Do Christian black lives matter in Africa?
A Sahel Jihadist Advance at the Gates of Coastal West Africa – And a World That Looks Away
Disclaimer: This is a personal statement written in my individual capacity as a private citizen and Zionist Jew. It does not represent the views of the Republic of Togo or any official entity.
I am a Zionist Jew.
For seventeen years I have served Togo without salary or title. Tikkun olam is not a slogan; it is the vow my grandparents made after surviving the European charnel house that murdered six million of us simply for being Jews. They built schools, fought Apartheid, marched for civil rights, and sheltered refugees. That is the Judaism I inherited: never again abandon another people to the darkness that once swallowed us.
Zionism, at its core, is the refusal to let Jews be murdered with impunity. To be “anti-Zionist” is to say, however quietly, that the murder of Jews is acceptable. Zionism is anti-colonialism in its purest form—the return of an indigenous people to their homeland after two thousand years of exile and slaughter. Israel was reborn in 1948; Togo and most African nations won independence only afterward. Our struggles are the same struggle.
That is why Zionism compels me to stand against the jihadi invasion now reaching Togo’s Christians. The ideology that slaughters Jews in Israel slaughters black Christians in the Sahel. Selective silence about one while condemning the other is not morality—it is complicity.
As Israel fights genocidal Islamic enemies who hide behind Gaza’s children, the world again turns its back on Jews. The pain is physical, a knife that never stops turning.
I watch the same abandonment fall on the black Christians of northern Togo—my neighbors, my friends, my family. Pastors threatened, converts facing execution, villages on the brink. The world that filled streets for other causes is suddenly mute.
When a child in the Savanes hides under a pew while Islamic terrorists prowl, I hear Jewish children whispering in European attics. When a village is told “abandon Christ or die,” I hear “Shema Yisrael” forced underground for centuries. Their terror is mine.
I serve Togo—unpaid, for seventeen years—because if we Jews stay silent while another beloved community is marked for destruction, the murderers have won twice.
Since 2021, JNIM (Al-Qaeda in the Sahel) has pushed south from Burkina Faso into Togo: ambushes, IEDs, and in April 2025 the suspected first use of a kamikaze drone near Dapaong. In the first half of 2025 alone, fifteen attacks killed fifty-four civilians and eight soldiers. Open Doors 2025 ranks Togo No. 66 with rising violence scores explicitly tied to jihadist pressure.
These are the same precursor tactics JNIM used before burning churches, crucifying pastors, and issuing convert-or-die ultimatums across Mali and Burkina Faso.
The same jihadi belt now threatens the Gulf of Guinea:
– Nigeria: 30,000–60,000+ Christians murdered since 2015
– Burkina Faso: 2,000+ killed, two-thirds of churches closed, 2+ million displaced (mostly Christian)
– Mali, Niger, Benin, Ghana borders, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, DRC (ADF/ISIS), Mozambique (ISIS), Kenya (Al-Shabaab): tens of thousands more slaughtered, millions displaced, churches razed.
Advocacy monitors call this one of the largest religious cleansing campaigns in the world today.
The distress deepens when American city councils—from Chicago to San Francisco—rush to condemn Israel and demand it stop defending itself against the very same jihadi ideology, yet remain silent about the slaughter of black Christians in Africa. The only conclusion: black Christian lives simply do not matter to them.
Northern Togo’s churches are next if the window closes.
After a lifetime of loving and serving Africa, after watching my own people abandoned yet again, this parallel silence is unbearable. I will keep shouting, working, weeping—because tikkun olam and love demand nothing less, and because the souls of my ancestors and the living souls of my Christian brothers and sisters in the Savanes deserve nothing less.
