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The Israeli police’s decision to bar Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday sparked outrage from Rome to Washington — and rightly so. Pizzaballa, the Catholic Church’s top official in the Holy Land, was heading to celebrate a private Mass at the traditional location of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection when armed officers turned him back. It was the first time in centuries that Catholics were prevented from marking Palm Sunday there.
Israel’s blunder
The timing, one month into the U.S. and Israel’s war in Iran, could not have been worse. Officials cited safety concerns among the heightened Iranian threat. Yet no rationale could soften the optics: Israeli forces blocking a revered Catholic leader from one of Christianity’s most sacred places on a high holy day.
The ayatollah himself couldn’t have choreographed it any better.
The backlash crossed political lines. Even staunchly pro-Israel U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee called it “an unfortunate overreach.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reversed course the following day, granting the cardinal “full and immediate access” and insisting there was “no malicious intent.” President Isaac Herzog called Pizzaballa directly to express his “great sorrow.”
But the damage was done. The impression of Israel as a cold-hearted bully — already metastasizing across the West — only deepened. Antisemites on both the Left and Right seized upon the incident, barely able to contain their glee. Israel’s friends could only wince.
Yet despite the uproar, the Pizzaballa incident was not the worst thing that happened to Christians on Palm Sunday. Far from it.
The greater Palm Sunday tragedy — another brutal mass killing of Christians in Nigeria at the hands of Islamists — received comparatively little attention. The discrepancy is no accident — it reflects a West that has chosen to blind itself to the true threats to its values and survival.
Nigerian Christians massacred
On the evening of Palm Sunday, armed gunmen stormed predominantly Christian neighborhoods in Angwa Rukuba and Eto Baba, opening fire on residents. Reports put the death toll between 30 and 53. No group immediately claimed responsibility, but the pattern is grimly familiar.
In central Nigeria — where the predominantly Muslim north meets the predominantly Christian south — radicalized jihadis have waged a sustained campaign of violence on Christians for years. They typically arrive on motorcycles with AK-47s, torching homes and killing indiscriminately before scattering into the surrounding hills.
These attacks often coincide with Christian holy days. Last Palm Sunday, at least 54 Christians were slaughtered in Zikke village. The attack lasted over an hour and left 103 households burned to the ground and a community of 3,000 displaced. Fifteen of the dead were children.
The year before, 240 Christians were killed in the Easter season, some as they worshipped.
According to Open Doors, 4,118 Christians in Nigeria were killed for their faith between Oct. 1, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2023. That’s 11 Christians killed every day.
The Pizzaballa story ran on front pages. The Nigeria story made the back pages at best.
The West’s response
The collective shrug at these atrocities betrays a civilization that has lost its moral compass and its nerve. The West is engaged in a long-term civilizational conflict with imperial Islam, aided by its allies on the Left. These two groups have long sought the destruction of Western civilization — one in the name of Allah, the other in the name of global revolution— and have found in each other a useful, if temporary, partner. And thanks in no small part to decades of cultural decay and feckless leadership in America and Europe — and to a third emerging ally in the isolationist, anti-Jewish Right — they are on the march.
It is ironic that American Leftists seized on the Pizzaballa story and not the Nigerian massacre — the crude math of intersectionality would suggest that Black Africans deserve the lion’s share of sympathy, not a Catholic prelate. But this illogic is consistent with the Left’s convenient subordination of its own stated principles, typified by “Queers for Palestine” placards.
As ever, the Left is guided by what it hates — the West and all that it represents — rather than what it purports to love. Protesters waving Iranian flags don’t love Iran, they are only eager to link arms with anyone sharing the common goal of destroying the West. The mullahs and the Marxists don’t agree on much aside from who the “Great Satan” is — but that is enough to bind them.
Moral cowardice
But not everyone who looks away from the Christian genocide in Nigeria or radical Islam’s growing threat does so out of ideological conviction. For establishment politicians and media figures, the motivation is simpler: cowardice. Plain, ordinary cowardice.
It is easier to blame Israel than to name radical Islam. Easier to hyperventilate about gas prices than to reckon with an ayatollah building a nuclear bomb. Easier to remain in the good graces of elite consensus than to stand up and face the storm.
The war’s critics — from talking heads of the liberal establishment to right-wing isolationists — never propose a viable alternative to dealing with Iran and the threat of radical Islam. They won’t even acknowledge the threat in the first place.
What exactly was the alternative to war following decades of failing to contain the apocalyptic death cult running Iran through bribery and toothless diplomacy? They never say. Because everything they’ve tried has failed. And because they know, deep down, that there is no possible justification for allowing radical Islamists to acquire nuclear weapons.
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And so they simply turn away. They ignore the massacres of Christians in Nigeria, ignore the mass execution of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters, and fixate instead on the diplomatic blunder of the U.S.’s only true ally in this epochal struggle.
Civilizations that refuse to even name their enemies will not outlast them.