President Donald Trump sent bombs into Nigeria Thursday, but one military expert was forced to school a Fox News host who cheered the expensive weaponry.
Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson cheered, "U.S. Navy destroyer launching Tomahawk cruise missile into Nigeria targeting Islamic State on Christmas."
Thomas Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project and a senior fellow with the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), explained that the use of a tomahawk cruise missile was a huge waste of money.
"If you’re cheering the use of Tomahawks here, you are cheering the use of scarce, long range, standoff weapons that would be quite useful against China on a bad day. You do you. But, Nigeria? Cmon," Karako wrote on X.
Former British soldier and Ukrainian Marine Shaun Pinner pointed out to Karako that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the biggest killer of Christians.
Nigerian officials put out a statement after the attack, saying that Christians haven't been the only victims in the country. The same group is killing Muslims too.
“This is not a Christian genocide, because the facts don’t support it,” Good Governance Nigeria researcher Malik Samuel said in November. “If you look at the areas where this conflict is rife, even in the — even if you take Borno state alone, you look at northern Borno, many of these communities are Muslim-dominated. So most of the victims of Boko Haram violence are Muslims.”
“Nigeria reiterates that all counter-terrorism efforts are guided by the primacy of protecting civilian lives, safeguarding national unity, and upholding the rights and dignity of all citizens, irrespective of faith or ethnicity,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a statement. “Terrorist violence in any form whether directed at Christians, Muslims, or other communities remains an affront to Nigeria’s values and to international peace and security.”
