must make online reservations before they can attend services in churches, mosques, or Buddhist temples.

Local believers must register and make an appointment through an application called “Smart Religion,” developed by the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission of Henan Province.

HOW THE FORM WORKS

According to the application’s requirements, religious people must select the religious venue they want to attend before booking. Still, the use of religious identification keywords such as “mosque,” “temple,” “Christianity,” and “Catholicism” is not allowed.

Applicants must fill in personal information, including name, phone number, ID number, permanent residence, occupation, and date of birth, before they can make a reservation. Those who are allowed into the church must also have their temperature taken and show a reservation code.

Read more at: chinaaid.org

The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday.

Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com.

“In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship,” the document from January 23 states.

It adds that “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

Read more at: www.nationalreview.com

Jessica Tapia went into teaching because of how ‘amazing it would be to be a light to [kids] coming from very rough homes like I did when I was a child’

A California teacher, who lost her job after refusing to comply with a California district’s gender policies, citing Christian beliefs, is blowing the whistle on the expectations she felt as a teacher to not only hide students’ gender transitions from parents, but also to keep them in the dark through lying.

“I knew immediately, like in my gut, in my heart, in my soul, that there was a decision I had to make because, you know, these two things were totally butting heads,” Jessica Tapia, who worked at the Jurupa Unified School District, told Fox News Digital. “I essentially had to pick one. Am I going to obey the district in the directive that are not lining up with… my own beliefs, convictions and faith? Or am I going to stay true…, choose my faith, choose to be obedient to… the way the Lord has called me to live. And so it was crazy to be in the position where I realized that I couldn’t be a Christian and a teacher.”

In a notice under Superintendent Trenton Hansen’s letterhead, reviewed by Fox News Digital, the district said they couldn’t accommodate Tapia’s Christian beliefs which prohibited her from withholding information on gender transitions from kids’ parents.

“Consequentially, the District will release you from your employment effective at the end of the day on January 31, 2023,” the notice said.

Read more at: www.foxnews.com

A student has reportedly been suspended by a Catholic high school for the remainder of the school year for believing that God created two genders and protesting against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms.

Since November, Josh Alexander has allegedly been suspended from St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. Alexander was allegedly punished by the school for organizing a protest against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms. Alexander said he launched the demonstration after two girls at his school confided in him that they were uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with biological males.

Alexander, an 11th-grade student, was reportedly barred from attending St. Joseph’s Catholic High School for the remainder of the school year.

Read more at: www.theblaze.com