stupid liberal chants, we must no say bad things about bad people, make them feel bad and do more bad things. l say enough of words, lets some actions follow them.

Posted by: ZenaWarriorPrincess at July 15, 2008 7:11 AM

I haven't heard a whimper from "mainstream" Muslim groups like CAIR or the British Muslim Council on the slaughter of Muslims in Sudan by al-Beshir. Perhaps they back al-Beshir's contention that someone has to do the dirty work of separating "fake black Muslims" from the "real
Arab Muslims".

Posted by: Briars at July 15, 2008 7:33 AM

In 1900, save for a very small sliver in the north, the Sudan was black African. But the British were indifferent to the fate of black Africans, and the odd Evans-Pritchard studying the Nuer or the Dinka did not create a political lobby; the power was with the Arabs, more "our sort" and "people with whom one might deal if one were careful" in the Sudan.

The way the British favored the Arabs, at the expense of the black Africans in the Sudan, has a parallel in Mandatory Palestine. The Administratoin there attraced people, or fashioned people, entirely unsympathetic to the Jews and to their claims, and that lack of sympathy led the very people who were supposed, as the representatives of the Mandatory Power, Great Britain, to further the express aims of that Mandate (that is, to encourage Jewish immigration and "close Jewish settlement on the land" in order to create the Jewish National Home)to favor the oily, eager-to-please, and oh-so-locally-colorful landowning families (the Husseinis, the Khalidis). These were, in the view of the British on the spot, so much more "our sort" than those pesky eastern European Jews, who offered no local color, and were not oily but downright disrespectful in demanding that the English respect the solemn commitments they had made when they accepted the Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations. These Jews in Mandatory Palestine, for some reason thought that they had certain rights, including the right to be free of Arab terrorism in 1920, in Jerusalem, and 1929, in Hebron, and 1936-38, during the Arab Revolt, and the right to enter from Nazi-threatened Europe, from the late 1930s on. Many of those Jews appeared to actually have had the effrontery to have read the Mandate for Palestine and knew what it was all about.

Very few people know just how "black" the Sudan was in 1950, or 1920, or 1920. They know vaguely about the Mahdi, and the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, and Kipling's "we have the Gatling Gun, and they have not" and something about "the last charge at Omdurman" and, of course, latterly we have all read Churchill's now-famous paragraph on Islam from "The River Wars," but really, that's about it.

And because "that's about it" we consign the Sudan to the Arabs, we simply hand it over to them. We think it right, not wrong, or in the inevitable nature of things, that Arab colonialists in the north, who have taken and taken and taken over the past century, more and more land, and power, and now have helped themelves as well to the oil wealth that is under the land of black Africans, who never asked to be, and clearly never wanted to be, under rule by northern Arabs, and these black Africans are at least as entitled to independence (and oil could provide their wherewithal) as any group of black Africans on the continent.

It is often said that the Sudan is the "largest country in Africa." That's true. In land area it is the largest. But it is not really a nation-state at all, but part of the incipient Arab empire. It is a colonial regime: Arab colonists have never displayed the slightest interest in the welfare -- or even keeping alive -- the Christians and animists in the southern Sudan. Their interest is entirely in the land, the natural resources, and especially the oil, that is in the southern Sudan. To the extent that they can kill, or starve to death, or inveigle into permanent submission the black Africans of the south -- and also the black African Muslims of Darfur -- they will be content. They will move heaven and earth to keep on with their colonial empire, backed by Egypt, of course, playing a malevolent and meretricious game (do you really think Egypt does not want the Arabs of Khartoum to not further islamize and arabize the Sudan? Of course they do, and then -- who knows? -- perhaps the Arabs of Egypt can subdue the Sudan to their own ends, as the Egyptians and other Arabs wish to further islamize east Africa, and especially, to end the "Christian kingdom" of Ethiopia, through the demographic conquest and Da'wa that in Ethiopia, that famous holdout to Islam (the "Christian kingdom of Prester John" that the Christians of besieged and permanently threatened Europe, in the Middle Ages, dreamt of as their powerful Christian ally) is already well underway -- but of course unrecognized in Washington, where the time-horizon for foreign policy is about a month, or a year, but never five years, or ten.

If the Muslims marching through black Africa are to be halted, in east as in west Africa, not only in their rape and pillage and enslavement of black Africans, as in Darfur and the southern Sudan, but also in their campaigns of Da'wa (and refashioning the sometimes easygoing and syncretistic Islam into the hard, real, uncompromising and dangerous thing) and demographic conquest, a dramatic act, by the finally-awakened West, could do much to help the imperilled Christians all over black Africa. And such a dramatic act, if it is military -- pointing up Muslim weakness in qitaal or combat --and yet obviously with a humanitarian impulse, as would clearly be the case in the Sudan, and a humanitarian impulse, by the way, that is responded to only after nearly 2.5 million black Africans -- about 2 of them in the south and .5 million in Darfur -- have been killed, with millions of black Africans also displaced or forced into Chad. measures must be taken.

It's a golden opportunity. But then, Iraq -- with its pre-existing sectarian and ethnic fissures -- was also a golden opportunity for the American government, in another way, to weaken, by dividing and demoralizing, the Camp of Islam. In the case of the Sudan, it is true that there are logistical problems. But they are not insurmountable. Bases borrowed and expanded in "Christian" Ethiopia (itself alarmed by the spread of Islam within and without) and from aircraft carriers, and other bases already established in East Africa, from which American forces are already working, could do the trick. The entire Sudanese airforce could be eliminated in a day; the motorized vehicles of the Janjaweed can be similarly dealt with. What would the Sudanese government, what would the sullen Arab League do, at the sight of all those black Africans greeting, with great relief and gratitude, their American saviors from Arab murderers?

What a photo op, and what a geopolitical opportunity as well. That seizure, for "humanitarian reasons" (real, but not the only or even the main reason that should prompt such a move), of the southern Sudan and Darfur, to be held by American and other non-Muslim troops, until a referendum on independence can be held, should be the very first thing the next Administration considers, an act which should accompany a prompt withdrawal from Iraq. And such a step would immediately put paid to any crowing by any Arabs or Muslims that "the Americans are on the run" for what would be signalled is somoething quite different: a new American government, without any of the messianic sentimentalism of the previous administration and its goals, both unattainable and wrong, to work to minimize the sectarian and ethnic fissures within Iraq, to keep Iraq unified, to lavish aid ("reconstruction" aid) upon it, and to transplant "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in that country, without stopping, not even for a second, to analyze whether democracy is a plant you buy at a local garden-shop and can easily transplant, or whether or not there might be chemicals in the soil of Islam that makes it almost impossible for such a plant to take route in that dusty, unpromising, inhospitable soil.

In 1967, finally pushed to the limit by the pogroms against Christian Ibos in northern Nigeria -- overnight thousands were killed by Muslims -- the Christain Ibo and other christianized tribes of southern Nigeria revolted, and declared their independence as a new state, the state of Biafra. Only two countries -- Ghana and Israel -- recognized Biafra. Not a single Western power came to Biafra's aid. The country made all kinds of sense: it would have been composed of the most advanced, because not-held-back-by-Islam, peoples of southern Nigeria. That was, and is, where all the oil is. But the Western oil companies in Great Britain and the United States did not want to do a thing to disrupt the supply of oil. And Western governments had no understanding of what was at stake. When the leader of Biafra, Col. Ojukwu, in his Ohiara Declaration, explained in 1969 why the Biafrans had gone to war, ne noted the "Jihad" that had been declared against it (he did not allude to earlier Jihads in West Africa, such as that by Dan Fodio, but he could have). Everyone in West Africa knew that the Arabs had been helping to crush the Biafrans; Egyptian pilots, flying Migs, strafed at will Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands of utterly helpless villagers. No one, save Frederick Forsyth and Renata Adler, reported in detail on what was going on, and even their reports, good as they were, ignored the matter of Islam. The Christians were crushed, and now in Nigeria -- still billing itself as "the world's most populous black nation" as if that justified its continued existence, and was an argument against another separatist movement -- more and more Muslim-dominated states are imposing the Shari'a. In the Ivory Coast, the late Houphouet-Boigny, knowing of the impact of monumental size, built the second-largest cathedral in the world at Yamassoukrou -- a religious, but also a geopolitical statement. In that same Ivory Coast, once the pride of French West Africa, Laurent Gbagbo and his Christians have attempted to stave off demographic islamization that, because of porous borders, is occuring -- and were rebuffed by the French under the Arab-pleasing Chirac. Will a greater understanding of this probem be exhibited by the still-powerful, and manipulating French in their former colonies, now that the excitable and so far disappointing Mr. Sarkozy, is in charge?

Why wait? Why should the American government not plan now to seize the southern Sudan and Darfur? That will hearten black African Christians, who ever since Biafra have felt the West has abandoned them to their fate, and to the Arabs. And they have had long experience -- a thousand years -- with the Arabs and Muslims. Unlike the Western world, which seems intent on forgetting more than a millennium of its own encounters with Islam, black African non-Muslims are well aware -remember the black revolt against their Arab masters in Zanzibar and Pemba, just a few decades ago? -- of what they can expect from islamization, and arabization.

They deserve some help. And the people in the southern Sudan and Darfur deserve at least to stay alive, and even, just perhaps, to enjoy the revenues derived from resources under their land, now ruled by Arab Muslims in the north, who have always brought them nothing but misery and death.

Posted by: Hugh at July 15, 2008 8:00 AM

I thought the black Sudanese being slaughtered were Christians and native animists. They are Muslims?? Anyway, the whole Sudan issue is shocking. I've seen a few documentaries on the subject and it just reinforces my shock that no nation will step in to help these people.

Posted by: Madame Vengier at July 15, 2008 8:24 AM

Madame Vengier,
Those in the south are black Christians. Darfur is in the West and is peopled by black Muslims.

Posted by: PMK at July 15, 2008 9:02 AM

While I'm happy this rodent is indicted and know that many more should also be indicted for similar crimes, I worry about this development. If the ICC were entirely unpolitical that would be one thing, but I wonder just how long we will have to wait before they start looking at Israelis or Americans. As much as it would be nice to inject legalities into our world order, that was one of the reasons behind the UN and look where that it (and how quickly it became a farce).

Posted by: Seymour Paine at July 15, 2008 9:03 AM

Seymour Paine,
The ICC currently has no jurisdiction over Americans because the US is not a party to the ICC. That might change under an Obama administration with a Democratic Congress that is filibuster-proof. It might even change under a McCain administration that wants to "send a message to the world".
Meanwhile we have plenty of Americans who want to do the job themselves, such as John Conyers. Vincent Bugliosi, of Manson fame, is distributing to prosecutors everywhere information on how George W. Bush can be tried for murder because "he led us into war in Iraq under false pretenses". Stranger things have happened.

Posted by: PMK at July 15, 2008 9:52 AM

PMK: I know they have no jurisdiction, but that wouldn't stop them. I'm more concerned that Israel will become a target.

Posted by: Seymour Paine at July 15, 2008 10:31 AM

"His motives were largely political. His alibi was a counter-insurgency.' His intent was genocide," he (prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo) said.
.....................................................

Good grief--it's like trying to acurately describe the old Soviet Union without being allowed to use the word "communist", or Nazi Germany while entirely skirting the concept of fascism.

Oh, the resulting image is not entirely wrong--it does touch on aspects of the situation--but it entirely misses the main point. Islam--the motive that must not speak its name.

Madame Vengier wrote:

I thought the black Sudanese being slaughtered were Christians and native animists. They are Muslims??
..........................................

Khartoum has many fronts--in its own country. They are waging war on the Black Christians and animists of the south--this has died down temporarily due to a "truce". Most of those in Darfur in the west are indeed Muslim, but they are regarded by Khartoum as non-Arab, and "insufficiently Islamic". Add to that the fact that Darfur and the south have much of the country's natural resources.

One of the oddest things is that few outside the Sudan would consider Khartoum to be "Arab"--the northern Sudanese, including president Al-Beshir, look like inhabitants of the rest of the Sahel--slightly lighter-skinned Africans, but quite recognizably black.

That they consider themselves to be "Arab"--and are willing to use that basis to attack their just-slightly-darker countrymen for being "non-Arab", shows the deep and pernicious nature of Arab supremecism present in Islam.

from above:

'the African Union warned the indictment of Beshir would create a power vacuum that risked "military coups and widespread anarchy"....'

As usual, the African Union is going to do nothing to protect its own people. I very much doubt that the West has the will, either.

Posted by: gravenimage at July 15, 2008 12:12 PM

From article: to lavish aid ("reconstruction" aid) upon it, and to transplant "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in that country, without stopping, not even for a second, to analyze whether democracy is a plant you buy at a local garden-shop and can easily transplant, or whether or not there might be chemicals in the soil of Islam that makes it almost impossible for such a plant to take route in that dusty, unpromising, inhospitable soil.

That's a good analogy.
The flower of freedom and democracy does not grow on barren or poisoned soil.
To try and plant them where there is only rock, is an exercise in poor judgment...

Posted by: duh_swami at July 15, 2008 12:51 PM

From above: A little OT...: Vincent Bugliosi, of Manson fame, is distributing to prosecutors everywhere information on how George W. Bush can be tried for murder because "he led us into war in Iraq under false pretenses". Stranger things have happened.

Stranger things is about right.

I wonder what false pretenses were those, and how they can be proven? This is just more leftist bilge.

Saddam surrendered and then continued hostilities. He was not acting like a loser in a war is supposed to act. Standard warfare dictates that when the 'loser' continues hostilities the war continues.
That is the way it has always been. It took twelve years and plenty of chances before Bush decided that the loser was acting like a winner. He did what commanders in chiefs are supposed to do in this situation...resume hostilities. The first gulf war never ended, the second was/is a continuation of the first...Bush should have won the war when he won it. That's when Saddam was dug out of his hole. To continue beyond that has been a huge lack of good judgment...Besides that governments kill a lot of people, but they never 'murder' anyone...

Posted by: duh_swami at July 15, 2008 1:48 PM

Hugh wrote:

"to lavish aid ("reconstruction" aid) upon it, and to transplant "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in that country, without stopping, not even for a second, to analyze whether democracy is a plant you buy at a local garden-shop and can easily transplant, or whether or not there might be chemicals in the soil of Islam that makes it almost impossible for such a plant to take route in that dusty, unpromising, inhospitable soil."
..................................

As Duh Swami noted, excellent analogy.

A month ago there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about Zoe Ferraris, the author of a new mystery, "Finding Nouf", set in Saudi Arabia. She is an American woman who was just 19 when she married a Saudi-Palestinian Bedoin man. She had just given birth to their child, Yasmina, when he decided it was time for the obligatory trip home to visit the in-laws in the old country.

She describes her life there:

During the nine months or so that took, Ferraris lived the life of the typical Saudi woman, confined to the house and the "women's sitting room" (where the upholstery was deemed too good to be sat upon, so they sat on the floor). They'd go outdoors if a man escorted them, but even then they had to be covered in a burqa and cloak.

"The windows were shuttered, with grills on them. It was a very claustrophobic environment.

"It's 120 degrees - 110 degrees on a normal day - very humid and very sticky," she said. "You stay inside as much as you can. My mother-in-law kept trying to grow jasmine. It would die, and she would try again."

This last image is what stuck with me--the jasmine dying in the parched soil and pitiless sun, over and over again.

Ferraris was luckier than most. She divorced her husband shortly after their return to the US, and he returned to Jeddah. She just regards her trip to Saudi Arabia as a bit of youthful exotica, that she can use in her fiction. Her daughter, Yasmina, is now an American teenager.

Posted by: gravenimage at July 15, 2008 6:48 PM

duh_swami,
The "false pretenses" were the usual leftist boilerplate:

1. WMD not found, so there was none to begin with.
2. Bush linked Iraq and 9/11
3. Bush lied about [everything you can think of]
4. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc. etc. etc.
5. Torture of prisoners, illegal detention, etc.

Ergo, since Bush lied to get us into this war he can be tried for the murder of every soldier who has died fighting under false pretenses.

The man wrote a book that he is peddling to the left wing. He believes that conservatives are bad human beings and also that they are stupid, that Mario Cuomo is being intimidated (otherwise he would never have said he "respects" Rush Limbaugh!) and that Bush is a monster. His audience, progressive Democrats, ate it up.
If you have access to C-SPAN2, see if they show it again on BookTv in a few weeks. It was a real comedy show. It was THAT ridiculous.

Posted by: PMK at July 15, 2008 7:11 PM

Many churches here in Australia - mine is one of them - have gained new, enthusiastic members: fortunate survivors of the relentless, murderous jihad in southern Sudan, escaped out of Sudan and then lucky enough to have been granted asylum in Western countries.

The High Anglican parish that I attend, helped a large family of Sudanese Christian refugees to find their feet (they eventually decided to join a Catholic congregation). We have a young woman, a widow, with her two little daughters (her husband, a priest, sadly died of cancer after his arrival in Australia).

In the Mothers Union (Australia) magazine I saw a photograph of five new members being inducted - five joyfully smiling black Sudanese Anglican ladies in colourful robes.

I am sure that across the United States and Canada, and probably in the UK and parts of Europe, there may be other Sudanese Christian (and animist) survivors who - like the Armenian survivors of that other great jihad genocide of modern times - have terrible stories to tell, stories that should and must be told.

They should be telling the likes of Oprah Winfrey and (more up-market) Andrew Denton [Aussie TV interviewer of a show called 'Enough Rope'], what it is like when - exactly replicating similar scenes from history, in Byzantine Palestine or in Egypt or North Africa, Spain, the Balkans, Northern India, Persia - the armed horsemen ride into your peaceful village, howling Allahu akbar as they gleefully rape, enslave, torture, destroy places of worship, murder holy men, kill and rob and ruin and carry off into slavery. What it feels like when you are faced with a human gestalt - the ummah - that behaves as though in-dwelt by the soul of a serial killer.

Those non-Muslim Sudanese who have survived and escaped the jihad should be testifying in churches, synagogues and temples across the non-Muslim world, and in our synods, and on the floors of our parliaments, and in programs on prime-time television, bearing witness to the reality that is Islam, the Arab Imperial Religion, an ideology as pitilessly supremacist, cruel, murderous and amoral as that of the Nazis or of Imperial Japan.

The International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church will be observed on - I think - November 16th this year.

It would be the perfect occasion for Christians in the West, in the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada, to ask Coptic, Sudanese, and Nigerian and Pakistani and Iraqi Christians, lately escaped out of the hellholes of the Ummah or from its bloody borders, to visit our churches and bear witness.

It could be a day not only of prayer, but of public protest and public education.

For churches that observe the liturgical calendar, and even for those who usually do not, one might observe three days in succession: a vigil (All Hallows Eve), the commemoration of Persecuted Christians (especially martyrs) on the Feast of All Saints;

and finally, on All Souls, the 1st of November, a day of mourning and consciousness-raising on behalf of ALL the victims of jihad, not just the Christian victims but Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, animists, and not forgetting all those brave souls who, born within Islam, have been put to death down through the ages for 'blaspheming' or for 'apostatising'.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at July 15, 2008 11:41 PM