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Israeli prime minister didn’t say Biafra would ‘overtake Nigeria as Africa’s giant’

A report claiming Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Biafra would take over from Nigeria as the giant of Africa has been circulating on Facebook.

Biafra refers to the South-Eastern region of Nigeria, which sought to secede from the country in 1967, leading to the 30-month Nigeria-Biafra civil war.

Some of the Facebook posts linking to the report have been shared over 200 times.  

The report claims Netanyahu said: “Biafra is a Jewish nation in Africa and the moment Biafrans go out from Nigeria, within five years, they will take over from Nigeria as the giant of Africa.”

There is no evidence that the Israeli prime minister made such a statement publicly.



Speech at Holocaust memorial


Netanyahu’s only known public reference to Biafra was in his remarks at the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem in April 2017.

In the speech he mentioned Biafra as one of the places mass murder had occurred without the world’s intervention since World War II.

A transcript of his remarks, which were in Hebrew, reads: “It is true that since World War II, no tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust has occurred, but there are many cases in which the world just stood by and did nothing to prevent the destruction of peoples or mass murder: in Biafra, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Sudan and indeed, also in Syria.”

Netanyahu was referring to the civil war, which caused an estimated 1 to 3 million deaths. - Allwell Okpi (26/03/2019)




 

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