Obama administration says the violence in Nigeria has nothing to do with religion

Willful blindness from Johnnie Carson at the White House (no, really)

From CNSNews April 10 by Elizabeth Harrington

Obama Official After Easter and Christmas Church Bombings in Nigeria: ‘Religion Is Not Driving Extremist Violence’

(CNSNews.com) - Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson said Monday that  “religion is not driving extremist violence” in Nigeria--just one day after a Christian church conducting an Easter service was targeted by a car bombing that left 39 dead.

OK, question; if it is extremist violence, describe the type of extremism driving the violence.  We'll wait...

Similarly, on Christmas Day, the Nigerian Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram, attacked a Catholic church in that country, killing more than 40 people.

“I want to take this opportunity to stress one key point and that is that religion is not driving extremist violence either in Jos or northern Nigeria,” Assistant  Secretary of State Carson said Monday at a forum on U.S. policy toward Nigeria held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

“While some seek to inflame Muslim-Christian tensions, Nigeria’s ethnic and religious diversity, like our own in this country, is a source of strength, not weakness,” he added,  "and there are many examples across Nigeria of communities working across religious lines to protect one another.”

And....?

On Easter Sunday a church in Kaduna, Nigeria, was targeted by a suicide bombing that killed 39 and wounded dozens. Though no organization has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, it is suspected that Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist organization, was behind it.

As CNSNews.com previously reported, Boko Haram, whose name translated into “Western education is forbidden,” has links to al-Qaeda’s North Africa affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and has repeatedly vowed to cleanse northern Nigeria of minority Christians, and is responsible for more than 1,000 deaths since mid-2009.

Uh, guys...this is a problem, is it not?  What does the cleansing of Christians remind you of...anything in history? 

Carson spoke at length about the terrorist group, saying Boko Haram “capitalizes on popular frustrations with the nation’s leaders,” and “seeks to humiliate and undermine the government and to exploit religious differences in order to create chaos and to make Nigeria ungovernable.”

Boko Haram was responsible for multiple bomb attacks including the Jan. 20 attack in Kano, which killed nearly 200, a Christmas Day attack on a church near the federal capital, Abuja, which cost more than 40 lives, and a car bomb at the United Nations headquarters in the Nigeria capital of Abuja last August.

“Boko Haram’s attacks on churches and mosques are particularly disturbing because they are intended to inflame religious tensions and upset the nation’s social cohesion, although Boko Haram is reviled throughout Nigeria and offers no practical solutions to the country’s problems,” Carson said.

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