I wonder exactly what sort of unspeakable brutality is shown on this film. I'm glad the film is available so everyone can see it who wants to, but for my own information I might find a detailed verbal description of the events quite sufficient. I'm not exactly drawn by the prospect of seeing someone beheaded or mutilated or raped, if that's what's depicted.

I'm wondering how the cameraman managed to film the thing and get out alive.

Posted by: traeh at July 20, 2007 7:52 AM

The mass-murders in Darfur (or Dar Fur, as Carl Geiger Pasha and everyone else used to write it) are not regarded with abhorrence by other Arabs. Nor do other Arab states wish the Arabs who rule Sudan to be taken to be prevented from continuing their genocidal activities -- and are doing everything they can, especially in the corridors and coulisses of power at the U.N. and the E.U. and through their extensive network of Western hirelings, collaborators, and fellow-travellers, to block any effective action to stop the Sudanese government until it is too late -- until, that is, enough of the black Africans have been killed, the women raped, the villages burned down, the remainder forced to straggle into Chad, and even in Chad the harrying by Arab tribesmen continues, and that country, too, has become unsettled with a million or more refugees.

Yet there has not been a single resolution by the Arab League, not a syllable of protest by Egypt --Sudan's political enemy, but certainly not a regime about to protest something as unremarkable and acceptable as the mass killing by Arabs of non-Arabs -- in this case black Africans. There has been no "cooperation" by Egypt with the West, nor by another Arab power.

And yet American campuses are full of people brightly demanding that China cease its cooperation with Sudan, that China is the main country to count on to pressure the Sudanese government and there is talk of boycotting the Beijig Olympics in order to force the Chinese government to stop its running of interference for Sudan at the U.N. But running interference, through the use of a veto at the Security Council, is not the same thing as giving the kind of endless behind-the-scenes support, as fellow Arab states do, to the Sudanese government. American campuses should be full of divestment movements aimed at the most effective collaborators with the Arabs of Sudan: the Arabs of the Arab League states, including "our ally" Egypt. But so far the Arab states have gotten off scot free.

The lone Arab, Nabil Kassem, who made this documentary, is akin to Kanan Makiya (Samir al-Khalil), who alone among the Arabs publicly denounced the mass-murder of the Kurds (some 182,000) by Saddam Hussein. Kanan Makiya called this "shameful" but could never quite understand -- the problem with the best people in the Muslim world, if they do not become apostates but out of filial piety remain Muslims, is that they never can quite understand, much less analyze for others, what it is tha explains certain kinds of behavior.

In the case of the complicity of the Arabs outside Sudan -- who have cleverly disguised their support for that regime, their efforts to hinder and delay -- very successfully -- actions that might have been taken by the U.N. against Sudan during its twenty-year campaign of mass-murder in the southern Sudan, or its several-yea-long campaign in Darfur)--the explanation is simple: Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism. Islam is the national religion of the Arabs, evolving initially out of pagan Arab lore, and a mishmash of appropriated, and much distorted, figures and stories taken from Judaism and Christianity, the final result being a "faith" that could be used to both justify and promote the conquest, by comparatively primitive Arabs, of much larger numbers of non-Arabs, chiefly Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians). A non-Arab Muslim, until recently and still ideally, reads the Qur'an only in Arabic, and non-Arab Muslim children memorize as much of it as possible -- in Arabic. Non-Arab Muslims take as their model a group of seventh-century Arabs and above all, Muhammad, the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil. The Sunna itself consists essentially of the ways, the customs and manners, of seventh-century Arabs. Muslims turn Meccatropically five times a day for the canonical prayers; they perform hajj to Mecca; Arabia is the center of their being. It is as if all those who were part of the British Empire, five times a day, turned and prostrated themselves toward London, as if every Indian, every black African in a British colony, took an English name, and took some Englishman (possibly someone a bit more modern than a woad-painted Pict from 700 A.D.).

The black African Muslims of Darfur, like the black Africans of the southern Sudan, may be killed without arousing any indignation among all but the tiniest handful of Muslim Arabs, the same tiny handful that might have protested the killing, by Arabs, of the Muslim Kurds.

The reason is one that not even Kanan Makiya, nor Nabil Kassem, can likely face: Islam is the source of, the promoter and vehicle of, Arab supremacism. And Arab supremacism, whether it is of the lingusitic and cultural kind, that attempts to ban the Berber language, or to convince Maronites and Copts, not always unsuccessfully, that because they are "users of Arabic" that makes them "Arabs," or of the murdering kind that simply wishes to eliminate non=-Arabs if they happen to possess something -- oil, as in the Kurdish lands and in the southern Sudan, and possibly oil (and now water -- that vast underground lake discovered by American researchers who naively have said that if the waters were to be used for irrigation, this "might solve" the Darfur crisis when, if anything, it will only make Darfur that much more desirable to the Arabs, and their insensate desire to remove all the black Africans -- through murder -- that much greater.

Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism is a theme that must always and everywhere be noted, analyzed, stressed. It is a powerful weapon in dividing non-Arab Muslims, more and more of them no doubt recognizing the inattention to their own histories, their own pasts, once islamization, then followed by arabization of varying kinds, takes place. And the understanding of Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism has one other great virtue: it happens to be true.

Posted by: Hugh at July 20, 2007 8:25 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6908224.stm

huge underground lake, which according to the U.N., couldve solved the war there, is all dried up. so everyone can go back to killing in the name of "water".

yeah riiiigght.

Posted by: leonthepigfarmer at July 20, 2007 9:38 AM

"Earlier in the week Hafiz Muhamad, from the lobby group Justice Africa, told the BBC the "root cause" of the conflict was lack of resources."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6908224.stm

i wonder which religion muhamad practices? dare he ever state that the "conflict" is caused by islam.

note the way that liberal orgs all have muslims at the top, they all blame lack of resources, lack of funding into the local communities, lack of money, lack of education etc, always everyone elses fault and never the muslims.

Posted by: leonthepigfarmer at July 20, 2007 9:41 AM

It's nice to know that when blacks are oppressed to the point of genocide by Islamania the universities are silent-no anti-apartheid type rallies and such for this atrocity. It's also not surprising that the Arab media is virtually ignoring this-after all, blacks are the lowest of the infidels as far as they're concerned.

Islamania and its fellow travellers should be proud of the fine work going on in Sudan-the process of silent genocide is moving along quite well. Soon enough this problem will simply disappear.

Posted by: ISLAMSFORLOSERS at July 20, 2007 10:41 AM

Is jihad the proper term to use since the residents of Darfur are also Muslim? To me, this reeks of genocide based solely on racism. Nice comment Hugh.

Posted by: johnb at July 20, 2007 10:47 AM

As Islam blankets Asia more and more completely, from Indonesia west and Arabia east, I'm looking forward with interest the inevitable clash between white Arab Muslims and their non-white counterparts.

I also find it curious that Muslims in the far east haven't noticed the blatant Arab-centricity of their "religion".

Posted by: Godefroi at July 20, 2007 11:39 AM

I hate to post two in a row, but I just read the BBC "News" story. What complete hogwash.

"Earlier in the week Hafiz Muhamad, from the lobby group Justice Africa, told the BBC the "root cause" of the conflict was lack of resources.

He said 'drought and desertification' in North Darfur had led the Arab nomads to move south, where they came into conflict with black African farmers."

How could someone say that this genocide is a conflict over water with some "Arab nomads" and maintain a straight face?

Posted by: Godefroi at July 20, 2007 11:47 AM

traeh, very little gore that i could detect. lots of terrible things said, and lots of homes burned though.

kassem thinks this is denial on the arabs' part. i disagree, & think as a muslim he is confused by what he sees.

it's genocide & arab supremacy in darfur, and jihad in the rest of south sudan, where the christians & animists live(d).

i'm hopeful that kassem's troubled attitude will lead him on the path to true enlightenment about the situation.

Posted by: Miss_Anthrope at July 20, 2007 12:27 PM