Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the Egyptian resistance to the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces in Darfur:
Egypt (see “Mr. Mubarak, We Want Our Money Back“), not content with having been secretly involved in arms projects with Saddam Hussein, and with some of its highest officials on the take from the same regime (this was not the least of the discoveries made by the Americans in Iraq); not content with having ignored every single of the solemn commitments it made to Israel under the Camp David Accords (while Israel scrupulously fulfilled all of its obligations to Egypt); not content with repeatedly blocking American efforts to force something akin to “democracy” and resisting it at every step; not content with permitting attacks on the Copts by Egypt’s Muslims and then denying all of it; not content with having created an atmosphere in which Muslim fanaticism may flourish among Egypt’s better-off (Al-Zawahiri, Mohammad Atta, thousands of others) who join Al-Qaeda and similar groups or go off to Iraq, as well as among Egypt’s poor (who vote for Akef and the Muslim Brotherhood); not content with bullying Ethiopia to prevent its rightful diversion of some of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation purposes (the Egyptian Arabs apparently believe that they, and they alone, own the Nile and black Africans have no right to it — in this, they will be proven quite mistaken)– not content with all these things, Egypt now has organized opposition to U.N. (i.e. Western, effective) troops going to Darfur.
Why? Because the Egyptians know that if the black Africans in Darfur received real, as opposed to hollow, protection, that might lead to their expression of dismay in being forced to live under the rule of Muslim Arabs.
For there are two kinds of supremacism associated with Islam. The first is the division of the world between Believer and Infidel, with the former on the side of Good, and demanding loyalty from fellow Muslims, and the latter on the side of Evil, and demanding the hatred of Muslims. Within that supremacist ideology is a second one: Arab Muslims are superior to non-Arab Muslims. It is repeated in Qur’an and hadith: the Qur’an was given to the Arabs, the best of peoples. Muhammad and the Companions were all Arabs. The gift of the Arabs to the world is Islam itself. Non-Arab Muslims must learn Arabic to read the Qur’an properly. Many of them take Arab names, and assume false Arab identities, with false Arab genealogies.
It makes no sense, for Arabs, that anyone would bother with non-Muslim or non-Arab civilizations. It was natural for the Arabs of Algeria to ban, for decades, even the mere use of the Berber language, and to attempt to stamp out Berber culture. It was natural — not unnatural — for the Iraqi Arabs to seize the oil in Kirkuk and Mosul, the Kurdish lands, to arabize those lands with the wholesale movement into them of Arabs, and even to engage in mass murder of Kurds (182,000 killed by Saddam Hussein’s Arab troops).
What is happening in Darfur, where northern Arabs are murdering those they consider to be non-Arabs, and hence not quite fully Muslims, is a subset or a variant on the Jihad ordinarily conducted against Infidels — such as the one that has been waged for the past 20 years, with nearly 2 million victims, against the Christian and animist blacks in the southern Sudan. That some Darfur blacks are even insisting that the Shari’a not be imposed will merely make their treatment still more barbaric, if such is possible — for they have, in taking this stand, distanced themselves further from the Arabs (or those who imagine themselves “Arabs” — which is the same thing) in Khartoum.
But U.N. troops in Sudan, which would not be limited to or led by Muslims, would draw attention to all this. They would shed light on the behavior of Arab Muslims toward non-Arab Muslims, and would necessarily as well have contact with the southerners now being temporarily bought off with a pretend “peace treaty” with the north (useful while Darfur is being ravaged and emptied of its population by the Sudanese government).
Egypt is the key here. But the entire Arab League will move heaven and earth to keep any effective force, including Western troops, out of Darfur. To Egypt, the Muslim Arabs have a divine right to harry and kill the black Africans, whether Christians and animists in the south, or lesser, because merely black and not Arab, Muslims in Darfur. Just as Egypt has a divine right to the waters of the Nile. Or a divine right to the Jizya of foreign aid that successive American governments have been fearful of cutting, lest their “ally” Egypt suddenly do even more damage to American policy, become even more anti-American in thought, word, and deed, than it already is. How it could possibly do so, without Mubarak having to trade in his Family-and-Friends Plan for something offered by the Muslim Brotherhood, seems to have escaped our strategists.