My Blog - Darfur and the African Crisis

Africa! Poor, poor Africa. Land of great plains, savannahs, and mighty green forests. Land of noble tribes and colorful traditions. Well, so much for my childhood delusions. The Africa of King Solomon's Mines is not just gone, it never existed. Even so, it appears to be worse now. Africa has become a Land of death and disease, murder and corruption; of child killers and killer children. And nobody cares. Millions starve and tens of millions die and nobody cares. I cannot begin to catalog the evils inflicted upon Black Africans, either by Whites and colonialists, or by their own rulers and fellow human beings. The current tragedy in Darfur is just one more tragedy in a very long, sad list of human tragedies. And nobody cares, or at least nobody that is important enough to do something about it. Sadly, the problem is probably this: the people being killed are black, and the people doing the killing are not white. That makes it all OK. After the Holocaust, after the Cambodian killing fields, after Rwanda -- why would one think at all that it would be different? Everytime a mass murder occurs, the world puts its finger to the political wind, and then looks the other way. I remember a woman in DC, on the sidewalks of DC calling attention to the Rwandan genocide, watching people leaving the Holocost museum with "Never again" buttons look the other way as they passed her sign. The human race really sucks.

The tragedy of Africa for this year is called "Darfur". It's not really a new problem, and the players in the tragedy are some of the usual suspects. The government of Sudan has been murdering its own people for decades; this year it just picked a different group. Rather than brutalizing its Christian population in the South, it has chosen to help its Muslim Arabs annihilate their Black African Muslim neighbors. Arabs and Muslims killing blacks is OK, too, so it seems.

So I watch the Muslim sites on the Internet to see if they care. Except for one site, our Islamic friends are pretty much silent. The Nile is not just a river in Egypt; denial is an ocean in Islam. Most Muslim sites choose to ignore the sad events unfolding in Sudan. It gets worse, much worse. Many Islamic sites, much to the contrary, argued that there was no campaign against the people of Darfur, that the government of Sudan had no part in arming and supporting the militias, and that not only was there no genocide, but at most there had only been a few isolated events of inter-tribal violence. All this in the face of hundreds of eyewitness reports to the contrary. This is not just sad; this is pure evil.

Islamonline makes up news.

I read Muslim sites. I have written here (

) about why blogs and the Internet are so wonderful. While checking out one of the biggest and best-known Islamic sites on the Internet, I came across a report about events in Darfur. The icons here show screen shots taken of the content of that site, on that date, as proof. According to Islamonline.com (Link here:

), the whole issue of Darfur is a bad case of over-active imagination. This site basically says that nothing really grave is happening. Nada, zilch, niente! It is just a minor dispute between two groups of people and it is nobody's business, and of course, because all the parties involved are Muslim, the stories of rapine, death and destruction cannot possibly be true because Islam is a "Religion of Peace". It also cannot be a matter of racism because, as everybody knows, there can also be no racism in Islam. Speaking of blacks and Islam. There was an Editorial a few years ago in a Kenyan newspaper asking where all the black slaves taken north by the Arab Slave Traders over 12 centuries had gone. It said that it was clear where the slaves taken by Western Slavers were (well the ones that survived the boat trip and weren't murdered afterwards on the plantations!). They (or better, their descendents) are in the US, Cuba, Brazil, and the Caribbean islands. So where did the millions of Black Africans go taken North to Islamic lands? Maybe, just maybe, the answer is that few if any survived the tender mercies (ie, brutality) of Muslim societies.

Getting back to the report on Darfur at the site above. Not only did it deny the massacres and rapes, it even quoted a respected human rights and medical group to 'prove' that the whole thing was overblown, and not really a major humanitarian crisis. Ok. I read the story. Hummm. It is not linked, but using a trusty search engine I find the site called Medicins Sans Frontiers or, in English, Doctors without Frontiers (

), a French humanitarian group that provides medical assistance to needy populations. Could it be that Islamonline is right? Well, the icon on of the left for this paragraph shows screen shots from the French group site from the very same day. Check it out. Those lying sons of bitches at Islamonline! As far as I'm concerned, they are right there with the Janjaweed militias raping and murdering innocent people. Have they no shame? Did they not think anybody would check out their 'facts'? May Islamonline and its entire staff rot in the darkest and hottest corner of hell! The second thumbnail on the left is from an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) about the problem of the almost total inability of Muslims to look at themselves and see their problems. Well, maybe I should say understand their problems. Muslims seem oblivious to the discrimination, oppression and hate that permeate their societies. If they see a problem, it is not their fault - it is because of what the Crusaders did, or the Imperialists, or because of Western Culture, or the Americans, or most of all, those evil Jews.

Before I end this page I would like to say a kind word about one Muslim site. It is called Altmuslim.com (

). This is perhaps the only major Muslim site on the Internet that will bring up uncomfortable issues about Islam. It will say some good things about Muslims, and it is not afraid to say the bad things, including about the events in Darfur. It adopts a "variety" report format about different subjects relating to the Islamic community, rather than a "hard news" format. Make no mistake, however, it is very much a Muslim site and it supports the teachings and principles of Islam. Even so, I recommend that people check it out.

Update: UN is "shocked"

From a BBC headline - Saturday, 9 April, 2005, 17:53 GMT 18:53 UK

Darfur village rampage shocks UN. The UN and African Union have condemned with "disbelief" a village rampage by militiamen in Sudan's Darfur region. I won't say anything.... It's useless!

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