“SHHH, WE’RE BEING WATCHED”: THE SULTAN’S 7 MAY STATEMENT, TRANSLATED
On May 7, 2026, the Sultan of Sokoto stood in Abuja and made what his publicists called a bold condemnation of Islamic extremism
Read it carefully.
“Anyone that takes innocent lives while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ is
going to hell.”
That is not a condemnation of killing.
That is a condemnation of shouting Allahu Akbar.
Killing innocent people — fine, apparently. Just keep it quiet.
Don’t say the phrase that ends up in survivor testimony. Don’t say the phrase that ends up in news footage. Don’t say the phrase that gets quoted in U.S. State Department reports and congressional briefings. Don’t say the phrase that makes Trump pay attention.
The killing is not what disqualifies you in the next life. The
audible religious branding of the killing – bad press – is what disqualifies you in this one.
“Let us stop bringing religion into it,” he said in the same speech.
“Call them criminals. Not Muslim criminals, not Muslim terrorists,
not Muslim bandits.”
Translation: Strip the religious marker. Keep the operation.
Two and a half weeks after this speech, a Lagos publicist named
Haroon Ishola Balogun published two articles attacking me by name, quoting this very statement as proof that the Sultan is a moderate and my work is “false narratives” that “demonize an entire religion.”
The lobbying machine had its line, courtesy of the Sultan himself.
Here is what the May 7 statement actually was.
It was operational guidance.
It was instructions to a fluid network of fighters who do their
work under different brand names — Boko Haram, ISWAP, Lakurawa, Ansaru, Fulani militias, bandits, kidnappers — telling them: keep killing, but tighten the optics. The West is watching. Survivors talk. Trump is paying attention.
Shhh! We’re being watched.
The Christians keep dying. The Muslims who refuse to bow keep dying. The villages keep burning. The children keep being kidnapped. The displaced keep being forced into a hellish existence – denied by the government, steeped in trauma, far from home. The mining trucks keep rolling through the cleared ground. The platform keeps building for the Mahdi.
Just don’t say the slogan out loud.
That is what twenty years of institutional protection of genocide looks like in one sentence from one Sultan on one day in Abuja.
I read it carefully. You should too.
EarthShaker
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