Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer’s latest, “Sudan’s silent jihad,” appeared Thursday in FrontPage.
Just in time to mark the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide that it largely ignored, the human rights community is beginning to take notice of the genocide in Sudan. As welcome as this is, and as refreshing as it is that the New York Times and Washington Post have done extensive reporting on Darfur in recent weeks, few have noted that the tragedy of Darfur is actually the second Sudanese genocide of our age. The first killed over two million African Christians and animists in southern Sudan.
They may be forgiven for being slow on the uptake, however; after all, Darfur marks the third genocide in Africa that Kofi Annan is declining to notice: Rwanda, Sudan I and now Sudan II. Over 100,000 people have been killed in Darfur. By autumn the number of those who have been displaced or impoverished, or whose lives have been destroyed by the war in other ways, will most likely exceed three million. Yet Annan declared that he cannot consider it “genocide or ethnic cleansing yet.”
There is another word that Annan has never uttered in connection with Sudan. For a decade Khartoum has waged what the regime itself calls a jihad against Christians and tribalists in the South. A 1992 fatwa issued by a group of pro-Khartoum Sudanese imams declared: “An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.” This allowed for the murder of Christians and animists in the south; now it has been turned against the Muslims of Darfur, whose Islam doesn’t measure up to Khartoum’s hardline standards….
The victims are the blacks of Darfur and southern Sudan, who continue to be murdered and enslaved by Islamic Arab fundamentalists. The jihadists operate with impunity before a world that doesn’t dare give a name to the crime they are committing. How many more deaths will be needed before Annan and the human rights establishment admit the truth?