The New York Times has been supplying some news coverage of a crackdown on gays in Nigeria.
Today's paper carries a brief report that consists of two paragraphs, the second of which reads as follows:
A roundup of gay men, accused of belonging to a gay organization, has begun in Bauchi State, rights activists and officials said, though they disagreed over how many had been arrested, The Associated Press reported. Dorothy Aken'Ova, director of Nigeria's International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights, said the police detained four gay men last month and tortured them until they named others. The police have since arrested 38 men and were looking for 168 others, Ms. Aken'Ova told The A.P. Mustapha Baba Ilela, chairman of the Bauchi State Shariah Commission, told the agency that 11 gay men had been arrested, and he denied that any had been mistreated.
Yesterday's paper carried a 13-paragraph news article about the situation. The penultimate paragraph read:
Nigeria's population, divided roughly in half between Christians and Muslims, is deeply conservative, with widespread hostility to homosexuality in both religious communities.
This is the sort of thing that one might expect the Times to editorialize about, but no editorial has yet appeared. Perhaps the impulse to blame Christian conservatives for the human rights abuse is at odds with the Times tendency to deny the culpability of Islam. Rest assured that if Israel had rounded up and tortured gays, it would be front-page news and the Times editorialists would be frothing in condemnation.