MAKING THE CASE FOR DARFUR DEFENSE

Arab Supremacy alert: African Muslim refugees from Darfur scatter across Sudan to Chad fleeing genocide at hands of Arab Muslim soldiers.

By Hugh Fitzgerald

Osama bin Laden is now attacking the government in Khartoum, decrying the permission given by the fanatical Arab Muslims in Khartoum to the "infidels"—i.e., allowing in some completely ineffective troops from the African Union to "keep the peace" in Darfur.

He needn't worry. Turabi is still Turabi, and the Muslims of Khartoum are just as fanatically vicious as they ever were. They are just willing to be a bit more mindful of Muhammad's "war is deception" as they attempt to diminish Western pressure on them. Hence that "peace treaty" with the Christians and animists in the southern Sudan, which "treaty" is, of course, merely a hudna or "truce" treaty and, for the past six months at least, has been grossly violated by the Sudanese government—and with seeming indifference by the Western powers, which content themselves with the notion that there is now an agreement, a "peace agreement," in the southern Sudan, and they can all forget about that part of the Sudan.

In Darfur, the Sudanese government has made sure that the troops will only be from the African Union, and has repeatedly said that not a single Western soldier will be allowed in. In other words, there will be no force effective enough to smash the Janjaweed, and protect the black Africans being killed for the crime of being black African, rather than Arab, Muslims.

Osama Bin Laden and his Arabs famously treated the Afghani Muslims with indifference, or contempt. The Arabs, after all, are the "best of peoples" to whom the Qur'an was given, and—so Muslims believe—in Arabic. In his remarks on the Sudan, he reveals his indifference to, or rather his tacit approval of, the mass murdering of black Africans. That is not surprising. What is surprising is how this is overlooked by the entire Western world, including those—such as Nicholas Kristof—who write about the Sudan without any mention, much less understanding, of either Islam, or that aspect of Islam that makes it a vehicle for Arab cultural, linguistic, economic, and political imperialism. That subject is too difficult and too troubling for the heart-on-sleeves (and Pulitzers carefully pocketed) likes of Nicholas Kristof and others like him, who can report, who can be mere reporters, full of their easy anguish, but who cannot make sense, for themselves much less for others, of what it is they have been reporting on. They cannot explain the promptings, the attitudes, the atmospherics, that move the people who run the government in Khartoum. They cannot explain the Arab Muslim view of non-Arab Muslims. Don't expect someone on the mental level of Nicholas Kristof to conceivably beable to make a connection between the massacres of Kurds by Arabs in Iraq, and the cultural and linguistic imperialism of the Arabs directed at the Berbers in Algeria, and what is happening in Darfur, where he reports so much, and understands so little.

No, Bin Laden doesn't have to worry about the Turabi government in Khartoum. They know exactly how to delay any day of reckoning.

But what of the American government? Does it realize what an opportunity it is missing by not sending a few thousand troops to seize all of the southern Sudan (with its oil, that would allow that region to pay for itself, and deny those oil revenues to the Arabs in the north?), and Darfur, and holding them until a referendum on independence can be held? That would be a blow for that "freedom" and "democracy" that, unlike in Iraq, might actually mean something because the southern Sudanese are not Muslims, and those in Darfur are nominal Muslims who, having had a taste of the Arab Muslim attitudes, might be willing to listen to the message of Christianity—already hundreds of refugees from Darfur have apparently, once out of the Sudan, converted to Christianity. Quite an opportunity presents itself for the American government to draw a line against further Arab (and Egyptian Arab) expansion further south, threatening Ethiopia, and Kenya, and the rest of the littoral, including Tanzaniya, which is where the old Arab slave trade had its entrepots, at Pemba and Zanzibar, to ship those black slaves to the Arab slave markets of Muscat, and beyond.

But Tarbaby Iraq gets in the way. It gets in the way of properly dealing with Iran's nuclear project. It gets in the way of domestic surveillance that is amply justified. It gets in the way of thinking clearly about the future of the Western countries now subject to demopraphic assault from within. It gets in the way of considering the Jihad as a world-wide phenomenon, one for which terrorism is the least effective of its weapons.

Bin Laden needn't worry about the Sudan. The government there knows exactly what it needs to do to protect the Arab Muslim position, and it has already violated the "peace agreement" with the south in ways that, if Bin Laden knew, would leave him well-satisfied. And they are doing much the same, or trying to, in Darfur.

Those who need to worry about the Sudan are the Infidels. Why has the American government not yet taken the step—the "humanitarian" step—of rescuing the black Africans of Darfur and the southern Sudan? Why has it not allowed its troops to be deployed effectively, instead of ineffectively—to attain exactly the wrong goals—in Iraq? Why has it not created a situation in which the Arab League would have to denounce the Americans (and other Western troops) for protecting the obviously grateful (see those photographs of smiling black faces surrounding their saviors and protectors) for ending the mass murder, by Arabs, of black Africans. What better way to drive a wedge between Arabs and sub-Saharan Africa? What better way to bring to the attention of black Americans, one group long targetted for sinister campaigns of Da'wa, that the Arabs conducted a slave trade that lasted far longer (indeed lasts to this day, despite Western efforts to end it), and claimed far more victims (see "The Hideous Trade") than the Atlantic slave trade and that the Qur'an permanently recognizes the institution of slavery (and Saudi clerics have restated that position repeatedly), and the fury of the Arab League over the rescue of black Africans in Darfur or southern Sudan ought to tell us all a great deal about the real attitudes and intentions of the Arabs.

The Sudan presents a great opportunity to weaken the Camp of Islam, through a very small deployment and application of force. Iraq, on the other hand, presents a great opportunity to weaken the Camp of Islam not through the bringing of "democracy" and keeping the country together, but by the removal of American troops, in order that the pre-existing fissures, sectarian and ethnic, may work themselves out, as they inevitably will.

There is no contradiction here between a policy of removal in Iraq and intervention in Sudan. Both measures would contribute to weakening the Camp of Islam. And that is, or should be, the goal.