Jihad in West Africa

One does wonder what they mean by Sharia, when the "infidel regime" in Nouakchott is notorious for such enlightened and Westernized practices as slavery. How much more do they want?

Two centuries before there was American foreign policy, Zionism, "Iraq" and "Palestine" to blame, long before "poverty" was a root-cause, and the why-do-they-hate-us brigade not only did not exist, but would have been impossible to come into being, Muslims in West Africa were on the Jihad warfath.

A Muslim cleric, or mallam, Usman dan Fodio, led a Jihad against local non-Muslim rulers from 1804 to 1810 that lead to the establishment of the so-called Caliphate of Sokoto, and to the spread, enforced spread by military conquest, of Islam.

The results of that can be seen in West Africa, where one can find, well-tended, neat, prettified even with simple touches (a few flowers) the Christian neighborhoods, and then the sullen, dirty, rundown areas of Muslims which are on view. The comparison is remarkable.

And everywhere Christians are under assault. They have been under assault, most famously, in Nigeria, where in 1967 the Christian Ibos, far more advanced and industrious than their Muslim overlords, rebelled and declared the independence of the State of Biafra. The proximate cause were the mass murders, by Muslims, of Christian Ibo all over northern Nigeria. But the Western world did nothing to help the Christian Ibo, while the Muslims -- including Egyptian pilots and planes that strafted Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers -- did provide aid. Only two countries in the world recognized Biafra - Israel, and Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah, Osagyefo, if he did not always understand economics, did understand Islam). In 1969, in his famous Ahiara Declaration, the leader of Biafra, Colonel Ojukwu, listed as the main reason for the Biafran fight was to defend the Christians against, as he put it, the "jihad" being conducted against it. That jihad by the Muslims who control the military, and have largely stolen the oil wealth of Nigeria (with a little help from some islamochristians willing to collaborate) continues today.

Elsewhere the Christians are under siege --as in the Cote d'Ivoire, or in Togo, where the more advanced southerners, often of the Ewe tribe that, like most tribes in coastal West Africa, cuts across national borders, are leaving -- not only because the crooked son of the previous crooked leader is back in business, but because of the Islamic menace.

Black Africans are enslaved in Mali and Mauritania, but not a syllable of protest has come from the Arab League about this, though both countries are members of that league. For decades black African Christians and animists have been slaughtered or starved to death in southern Sudan, and now black non-Arab Muslims (or nominal Muslims) are being killed, their cattle destroyed, their huts and houses burned, their women raped, their men all killed. And every single person who has lived to testify has talked of how the various Arab marauders say that "they are black and must be killed." Imagine, just imagine, if there were not a hundred thousand such incidents (as have taken place in Darfur) or a million(as in the southern Sudan) but even one such event, anywhere in the Western world, by a Western government.

Then ask why there is such a different standard, such fear of telling the truth, about how Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacist ideology, and Arabs among the supreme racists of history, who persuade those they conquer to abandon, forget, despise their own pasts, and to assume pseudo-Arab identities, and to take as their own models some Arabs who lived -- if they existed at all --in 7th century Arabia.

Is the American government fully aware of the jihad that Ibos remember well, and does the American government have any plans should the notion of a free Biafra (with all the oil in the south, among the lands where various Christian tribes live) be revived? Does the United States understand that in the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo has been demonized by the French government, but that the fears of the Christian ivoiriens that they are being asked to give citizenship to Muslim migrants in the north are justified? Does the American government know about Egypt's bullying of Ethiopia in an attempt to prevent Ethiopia from diverting just some of the headwaters of the Nile for vital irrigation projects, and of how Egypt sees a Muslim Sudan not as an enemy but as an ally in the future conflict with Ethiopia? Has the American government actually talked to Christians from Ethiopia, worried -- like people in Western Europe -- about the growing Muslim population, and the demands it makes to change the very nature of Ethiopia?

Given the entirely predictable paralysis at the U.N. -- where the Islamintern International calls the shots, and focusses attention on "Palestine" and keeps it always off the local expressions of Jihad -- over Darfur, and given the predictable collapse sometime in the future, of that famous "peace accord" recently "achieved" for the southern Sudan, one which will last just as long as the government in Khartoum thinks the West is paying close attention, and not a minute longer, why has the United States not used the accuse of rescuing the people in Darfur to send in a few thousnad troops, to seize both Darfur and the southern Sudan (claims of government violations of the peace accords with the southerners can easily be justified).

What would an American presence do? And who could object? Not Nicholas Kristof -- he is calling for such intervention in Darfur (he seems strangely uninterested in what happened to the non-Muslims of the southern Sudan over the past 20 years). Not the leftists everywhere -- how can they oppose coming in to rescue black villagers, whose pictures, with them swarming around and smiling at somewhat abashed American soldiers can be displayed worldwide. Not to black African Christians who will rightly take this as a sign of muscular American interest in confronting those who conduct Jihad, and who will be bucked up, from Kenya to West Africa.

And who will be mad? Muslims everywhere will realize that the game is up, that the Jihad can be opposed without invoking Al Qaeda, and that everywhere the Muslims have been on the offensive (slowly swallowing up, and arabizing, most of the Sudan when, a hundred years ago, it was largely un-islamized and un-arabized). Two can play this game, but the Infidels have not -- they have simply allowed the conquest. They did nothing to help the Biafrans in their fight for independence after repeated widespread jihad-massacres of Christians. They have failed to recognize that demography is a weapon of jihad, and the cross-border infiltration of Muslim populations in West Africa is a reasonable thing for local Christians to worry about. They have shown not the slightest foresight about the coming clash, over water, between Ethiopia and Egypt (which acts as if the Ethiopians have no right to that water, or only to the amounts that the Egyptians grandly will allow them). Everywhere we can, we should take the side of those threatened by Jihad, and in black Africa, the point of obvious entry, and obvious gain with little pain, is the Sudan.

Let Saudi Arabia, where slavery was still officially allowed until 1962, and where unofficially it flourishes, sputter. Let the various Arab League states in which blacks are still enslaved wax indignant. Let Libya, where there are routinely murderous riots against black Africans (in one of which a diplomat from Chad was hung from a pole in Tripoli and left dangling for the edification and delight of spectators), try to complain.

Any and every place where Islam is clearly, obviously, in the wrong, and can be confronted at little cost (unlike, say, the miasma of Iraq at present, where the post-invasion and post-destruction-of-weapons-and-the-regime makes no sense), should be investigated.

This is a war of containment, and of wearing down the morale of the other side. We have right on our side. Islam is a primitive and unpleasant belief-system. There is little or nothing to admire about it. Everywhere Islam has conquered, those conquered have emerged, when left with their lives, to live lives that are far more impoverished, in every important way, either as non-Muslim dhimmis, or as converts to Islam, and Islam limits artistic expression, stifles the free and skeptical inquiry without which real science is impossible, cripples the lives of women. Islam stunts mental growth. We need make no apologies to others or to ourselves for coming to this melancholy conclusion, so much at odds with the official ideology that we have been subjected to -- that everyone is the same, that all religions and peoples are equal in every way, that no one must ever ever challenge the self-evident truth of any of this.

Iraq offered one kind of opportunity -- the opportunity, that was taken, to destroy the military capacity (and too much may now, foolishly, be done by the Americans to build up Iraw's military and restore that capacity, undoing what was so uefully done)lessen those very fissures. The best policy in Iraq would be to cease all these plans for $590 million dollar American embassies, or American bases that can be closed at a moment's notice through the whim of local Muslims, or to force the American officer corps to blandly follow the bland, in repeating mantras about "success" and "bringing democracy to Iraq" that show an absence of the simplest and most obvious strategic thinking -- simplest, and most obvious, as long as one keeps in mind that the tenets of Islam, and not the absence of "democracy," are and will always be, a problem for Infidels as they have been for the past 1350 years. In Iraq, 139,000 American troops should be pulled out, or at most, 20-30 thousand temporarily in Kurdistan, where they will be welcomed, or perhaps in the desert to keep out foreigners -- but always ready to pick up and leave quickly.

Yet, at the same time that leaving Iraq now makes sense (and not least because of the effect it is having on the long-term recruitment of the kind of people the army and the Reserves and the National Guard need -- a squandering of morale, and of resources, that cannot be forgiven and that shows a criminally negligently attitude toward the growing disbelief in the current Iraq venture that, in fact, is well-founded, and that comes most feelingly not from those who think there is no problem with Islam, but those who think, who know, that there is a very great problem with Islam, and Iraq, while far less important a matter than preventing the islamization of Europe, or Latin America (where sustained efforts by Tablighi al-Jamaat are bearing fruit), or sub-Saharan Africa, could if the fissures were exploited by American withdrawal, contribute its mite to helping the Infidels to contain Islam, to disrupt whatever unity it has, to cause consternation and damage morale of the enemy, not by spending a hundred billion dollars a year, but rather by not lifting a finger.

Please, let's use Iraq properly. Let's stop pouring in men, materiel, money. Let's not lift a finger. And let's turn our attention to Da'wa in Mexico, Muslim immigration in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and -- which is where this posting began and by rights should return -- to the besieged black African Christians, pursued by jihadists from southern Nigeria to the southern Sudan, and to Kenya, and even to the bombed-out "immoral" cafes of Capetown.