Nigeria’s Muslim communications minister: ‘We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed’

Now we know why the Buhari government has promised to destroy the Boko Haram jihad group many times over the last few years, but has actually done little or nothing to oppose the group or impede its jihad against Christians in any meaningful way.

“We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed: Minister Pantami,” by Idris Ibrahim, People’s Gazette, April 14, 2021 (thanks to Imam Tawhidi):

Isa Aliyu Pantami, President Muhammadu Buhari’s communications minister, once declared that he was always a happy man towards the massacre of those he considered infidels.

“We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed,” Mr Pantami said. “But the Sharia does not allow us to kill them without a reason.”

“Our zeal (hamasa) should not take precedence over our obedience to the sacred law,” he added.

Mr Pantami’s comments were contained in three audio recordings of his teachings in the 2000s, when he took extreme positions in support of the brutal exploits of Al Qaeda and Taliban elements who were on a campaign to obliterate the West and conquer other parts of the world.

He made the remarks while responding to audience questions about his views on Osama Bin Laden during a lecture about the Taliban. Mr Pantami said of Mr Bin Laden, the late Al Qaeda leader responsible for bringing down the World Trade Centre in an attack that claimed over 3,000 lives in 2001: “I still consider him as a better Muslim than myself.”

Mr Pantami’s comments were translated by Professor Andrea Brigaglia, an African expert at Naples University in Italy. Nigerian scholar Musa Ibrahim of University of Florida in the United States contributed to the paper that explored the onset of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Top journal publisher academia.edu published the research in March 2019, several months before Mr Buhari tapped Mr Pantami as a minister. Mr Pantami’s violent preachings, which he rendered in Hausa and Arabic throughout the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s, had gone largely unreported in the Nigerian mainstream media.

Mr Pantami did not return a request seeking comments from Peoples Gazette about whether or not he has eschewed his violent Salafist views….