From the Baltimore Sun, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
WASHINGTON - The unfolding of events in Sudan in recent months - to say nothing of years - has provided conspicuous evidence of the brutality that is inevitably unleashed by Islamist regimes.Long engaged in a bloody drive to impose the dictates of radical Islam on Christians and animists in the southern part of the country, Khartoum has more recently turned on its co-religionists in the Darfur region in a genocidal campaign. Despite the attention being paid to Sudan, the West has yet to recognize that jihad is being waged for the whole of Africa.
Traditionally, African Islam has been characterized by tolerance and moderation and made vital contributions to the region in education, commerce and government. But this progressive orientation has been imperiled in recent years by the introduction of Islamism - a movement intent on bringing society and state into conformity with radical interpretations of the religion.
Sub-Saharan Africa has proved tremendously useful in advancing this agenda: Its Muslim population of about 250 million provides a massive base from which Islamists can draw support. Weak and corrupt governments and economies allow Islamist ideologies to become alluring to African Muslims. And porous borders, a steady flow of illicit arms and obscure financial systems contribute to an ideal operating environment for Islamists with militant appetites.
Read it all.
The continuing massacres of non-Arab black Muslims in Darfur are part of a series of mass murders. These mass murders are of two kinds.
There are, in the main, attacks by Muslims on Christian Africans, in the southern Sudan, in Nigeria, even in the Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal and in the odd bomb that is set off in Capetown. The war for Biafran independence, which lasted from 1967-1969, resulted from a series of prior attacks on Christians all over the Muslim north, as well as years of stealing of oil wealth by the Muslim-dominated military, chiefly but not entirely Hausa. In the Sudan, which was a half-century earlier 70% populated by blacks, the Arabs have steadily encroached, and encroached, and encroached, and have been killing or enslaving Africans for many decades, but on a much larger scale during the last 20 years. In the Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal, the populations of Christians are under assault. Events were not helped by the Arab money that flowed in to buy the loyalty of diplomats and rulers, not only at the U.N., but at the Organization of African Unity. A few Christian leaders were bribed to become Muslims; some Muslim rulers were sent arms, or given refuge once they were booted out (Idi Amin is an example of both).
The second kind of attack is that of Arab Muslims, for whom Islam is a vehicle of Arab supremacist ideology (requiring the learning of Arabic, and the adoption of an Arabic name, if one wishes to be a "real" Muslim). Attacks on the Kurds, for example, in Iraq, or attacks on the Berbers (deprived of Amazigh culture, and punished for speaking Berber, or Tamazight, a situation which led the Berber francophone writer Kateb Yacine to denounce, like other Berbers, Kurds, and even Malay Muslims, "Arab imperialism" within Islam).
Both kinds of Jihad, on non-Muslims for being Infidels, and on non-Arab Muslims for being 1) black and therefore inferior to Arabs and 2) black and non-Arab and therefore an inferior kind of Muslim, whatever universalist claims are presented to win converts (or "reverts") in Europe and America, cna be seen in the Sudan. Nearly 2 million Christian and animist blacks have been murdered, direclty or indirectly, in the South. Now we are told that not 70,000, but possibly as many as 350,000 people, have been murdered in Darfur, and millions forced to flee as refugees. All this is taking place before the world's eyes, and with the U.N.'s full knowledge -- the U.N. which cannot do anything whenever Muslim aggression is involved, for it is largely controlled by an Islamintern International (as John Bolton will soon discover -- and he might begin with googling "jihadwatch" and "Edward Mortimer" to find out more about Kofi Annan's Chief Speechwriter and "Senior Adviser").
Can the American government not see that it must do something dramatic to show that the Christians of black Africa are not being abandoned? That something has been suggested here many times before. The so-called "Peace Treaty" between the Khartoum government and the Sudanese blacks in the south will end, broken as soon as the Sudanese government thinks it can get away with breaking it, and of course following the model of Muhammad and the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya. When that day comes, the Americans should immediately send in a small force (no more thn 5000 marines) ready, and able, to seize the entire south (and with airpower, to keep the Sudanese army at bay -- no last cavalry charge at Omdurman, for as Kipling wrote, we have the Gatling-gun and they have not -- or its modern equivalent, and they would be ill-advised to try anything, with or without the supporting hysteria of the Arab League).
Seize the south, and possibly Darfur as well, all for humanitarian reasons. And the Americans will stay, until such time as a referendum on independence (it is ludicrous to maintain that the non-Arab blacks, in the south and in the West, have anything much in common with the murderous Arabs of the north -- one does not require those who have been subject, for absolutely no reason except the Jihad and the attitudes engendered by Islam, to murderous attack over many years, to remain in the same nation-state with the attackers) can be held.
And it will, and it will be for independence, and there will in the meantime have been an endless series of pictures of deliriously happy African faces greeting their American rescuers. And who will be able to complain? The Arab League, demanding the Divine Right of oppressing non-Arabs? The E.U., stepping in to support the Arab League as it demands the Divine Right of oppressing non-Arabs? The U.N., as it supports the E.U. and the Arab League in demanding the etcetera?
And where better, for a permanent base (other than the Sinai, but that was foolishly given away, under American pressure, by the naive and vulnerable Begin, his hands tied by Brtzezinsky and Carter at every turn in those ludicrous Camp David negotiations)than the southern Sudan -- a base that unlike those hoped-for in Iraq, do not confront the permanent hostility that Islam inculcates toward all Infidels. A base from which most of North Africa and all of the Middle East would be within easy reach. A base safe from a Muslim population.
Just as soon as the Sudanese government gives an excuse -- and it will, it must -- the Americans should be ready to step in and rescue. And the lesson will not be lost in West or in East Africa, among the Ibo or among the Christians of Cote d'Ivoire (betrayed by the French, more interested in placating Muslims than in protecting the black Christians, as Laurent Gbagbo discovered).
Hugh: There was an armistace signed between the Sudanese government and southern forces not too long ago.
While my sympathies are 150% with southern Sudan and heavily with the Fur, and certainly think that moral support does need to be given to the Christianization of Africa, I would like to point out that the African continent is huge. The whole of the USA would fit two times or so into the Sahara Desert, for starters; the area of Sudan is roughly equivalent to the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi; and a lot of Africa's leadership was educated by a rotten European intelligentsia that even now regards Stalin as progressive and rues the fact that France and Italy got liberated by US forces in WWII. The lingering influence of Soviet and Chinese Marxism in Africa is also extensive.
Frankly, I'm all for putting OBL's skeleton in an American medical museum, and calling it a day--and also folding our foreign aid plant and telling the rest of the world that if they can't help themselves, they'll have to accept the possibility of Christian proselytizing (that's the segment of the population that's used to supporting non-political things out of its own pockets). For a very large part of the world, we Americans simply cannot do right, so we do not owe them a wooden nickel.
Except for the situation in Sudan, most Americans know very little about the jihads going on in Nigeria and other African countries. If there are any web pages devoted to the entire history of jihads in Africa, I would like to know about them.