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Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald proposes a way for both American policymakers and black Africans to escape dhimmitude simultaneously:
Black Africa is a battlefield between Islam and Christianity. Individual Christian missions, and are doing, have done a great deal of good. But Christians in black Africa need more support, tangible and visible, from the outside world. The spectacle of Muslims in Nigeria being allowed to throttle the Christians (Ibo and others) of the south during the Biafra War (1967-1969), with Egyptian pilots strafing Ibo villages and only two countries in the world (Ghana and Israel) willing to recognize an independent Biafra, should never be repeated. The forces of Biafra were fighting against the "Jihad" (Col. Ojukwu's own word in the Ahiara Declaration), while what was seen as the Christian world did nothing. It did not help the cause of Christianity in Africa.The spectacle of the Western powers, held in Africa to represent Christianity, doing nothing or very little while, almost at will, Muslim Arabs continued to kill, or starve to death, by taking away their cattle or destroying their crops, the Christian and animist black Africans in the southern Sudan, and did this without any consequences over several decades, with nearly 2 million dead a result, also did not help the cause of Christianity in black Africa.
It is time for something dramatic to be done so that the Western world makes clear it will take the side of the Christians where they are under assault. Should a new Biafra be declared, the Western world should support and not shun it. In the Sudan, the Americans should -- but this will await, as so much awaits, removal of American forces from tarbaby Iraq -- enter, and smash in the first hour the capacity of the Sudanese government to conduct its renewed campaign of murder (so much for that "treaty") in the southern Sudan and its newer mass murder in Darfur. Then they should seize both the southern Sudan and Darfur and hold them, to protect the black African populations, until such time as a referendum on self-rule can be held without interference by the government in Khartoum.The spectacle of American soldiers, having dealt a blow to whatever Sudanese army or air force exists, and having cleared Darfur overnight of Janjaweed (General Mattis might take particular pleasure in being put in charge of that), being warmly greeted by black Africans in both places, will be hard to disavow. What will the U.N. do? Deplore the protection of black Africans, either Muslim or non-Muslim, in Darfur and the south? And what will the E.U do? They can not, at this point, denounce the Americans for such an obviously humanitarian mission. It should galvanize support for, and encourage intelligent understanding of, the need for this kind of counter-Jihad.
In that event, what would the Arab League do? It has been foursquare behind the Sudanese government in Darfur, as it was in the southern Sudan -- or where it was not approving openly, then it was approving secretly. For who cares about non-Muslims being killed or Arab Muslims killing non-Arab Muslims? There was not a syllable of protest over the massacre of the Kurds by Arabs in Iraq. There was not a syllable of protest by the same Arab League over the use of the criminal law to punish the Berbers for using their own language and preserving their own culture for so many decades. (Recently, the Algerian government was forced by pressure from Berbers within Algeria to change those laws). What will the Arab League do? Declare the divine right of Arab Muslims to rule over and massacre non-Arab Muslims?
All that is being suggested is that word should get around that the Western world will no longer support countries or peoples equally. It is going to give its aid only to those who are not engaged now, or in a possible future, in Jihad, but to those countries where non-Muslims live, or where they currently withstand Muslim pressure, inside and out, and if given aid can make Christianity more attractive to those who might otherwise be tempted by Islam. The Infidel wold should eliminate economic, diplomatic, and other kinds of aid for countries where the jihad ideology is being spread. An example of a country deserving of special attention and support is Ethiopia. Its efforts to divert some of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation projects should be encouraged, and threats by Egypt against Ethiopia taken note of, and Egypt put on notice. And that Jizyah to Egypt that the Americans keep sending, should end. Egypt is not our "ally" nor our "staunch ally." It is a country that officially and unofficially has done everything to promote anti-Americanism and antisemitism (government television beaming a series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example), it has failed to meet any of its solemn commitments under the Camp David Accords, and Copts have been under attack for decades -- it was during the reign of Saint Sadat that Pope Shenouda II first went into self-imposed isolation as a protest against the government. Egypt needs to be taken off the American Infidel dole, until it changes its ways completely. Let all Muslim states be made aware that they are now on their own -- and they can go, hat in hand, as the "Palestinians" should be made to, to their fabulously rich Muslim brothers in the Gulf, and see how that works out. And that change in policy will be noticed throughout Africa, and not merely by Egypt's immediate neighbors.
Finally, in black Africa, more needs to be done to publicize the longest and most devastating trade in black Africans -- that of the Arabs. And that information should not only be spread in Africa, but in the Western world, since Islam's missionaries have deliberately targeted black populations on the assumption that they can continue to present Islam -- falsely -- as an appropriate vehicle for the expression of dismay with, or alienation from, the larger society. For Islam suppresses music and art and science. Islam does not encourage "social justice": good god, just look at Saudi Arabia, look at the zamindars and generals of Pakistan, look at the corrupt military rulers of Egypt and Algeria, the petty kings of Jordan and Morocco, the police-state of Tunisia -- one uninterrupted series of despotisms. It is also false that Islam discourages "materialism." Pay a visit to the souks of the Gulf statelets or Saudi Arabia -- shopping is all there is. There isn't anything else.
But more important, for helping to immunize important target populations for jihad subversion in the Western world, would be a clear and deliberate sign of Western protection of black African Christians from continued depredations, persecution, and even mass murder, by those pushing Islam in Africa. Black African Christians were abandoned to their fate in southern Nigeria and southern Sudan. That inattention, that neglect, that betrayal, should not be repeated.
Posted by Robert at April 14, 2006 7:26 AM
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Hugh, well said!!
Posted by: Franze
at April 14, 2006 7:57 AM
Thank you Hugh for excellent commitary. This is so important at a time when in the rest of the central and southern part of Africa the Christian faith is growing very fast and now is even sending missionaries to the West where they are needed and then to the Muslim areas.
Posted by: bigcatgirl13106
at April 14, 2006 8:29 AM
I agree with you Bigcatgirl.
at April 14, 2006 12:47 PM
Hugh
This is an excellent article and it highlights major problem regarding our attitudes to the plight of christain Blacks inAfrica.
I was recently appalled by a program wiced aired on PBS, calledExodus and Freedom, which recounts the story of a native sudanese bot being sold into the Islamic slace trade.
He escaped and was able to recount his story of bondage and cruelty to a western audience.
It is unfortunate that We in the west are poorly informed of the actual "goings on" in this dispicable trade and the level of human misery undured by christain blacks living in Africa.
Again may I commend you on a great article.
Posted by: Peter
at April 14, 2006 6:00 PM
Where are the voices of African-American Christian churches in all of this? Are they petitioning our government to stop the genocide in Sudan and to come to the defense of Nigerian Christians etc? Or are they totally unaware of what is happening to African Christians?
Posted by: Caroline
at April 14, 2006 6:06 PM
Caroline-
They're too busy fulminating about a "chocolate" New Orleans to care.
Posted by: profitsbeard
at April 14, 2006 9:11 PM
Profitsbeard - if they really and truly DON'T care then they should abandon the "African" prefix and simply call themselves "Americans"...
Posted by: Caroline
at April 14, 2006 11:12 PM
At one time, I heard about a web site called Blacks who oppose Islam but I could not find it. If the site still exists, could somebody please let me know?
Posted by: Christian
at April 15, 2006 6:30 PM
Christian: "At one time, I heard about a web site called Blacks who oppose Islam but I could not find it. If the site still exists, could somebody please let me know?"
Me too. I want to know. It's a funny thing. It was my casual impression that after 9/11 something fundamentally changed within America vis a vis the relation between whites and blacks. Maybe I imagined it but nevertheless, what I felt was that the longstanding and bitter conflict between white and black Americans was transcended, in some sense, by the reality of the threat from a foreign source that wished to see us all dead as Americans, irrespective of our color.
But clearly it's more complicated than that as there are many black Americans who have gravitated towards Islam. But there are also many blacks in America who are Christian and who have followed in the path of the most famous black Christian American - namely MLK, in whose honor we now have a federal holiday.
So what happens when black American Muslims dialogue with black American Christians over what is happening in Africa today? Obviously there is genocide going on and it's spreading. And it is largely Christian African blacks who are getting slaughtered. Aren't America's Christian blacks affluent enough on the whole today to be able to afford to put their energies towards defending black Christian Africans? Aren't they affluent enough to focus their energies beyond themselves here in America in order to take the lead in forcing the West's attention to what is happening to Christian blacks in Africa? Where are they? Shouldn't black Americans, of all people, be at the very forefront of these geopolitical issues concerning black Christian Africans, even if it DOES mean confronting and hammering out very uncomfortable facts with their fellow Muslim American blacks?
Personally, I think that it is those Americans who define themselves as "African-Americans" - whether they be Muslim or Christian - who ought to take the lead here from an activist POV, and if that means hammering this out with eachother to start with, here in the U.S., then so be it.
Posted by: Caroline
at April 15, 2006 10:29 PM
this is a story that has to be repeated over and over, even to those who don't want to listen
Posted by: Eliyahu
at April 16, 2006 2:38 PM
the Arab League obviously supports these massacres. When Iraq was charged in 1988 with using chemical weapons against the Kurds in the Anfal operation, Clovis Maqsoud, an Arab League spokesmen claimed that it was all Zionist lies.
Posted by: Eliyahu
at April 16, 2006 2:41 PM


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