Why Muslims Torched and Slaughtered Christian Students in Uganda

The Stream

On the evening of June 16, 2023, Islamic terrorists stormed a private high school in Uganda, where students were closing the night by singing Christian hymns.  Over the next 90 minutes, the Muslim invaders committed unspeakable horrors against the Christians—murdering, in the end, at least 42 people, 37 of them teenage boys and girls.

Most of the boys were burned alive. Locked in their dormitory, the Muslim terrorists poured fuel on and set the building on fire.  Some of the boys were so “charred beyond recognition” that investigators had to use DNA samples from relatives to identify them.

Most of the girls were hacked and stabbed to death with machetes and knives.  An investigative team which visited the site reported that “It was a devastating and upsetting scene.  Lots of dried blood is still on the ground outside the girls’ dormitory.”  As for the incinerated boys’ dormitory, “the smell of death is unmistakeable—beds have been reduced to wire mesh with pieces of flesh still stuck to them.”

While the media and “experts” continue to allot the usual materialist reasons for Muslim atrocities against Christians—from land disputes and “grievances” to “climate change”—there is no doubt that this massacre was entirely fueled by Islam’s hate for the non-Muslim, the infidel.

For starters, the terrorists were heard to holler Islam’s ancient war-cry, the takbir—“Allahu Akbar”—which immediately positions the attack in a jihadist paradigm.  Although many continue to translate that Arabic phrase as “Allah is great,” which suggests Muslim piety and awe, it actually means “Allah is greater,” and is cried out during violent jihads on infidels precisely as a way to say, “See, my god, Allah, is greater than your god—as evidenced by the fact that I am triumphing over and killing you!”

The terrorists further made a concerted effort not to kill any Muslim that might be intermingled with the Christian students. In the words of a survivor: “The rebels asked for Muslims among the students, but there were none. The rebels said they do not kill fellow [Muslim] believers.  [Then] they slaughtered every student in their sight using pangas [machetes], axes, and sharp objects.”

As documented in my 2016 article titled, “Prove You’re Muslim or Die,” separating Muslims from Christians during a jihadist raid, and then butchering only the Christians, is not only a very common practice—with examples from Bangladesh, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and even the U.S.—but further underscores that the attack was entirely about religion, namely, killing Christians—and only Christians.

There are even less obvious aspects to this attack that emphasize Islam’s role: it occurred on a Friday.  For those paying attention, Friday is the one day of the week when Muslims, both professional terrorists and regular individuals, are most prone to lash out against infidels.  Friday, of course, is also the one day of the week when Muslims gather to pray in mosques and get close to their god and his prophet—and where they invariably hear fiery sermons against infidels.

This phenomenon, incidentally, further highlights how utterly different Christianity and Islam are from one another: most Christians, on leaving church on Sunday afternoon, are probably at their most peaceful towards their fellow man—whereas Muslims, on leaving mosques on Friday, appear to be at their most murderous towards their fellow (though “infidel”) man.

Ugandan authorities are blaming the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF)—an Islamic terror group linked to the Islamic State—for the high school massacre, which occurred near the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where ADF is based.

In reality, however, the amount of “professional” terror groups in Africa is burgeoning, morphing, and allying with one another—Boko Haram and Fulani in Nigeria, JNIM in Burkina Faso, Al Shabaab (the youth) in Somalia, Al Shabaab (separate from the Somalis) in Mozambique, and so many more—all often under the Islamic State’s umbrella.

Not only does this make it difficult to determine exactly who is responsible, but it creates something of a distraction: the issue is not this or that terror group—which have been coming and going since the time of Muhammad—but that Islam breeds terrorism.  This is amply demonstrated through the behavior of “regular” Muslims all throughout Africa.

In Uganda alone, a Christian-majority nation with a mere 12% Muslim population, not a single month goes by without several incidents of “every day” Muslims slaughtering or terrorizing Christians (see Ugandan entries in my monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians” reports).  Below, for example, are some of the incidents to be reported in just May, 2023:

• A Muslim student slaughtered a Christian student in his dorm for “sharing Christ with Muslims.”
• A Muslim man, angered at his wife’s conversion to Christianity, starved her—in keeping with sharia’s prescriptions for punishing apostate women—before trying to feed her to wild animals. At one point, he too cried out, “Allahu akbar!”
• Muslims nearly beat another convert to Christianity to death. From a hospital bed, he recounted how they had tried “to force me to confess that Jesus is not the Son of God, and that Allah is the only God to be worshipped and Muhammad is His prophet.  I refused to renounce Jesus as the Son of God. They started beating me up.”

Again, keep in mind that Uganda’s Muslim population is only 12%.

Worst of all, for anyone paying attention, the June 16 massacre of Christian students, far from being some sort of aberration, is reflective of just how bad things have gotten, and not just in Uganda, but all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, wherever there are meaningful Muslim populations living alongside Christians.  This includes a full-blown genocide of Christians in Nigeria.