By Theodore Shoebat
Three Muslims broke into the home of a Christian family in Nigeria, pulled the father, who was a pastor, out of the shower and told him to convert to Islam, he refused and they shot him to death. His fifteen year old daughter, Deborah Peters, who survived the attack, recounted how the Muslims burned down his church before murdering him:
In November, they burned his church, but still, he didn’t give up and built the church again… So they said OK, they’re gonna kill him. And they came to our house and killed him. … He [my father] told them that he should rather die than go to hellfire… So, he then told them that [Jesus] said anyone that denied Him, He’s gonna deny them in the presence of his Dad in heaven. So my dad refused to deny his faith and they [shot] him three times in his chest.
This man was a true follower of Jesus, and exemplified what it truly means to have the Holy Spirit: endure persecution, even at the point of death. “And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:38) This surely picked up his cross, and is worthy of the Lord.
The Muslims also took this poor girl’s brother and shot him three times, and while he was convulsing, they shot him in the mouth. Deborah said:
I was in shock. I didn’t know what was happening… So they put me in the middle of my dad and my brother. The next day the army came … and [took] me to hospital.
Emmanuel Ogebe, a human rights lawyer with the U.S. Nigeria Law Group and expert in U.S.-Nigerian relations, explained the reality as to the brutality of Boko Haram:
The point is Boko Haram says we don’t kill the elderly, we don’t kill the young and we don’t kill women. Those are the three exceptions they had. The Christians, the Jews, the Muslim apostates, they don’t count. We’ll kill them. And so her story from a couple of years ago is classic… They came in. They killed the pastor and then they made a calculation that the son, who was an exception to the targets, should be killed because he might grow up and become a pastor. This was an example of Boko Haram shifting the goalpost of those it would not kill. …The Christian response to this genocide was they would move the men out and leave the women behind … because Boko Haram said we don’t kill women… That changed last month. Boko Haram realized, you know, we’ve killed all the men or we’ve run them out of town…. And the next thing we have almost 300 young women abducted, taken to this camp, and they’ve become slave brides. …What is most disturbing is that last week while we were in Cameroon, Boko Haram struck a village, killed close to 300 people, and then there was a population displacement and 3,000 people fled, again, across the borders… We have this going on almost consistently for a year, and you began to wonder, “Where is the humanitarian response to this crisis?”