The tragic massacre of at least 50 Catholic churchgoers in Nigeria has been linked to climate change by Ireland’s communist president, ignoring the country’s endemic Islamism.
Last Sunday, at least 50 Catholics were killed when gunmen opened fire on attendees attending Pentecost mass at St Francis Catholic Church in the village of Owo.
The actual perpetrators of the massacre remain unknown, yet the backdrop suggests that the gunmen are Muslim terrorists.
Higgins, though, sought to relate the atrocity to climate change in the region in a statement released on Tuesday, devoting three of the four lines of his written statement to discussing the topic.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that ISIS-linked Boko Haram is particularly active in Nigeria, the president made no mention of radical Islamic terrorism.
“That such an attack was made in a place of worship is a source of particular condemnation, as is any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change,” the statement published on the official website of the President of Ireland read.
“The neglect of food security issues in Africa, for so long has brought us to a point of crisis that is now having internal and regional effects based on struggles, ways of life themselves,” it continued.
“The solidarity of us all, as peoples of the world, is owed to all those impacted not only by this horrible event but in the struggle by the most vulnerable on whom the consequences of climate change have been inflicted,” it concluded.
This is far from Higgins’ first foray into an international debate in recent months, having previously compared Elon Musk’s potential takeover of Twitter to a “kind of dictatorship” on Irish state-run television.
While refusing to directly relate his remarks to Musk, the Irish President decried “concentrated ownership” of social media by wealthy individuals and groups, claiming that things were better back when newspapers and television stations were in charge of public dialogue.
While Higgins has expressed concern about who owns social media and their control over speech at the moment, he does not appear to have expressed the same concern about Big Tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey censoring speech, even going so far as to ban the country’s current president, Donald Trump. J. Trump.
Higgins has also remained silent on European Union threats to control online expression – threats that even Elon Musk appears to have surrendered to after one Brussels official threatened to ban Twitter from the EU if it did not comply with the EU censorship regime.