Gaddafi: Israel to blame for all the conflicts in Africa

Has this freak Gaddafi ever looked at at map? Israel could fit into the big toe of Libya, not to mention Africa.

Take a look at the true size map called the Peters Projection if its not clear enough:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall-Peters_projection

These frickin' greedy, sick, perverted Islamic bastards are ruining the world, and blaming everyone else for it.

I'm really not too worried they will take over entirely though, because the Chinese will wipe Muslim incompetents out 100% if necessary, but I'm afraid that will be after the West has become fully Islamisized and dhimmified, so we could get wiped out with the bastards. But who could blame China? Good land going to waste for a grotesque Islamonazi anti-culture of pimp mullahs and oil sheiks.

No country should be ruled by a "leader for life." Such scum should be eliminated from membership in the UN.

Fitzgerald: Islam In Africa

Islam has had its effect on Africa, all right. In the north, the thriving agriculture, and flourishing civilization of migrants and Phoenician traders and Jews and christianized Berbers, the Other Shore of Mediterranean civilization, from where among others Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo came, was destroyed by the Arab Muslim invaders, with the consequences for North Africa that we can all see. It was only in the period of French rule in Algeria, from 1830 to 1962, that agriculture was revived (including that of the vineyards), that the desertification that Arab non-methods of cultivation brought everywhere they conquered was reversed, and where universities, museums, and other outward and visible signs of civilization were established and maintained. For that moment, Algeria again possessed something like civilization -- and now it has relapsed, as of course it could have been predicted that it would, into a scarcely endurable and violent place, where the only hope is to get, as those chanting crowds repeated when they came out to "greet" a visiting Jacques Chirac a year or two ago: "Visa, Visa!"

What about black Africa? If you wish to see the traditional Arab Muslim treatment of black Africans, look at the 2 million dead over the past 20 years of scarcely uninterrupted warfare and genocide in the southern Sudan. If you wish to see the traditional Arab Muslim treatment of black African Muslims, prompted by the Arab supremacist ideology that Islam carries within it, and that does not admit of non-Arabs being as "fully Muslim" as the Arabs, look at Darfur, through the lenses even of Nicholas Kristof.

If you seek other examples, look at the unceasing pressure of Muslims in northern Nigeria on the Christians of southern Nigeria. Read again the Ahiara Declaration of Col. Ojukwu, in 1969, the leader of the Biafran Nation. Advanced Christians, chiefly but not entirely Ibo, sought independence as a way of protecting themselves from the "Jihad" (Col. Ojukwu's carefully-chosen word) being waged against them.

If you seek other evidence for what Islam, what Arabs, have meant for black Africa, do take a moment to read Willis on the Arab slavers of Africa, and the Arab slave trade that began earlier, and ended later (where it ended at all) in black Africa. Do read Jan Hogedoorn's article "The Hideous Trade" about the Arab slave trade, which was far more ruthless and genocidal in its effects -- for the Arabs liked particularly to seize young boys, who were castrated on the spot, and if they survived the initial primitive surgery, were forced to endure a long trip overland through the bush to arrive either by land or by dhow in one of the Muslim slave entrepots, Cairo or Jeddah or Muscat, Damascus or Baghdad or Constantinople or Algiers, or even distant Smyrna. Hogedoorn offers a complicated economic analysis of why the castration was done on the spot, which caused so many, on their subsequent forced march, to die. He estimates that only 10% of those castrated survived the trip in coffle or caravan to be sold in the Arab and Muslim slave-markets.

And while we are at it, let us remind ourselves that slavery was never really abolished, except in theory, in many Arab states. Tens of thousands of blacks still are enslaved in the Sudan, in Mali, in Mauritania -- and their masters are exclusively Muslim and Arab. Though slavery was officially abolished in Saudi Arabia, out of a desire to placate those pesky Infidels (before OPEC gave the Saudis the power to ignore them) in 1962, it continues still. This can be deduced from certain advertisements in the Saudi press (a kind of Saudi version of the Yankee Swap; a “young girl" will be traded for a "late-model American used car." What would a Yard Sale of cast-off slave girls look like?).

There never was a Muslim William Wilberforce. Slavery is in the Qur'an, and Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia have expressly reasserted that slavery is right and just. They argue that it cannot be ended because it is part of the practice of Muhammad and His Companions, whose sayings, acts, and attitudes give Muslim believers the Sunna -- not merely a secondary source of Islamic doctrine, but one for many at least as important as the Qur'an.

Oh, one could go on all day about what Islam has done to Africa. But don't ask me. Ask a black, non-Muslim African -- one who has some direct experience, possibly by living in an Arab country, of what Islam is all about and what it has done to black Africa. You might find someone who remembers the slave-trade conducted from Zanzibar and Pemba, now part of Tanzania, where the Arab Muslims are again displaying their wonted master-race attitudes.

The Sudan was scarcely 10% Arab in 1900. Now it is at least 50%. How do you think this happened? Did the Dinka, did the Nuer, cease to have children? How did this demographic change take place? In West Africa, aside from the Sokoto Jihad, what caused Islam to expand at the expense of Christians? What caused a frightened Nigerian female journalist to suddenly leave her country a year or two ago, when during the Miss World brouhaha (Muslim protests, which caused the event to be moved) she mentioned Muhammad's appreciation for pulchritude, and received for her admittedly silly sally death threats in return?

Why did it take the French to finally end the slave trade in North Africa? And why was it -- see J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880 -- that only the British, using naval power (and staying carefully away from the interior of Arabia) managed to suppress the slave trade in East Africa, because not a single Muslim Arab had the slightest moral qualms about it -- nor does today? If it was good enough for Muhammad, if it is in the Qur'an, well then who is to object to slavery?

There is much more one could write. One could go on, and on. But this is more than enough to provide a little grist for a little mill, one that grinds exceeding slow -- but it does grind.

[Posted by Hugh at January 11, 2006]

Fitzgerald: Remember Biafra!

Fitzgerald: Remember Biafra!

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explains why the world should never forget Biafra:

During the Biafra War of 1967-1969, which was triggered by a massacre by Muslims of Christians, the entire Western world stood by and allowed the Muslims of the North to slaughter the Christian, mainly Ibo, south. These Muslims were aided by outside Muslims, including Egyptian pilots who strafed and bombed Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands -- without any opposition, anti-aircraft fire, anything.

The war was brought on by the Jihad against the Christian Ibo and other Christian peoples of southern Nigeria by the Hausa and Fulani Muslims of the north (Islam itself was spread most recently in the 1804 Jihad declared by Othman Dan Fodio), and by the desperate attempt of the Ibo (Igbo) people to free themselves from Muslim aggression. Tens of thousands of civilians were murdered --- by the Egyptian pilots who repeatedly bombed and strafed them.

Great Britain, France, the United States, all of Europe, did nothing to help the Christians. Col. Ojukwu, in his Ahiara Declaration (for the full text, google "Jihad Watch" and "Posted by Hugh" and "Ahiara Declaration"), said that the Biafrans were fighting off a "Jihad" that was being waged against them -- and the word was not being used figuratively.

Only two states recognized Biafra: Ghana and Israel. The rest of the Infidel world turned its back, pretending to believe that it was more important to "keep the largest black African country whole" even if this meant the appropriation of southern oil wealth by the Muslims who controlled the army and repeated aggression against the Christians of Nigeria -- an aggression that continues to this day, in the steady spread of sharia, in the attacks on Christian peoples. Usually the press only reports the Christian attempts at retaliation, not all that goes before -- and furthermore, describes this as "communal violence" rather than Muslim aggression which the Christians must ward off.

There may yet be another Christian uprising. All the oil is in the south. The Muslims have been applying Sharia to Muslim and non-Muslim alike in several of the Nigerian states. They forced a Christian journalist, making an innocently joking remark about how "Muhamamd would have appreciated the girls in the Miss World Contest" (which contest was closed after violent Muslim protests), to flee for her life to England. The suppression, almost entirely unreported in the Western world, of the Christians in the south, many of their population centers still occupied by the Muslim-dominated army, continues.

One way to embolden the Nigerian Christians is to rediscover, and talk about, the Biafra War, and how terrible the behavior of the Muslims -- the Egyptians in particular -- was during that war, and how pusillanimously the entire Christian or post-Christian world behaved. And make sure the Biafrans, that is those Christians who long to rebel, know that this time they will be given arms and other kinds of support and will not be abandoned.

And what would do the most good is not in Nigeria itself, but if the American government, instead of wasting resources on the ungrateful, and largely non-existent "Iraqi" people, were with a few thousand soldiers to seize the southern Sudan and Darfur, and while tens of thousands of grateful black Africans demonstrate their joy and gratitude (so different from the whining, demanding, sullen, and essentially hostile even if occasionally feignedly-friendly-in-order-to-obtain-more-handouts-and-more-American-goodies behavior of the "Iraqis"), who will dare, at the U.N. or the E.U., to deplore such obviously humanitarian intervention? And it will be a signal, a three-way signal:

1. To the Arab League, and to Muslims, and especially to Egypt: your plans in East Africa to extend the Dar al-Islam all the way through Ethiopia will not be permitted. This is the end of this little game of mass murder that has gone on too long. And Ethiopia will not be subject to threats from Egypt about diverting some of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation projects.

2. To the Chinese, signing oil deals with the Sudan -- sorry, no can do. We are more interested in the wellbeing of the black Africans whose country this once was (a hundred years ago, 80% of the country was non-Muslim and non-Arab) than you communists-turned-ruthless-capitalists-and-exploiters have shown yourselves to be. Well, too bad.

3. To the black Africans of southern Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Cote d'Ivoire, Togo, and everywhere that local Muslims are becoming more aggressive, especially where Saudi money is transforming mosques into something less syncretistic and easygoing than had heretofore been the case: this is what we, the Western world, can do. Sursum corda. We won't make the mistake made in the First Biafra War again. We now understand Islam, and your plight, better. So keep at it.

[Posted by Hugh at December 14, 2005]

Fitzgerald: Jihad In West Africa

Fitzgerald: Jihad in West Africa

Two centuries before the current American foreign policy, or before there was Zionism, or "Iraq" and "Palestine" to blame, long before "poverty" was pulled up as a root-cause, and the why-do-they-hate-us brigade not only did not exist, but would have been impossible to call into being, Muslims in West Africa were on the Jihad warpath.

A Muslim cleric, or mallam, Usman dan Fodio, led a Jihad against local non-Muslim rulers from 1804 to 1810. This led to the establishment of the so-called Caliphate of Sokoto, and to the spread, enforced spread by military conquest, of Islam.

The results of that can be seen in West Africa. There one can find Christian neighborhoods that are well-tended, neat, prettified even with simple touches (a few flowers), and then the sullen, dirty, rundown areas of Muslims. The comparison is remarkable.

And everywhere Christians are under assault. They have been under assault, most famously, in Nigeria, where in 1967 the Christian Ibos, far more advanced and industrious than their Muslim overlords, rebelled and declared the independence of the State of Biafra. The proximate cause were the mass murders by Muslims of Christian Ibo all over northern Nigeria. But the Western world did nothing to help the Christian Ibo, while the Muslims -- including Egyptian pilots and planes that strafed Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers -- did provide aid. Only two countries in the world recognized Biafra: Israel and Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah, Osagyefo, if he did not always understand economics, did understand Islam). In 1969, in his famous Ahiara Declaration, the leader of Biafra, Colonel Ojukwu, explained that the main reason for the Biafran fight was to defend the Christians against, as he put it, the "jihad" being conducted against it. That jihad by the Muslims who control the military and have largely stolen the oil wealth of Nigeria (with a little help from some islamochristians willing to collaborate) continues today.

Elsewhere the Christians are under siege -- as in the Cote d'Ivoire, or in Togo, where the more advanced southerners, often of the Ewe tribe that, like most tribes in coastal West Africa, cuts across national borders, are leaving. They are leaving not only because the crooked son of the previous crooked leader is back in business, but because of the Islamic menace.

Black Africans are enslaved in Mali and Mauritania, but not a syllable of protest has come from the Arab League about this, though both countries are members of that league. For decades black African Christians and animists have been slaughtered or starved to death in southern Sudan, and now black non-Arab Muslims (or nominal Muslims) are being killed, their cattle destroyed, their huts and houses burned, their women raped, their men all killed. And every single person who has lived to testify has talked of how the various Arab marauders say that "they are black and must be killed." Imagine, just imagine, if there were not a hundred thousand such incidents (as have taken place in Darfur) or a million (as in the southern Sudan) but even one such event, anywhere in the Western world, by a Western government.

Then ask why there is such a different standard, such fear of telling the truth, about how Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacist ideology, and Arabs among the supreme racists of history, who persuade those they conquer to abandon, forget, despise their own pasts, and to assume pseudo-Arab identities, and to take as their own models some Arabs who lived -- if they existed at all -- in 7th century Arabia.

Is the American government fully aware of the jihad that Ibos remember so well? Does the American government have any plans should the notion of a free Biafra (with all the oil in the south, among the lands where various Christian tribes live) be revived? Does the United States understand that in the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo has been demonized by the French government, but that the fears of the Christian Ivoiriens that they are being asked to give citizenship to Muslim migrants in the north are justified? Does the American government know about Egypt's bullying of Ethiopia in an attempt to prevent Ethiopia from diverting just some of the headwaters of the Nile for vital irrigation projects, and of how Egypt sees a Muslim Sudan not as an enemy but as an ally in the future conflict with Ethiopia? Has the American government actually talked to Christians from Ethiopia, or worried -- like people in Western Europe -- about the growing Muslim population and the demands it makes to change the very nature of Ethiopia?

Given the entirely predictable paralysis at the U.N. -- where the Islamintern International calls the shots, and focuses attention on "Palestine" and keeps it always off the local expressions of Jihad -- over Darfur, and given the predictable collapse sometime in the future, of that famous "peace accord" recently "achieved" for the southern Sudan (one which will last just as long as the government in Khartoum thinks the West is paying close attention and not a minute longer), why has the United States not used the excuse of rescuing the people in Darfur to send in a few thousand troops to seize both Darfur and the southern Sudan? Claims of government violations of the peace accords with the southerners can easily be justified.

What would an American presence do? And who could object? Not Nicholas Kristof -- he has called for such intervention in Darfur (he seems strangely uninterested in what happened to the non-Muslims of the southern Sudan over the past 20 years). Not the leftists everywhere -- how can they oppose coming in to rescue black villagers, whose pictures, with them swarming around and smiling at somewhat abashed American soldiers can be displayed worldwide? Not the black African Christians who will rightly take this as a sign of muscular American interest in confronting those who conduct Jihad, and who will be bucked up, from Kenya to West Africa.

And who will be angry? Muslims everywhere will realize that the game is up, that the Jihad can be opposed without invoking Al Qaeda, and that everywhere the Muslims have been on the offensive (slowly swallowing up, and arabizing, most of the Sudan when, a hundred years ago, it was largely un-islamized and un-arabized), they may now be challenged. Two can play this game, but the Infidels have not -- they have simply allowed the conquest. They did nothing to help the Biafrans in their fight for independence after repeated widespread jihad-massacres of Christians. They have failed to recognize that demography is a weapon of jihad, and the cross-border infiltration of Muslim populations in West Africa is a reasonable thing for local Christians to worry about. They have shown not the slightest foresight about the coming clash, over water, between Ethiopia and Egypt (which acts as if the Ethiopians have no right to that water, or only to the amounts that the Egyptians grandly will allow them). Everywhere we can, we should take the side of those threatened by Jihad, and in black Africa, the point of obvious entry, and obvious gain with little pain, is the Sudan.

Let Saudi Arabia, where slavery was still officially allowed until 1962, and where unofficially it flourishes, sputter. Let the various Arab League states in which blacks are still enslaved wax indignant. Let Libya, where there are routinely murderous riots against black Africans (in one of which a diplomat from Chad was hung from a pole in Tripoli and left dangling for the edification and delight of spectators), try to complain.

Any and every place where Islam is clearly, obviously, in the wrong, and can be confronted at little cost (unlike, say, the miasma of Iraq at present, where the post-invasion and post-destruction-of-weapons-and-the-regime makes no sense), should be investigated.

This is a war of containment, and of wearing down the morale of the other side. We have right on our side. Islam is a primitive and unpleasant belief-system. There is little or nothing to admire about it. Everywhere Islam has conquered, those conquered have emerged, when left with their lives, to live lives that are far more impoverished in every important way -- either as non-Muslim dhimmis, or as converts to Islam. Islam limits artistic expression, stifles the free and skeptical inquiry without which real science is impossible, and cripples the lives of women. Islam stunts mental growth. We need make no apologies to others or to ourselves for coming to this melancholy conclusion, so much at odds with the official ideology that we have been subjected to -- that everyone is the same, that all religions and peoples are equal in every way, that no one must ever ever challenge the self-evident truth of any of this.

Iraq offered one kind of opportunity -- the opportunity, which was taken, to destroy the military capacity of Saddam Hussein and Iraq in general. And too much is now, foolishly, being done by the Americans to build up Iraq's military and restore that capacity, undoing what was so usefully done. The best policy in Iraq would be to cease all these plans for $590 million dollar American embassies, or American bases that can be closed at a moment's notice through the whim of local Muslims. The American officer corps should stop being forced to blandly follow the bland, in repeating mantras about "success" and "bringing democracy to Iraq" that show an absence of the simplest and most obvious strategic thinking -- simplest, and most obvious, as long as one keeps in mind that the tenets of Islam, and not the absence of "democracy," are and will always be a problem for Infidels, as they have been for the past 1350 years. In Iraq, 139,000 American troops should be pulled out, or at most, 20-30 thousand stationed temporarily in Kurdistan, where they will be welcomed, or perhaps in the desert to keep out foreigners -- but always ready to pick up and leave quickly.

Leaving Iraq now makes sense -- and not least because of the effect it is having on the long-term recruitment of the kind of people the army and the Reserves and the National Guard need. This is a squandering of morale and of resources that cannot be forgiven and that shows a criminally negligent attitude toward the growing disbelief in the current Iraq venture that, in fact, is well-founded, and that comes most feelingly not from those who think there is no problem with Islam, but from those who think, who know, that there is a very great problem with Islam. Iraq, while far less important a matter than preventing the islamization of Europe or Latin America (where sustained efforts by Tablighi al-Jamaat are bearing fruit) or sub-Saharan Africa, could, if the fissures were exploited by American withdrawal, contribute its mite to helping the Infidels to contain Islam, to disrupt whatever unity it has, to cause consternation and damage morale of the enemy -- not by spending a hundred billion dollars a year, but rather by not lifting a finger.

Please, let's use Iraq properly. Let's stop pouring in men, materiel, money. Let's not lift a finger. And let's turn our attention to Da'wa in Mexico, and to Muslim immigration in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and -- which is where this article began and by rights should return -- to the besieged black African Christians, pursued by jihadists from southern Nigeria to the southern Sudan, and to Kenya, and even to the bombed-out "immoral" cafes of Capetown.

[Posted by Hugh at November 30, 2006]

Fitzgerald: Sudan, Darfur, and the Jihad

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 be able 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? They could also send troops to Darfur, and hold both regions until a referendum on independence can be held. That would be a blow for "freedom" and "democracy" that, unlike in Iraq, might actually mean something. For 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. That expansion threatens Ethiopia and Kenya and the rest of the littoral, including Tanzania, 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 demographic assault from within. It gets in the way of considering the Jihad as a worldwide 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 those who would be obviously grateful to the Americans for ending the mass murder, by Arabs, of black Africans? (See those photographs of smiling black faces surrounding their saviors and protectors?) 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 targeted 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? The Qur'an permanently recognizes the institution of slavery (and Saudi clerics have restated that position repeatedly). 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 and Jihad, 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 Jihad. And that is, or should be, the goal.

[Posted by Hugh at October 28, 2007]

Memo to MG Africa had several perfectly stable advanced civilizations prior to Muslim invasions onto that continent.

Since Islam's arrival, slavery continues, people are starving, and African people suffer religious persecution and martyrdom daily. Whatever advances the African people experienced is destroyed in the wake of the Islamic invasion.

The Darfur crisis exists as a direct result of Muslims imposing sharia.

Bottom line here...Islam is the common denominator in African suffering.

Fitzgerald: Missing a chance in the Sudan

The American government is missing its chance in Darfur and in the southern Sudan. The inhabitants of Darfur, if they could somehow get word out, would also ask for American forces, as some Somalis are now said to be doing, and with greater cause.

And over the past 20 years, the Christians and animists in southern Sudan have done so. But during the past twenty years the West did not listen, just as during the Biafra War it did nothing to help the Biafrans, and nothing to stop the Egyptian pilots from strafing Ibo villages. But now the Camp of Islam can be better comprehended. The Arab Muslims of Khartoum are supported completely by Egypt and other Arab Muslims. Nor has there been a single word of protest about the 20-year-long Jihad against the Christians and animists in the southern Sudan from the Arab League or any Arab government or spokesman. And that is to be expected: the solidarity of the umma al-islamiyya is what matters. Why should Arabs care what Arabs to Christian and animist blacks in the southern Sudan, or Kurds in Iraq, or any non-Muslims anywhere?

There has also been the same silence, complicity, support for the Arab Muslims in Darfur, where the inferior -- because non-Arab -- Muslims are being killed and driven out of their lands by Arab Muslims. The Americans could use as justification any number of actions by the Sudanese government to seize, without an enormous effort, both the southern Sudan and Darfur -- or at the very least, to destroy every plane and helicopter in possession of the Khartoum regime, as a warning that it must stop, and to ensure that it will, in any case, no longer possess the means to continue.

That might be enough to change the balance of forces. It might be enough to hearten non-Muslims and non-Arab Muslims in the Sudan and especially among black Christians in Ethiopia. Those groups need to be reminded, to have their consciousnesses raised at every step, of how Islam has always been a vehicle for Arab supremacism. (The other day the BBC had a long piece on Harar, described by the female reporter as "the fourth city of Islam." Her sympathies were clearly with the Muslims. Her voice dripped with fellow feeling for the put-upon Muslims, and incomprehension and hostility toward the government of Ethiopia that in her view was leaving Harar as an ill-considered backwater, no doubt part of a Christian plot against those inoffensive -- everywhere inoffensive -- Muslims.)

And such a move would hearten Christians in southern Nigeria, in Togo, in the Ivory Coast, and in Kenya and Tanzania. They need a boost. They need to believe that Islam is on the run, that what they see as the Christian West will defend them, as it did not defend the Biafrans during the 1967-69 War. It will send a message to Egypt: stop telling Ethiopia what it can or cannot do with the headwaters of the Nile, some of which Ethiopia quite rightly wishes to use for irrigation projects. The Nile does not belong to Egypt alone.

And the destruction of the Sudanese airforce will be a signal as well to the Arab countries that Dar al-Islam can not only not expand, but be forcibly contained, or even subject to violent contraction. Remove those planes and those helicopters in one fell swoop. It should not take much. It would send a message the way messages are sent in the Muslim world:

This far, and no farther.

American troops should only be sent where the end result will be to damage the Camp of Islam and Jihad in the most cost-effective way possible. The greatest damage to Islam's spread, and to the Camp of Islam, that could right now be done is in the Sudan, through a humanitarian effort to protect those being mass-murdered. Even Nicolas Kristof would have to approve. And even the E.U. and, outwardly, most of the U.N. would have to go along. Only the Arab League would still dare to express its rage at this effort to protect non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslims.

Every move should be calculated. Does this weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad, at the low cost to us? Does it properly exploit the pre-existing fissures within Islam? Perhaps, in Somalia, the answer is yes. Or perhaps not -- perhaps the locals’ hatred for the Islamic Courts will soon be outweighed by dislike, or whipped-up hatred, for the Infidels -- whatever the local warlords and those in the previous government think. That is only to be expected from a Muslim population. In the Sudan, however, the black Africans in Darfur have had their own experience with Arab Muslims murdering them, and their own Islam is rudimentary -- as it would have to be with a largely illiterate population. They are much less likely to be prompted by the anti-Infidel sentiments than the Muslims of Somalia, who have not experienced the full fury of the Arab Muslims. That is, they have not experienced or recognized Islam as a vehicle of Arab imperialism. They may even complacently think of themselves as Arabs, and continue to do so until the real Arabs decide to let them know otherwise.

One hopes that Sudan (that is, southern Sudan, with its already producing oil wells, and Darfur, with potential oil wealth -- which would allow a new independent state to be self-sustaining) will still be higher on the list of places where American forces should intervene directly, than Muslim Somalia. By intervention one means something far less than the massive, fool's errand mess of Iraq, but something beyond the odd A-130 attack and whatever supplies and training are now being offered Ethiopia and other non-Muslim forces in and close to the Horn of Africa.

[Posted by Hugh at January 10, 2007]

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/45046/sec_id/45046
ISLAM IN AFRICA
by Hugh Fitzgerald (August 2009)

Last week, in an unlikely encounter near the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado, I met a couple who had just returned from a sabbatical year in Togo. I asked them about Togo. They told me they had last been in the country ten years ago, and this time had been horrified by the visible signs of Islam in Lomé. Ten years ago, the wife, a native of Togo, told me, there could not have been more than four mosques in Lomé, and now, she said, “there are four hundred.” And what is more, these four hundred are now equipped with P.A. systems, used by the muezzins to make sure that everyone – Muslim and Christian and animist – all over Lomé, hears five times a day the Call To Prayer.

I began to think about Islam in Africa, and the steady advances it appears, largely, at the level of mosque and madrasa and missionary work, through the deployment of oil money from the rich Gulf states, to be making all over sub-Saharan Africa. It is amazing, when one considers the long history of Arab depredations and Arab cruelty, and Arab seizure of black Africans in the longest-running, and cruelest, slave trade in history.

In the Western world, when we write or speak about Slavery in Africa, we usually have in mind the Atlantic Slave Trade, conducted by Europeans, who never entered the interior of Africa, but instead bought slaves from African tribes, almost exclusively on the western coast of Africa, especially from what is now called West Africa. These slaves were brought to the New World in order to work on plantations. The Arab slave trade in Africa, which began many centuries before, and ended (where it did end, and only where Western pressure was brought) at least a century later, was of a different sort. An important use of African slaves was as eunuchs, for harems, and thus it was that the Arabs entered the bush to seize young – sometimes very young – black males, and then to castrate them in situ, and then bring those who survived the painful operation and then the travel, by slave coffle and then by dhow from East African ports (Pema and Zanzibar were well-known entrepots for the Sultan of Muscat and Oman), to the slave markets of Arabia, where they were sold. According to Jan Hogedoorn, author of “The Hideous Trade,” an economic study of the Arab slave trade in Africa, the mortality rate for the black Africans was about 90% -- that is, only 10% survived – and the millions seized by the Arabs far exceeded the numbers who were bought by Europeans in the Atlantic Slave Trade. And unlike the whites of Europe, the Arabs managed to penetrate deep into the interior of Africa, and relied on their own slave-raiding, which was always regarded by Europeans, rightly, as exceptionally cruel, and we can find descriptions in the works by such travelers and adventurers as Bruce, Livingstone, Burton, and many others.
There never was, and never could be, a Muslim Wilberforce. Why not? Because Muhammad had slaves. It doesn’t matter if he “treated them well” as apologists for Islam suggest. He had slaves, and because Muhammad is the Model for All Time, uswa hasana (a phrase that occurs three times in the Qur’an, twice applied to Abraham, once applied to Muhammad), The Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), his practice, the “sunna” of the Arabs of the seventh-century, can never be declared wrong. And that is why the Arabs most faithful to Islam, the Saudis, refused to abolish slavery, and finally did so only under enormous Western pressure, in 1962, when OPEC had not yet been formed, and oil revenues not nearly as dramatic as they are today.
Again, the “hideous” Arab slave trade began earlier, and ended later, than the Atlantic Slave Trade carried on by Europeans. Unlike those Europeans, who never went beyond the coastal forts to which black Africans brought other black Africans, and traded them for goods (see “What Did They Trade For the Slaves” by the thoroughly-reliable scholar Stanley Alpern who, not holding an academic post, is free to write truthfully about pre-colonial Africa in a way that many of his inhibited colleagues can only dream of emulating). The Arabs went deep into East and even Central Africa, and Arab slavers from North Africa went on raids into West Africa as well to seize mainly young and defenseless boys. The Europeans were interested in both male and female slaves. Both were regarded as valuable property that had been bought from slavers who had bought them, in turn, from black Africans who brought them to the coast, and because both sexes were regarded as valuable property, the Europeans wished, if they could, to keep them alive.
This is still a folk memory in Africa, and the continuing mistreatment of black Africans by Arabs, who continue to enslave them wherever the two populations co-exist, in both West Africa (Mali) and in East Africa (Sudan) suggests that if the Western powers were entirely out of the picture, the Arabs would resume their slave trade, and forcibly bring black slaves to Arabia. And why not? The Qur’an and Sunna tell Muslims that this is not wrong, but right, a practice sanctioned forever by the practice of Muhammad himself.
A brief and true relation, focusing mainly on the period after Africans obtained their independence (in the colonial period, the European powers could control whatever the then-weak Arab states might try to impose), would not be amiss. For so much has been forgotten. How many in the Western world, or for that matter in black Africa, remember the vast, intelligently-run, tremendously successful aid program run by the Israelis all over Black Africa? The Israelis were particularly good at small-scale agricultural projects, intended to increase yields. They did far more, with these projects, than what the larger European powers, lavishing money on Big Men (aid that has been described as transferring wealth from the poor and the middle-class in the rich countries to the rich in poor countries).
That aid program, despite its success was, through Arab pressure, ended after the Six-Day War.
The Arabs, now determined to win through diplomatic and other means what they had failed to achieve, and realized they could not, given the current balance of forces, achieve by making war on Israel any time soon. In order to more easily win over public opinion in the Western world, the Arabs came up with a revised or camouflaged version of the Jihad against the Infidel nation-state of Israel whose real aim had not, by the Arabs, been hidden from view before, even if little attention was paid to it: neither Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League in 1948, nor Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most important Arab leader, nor Jamal Baroody, the representative of Saudi Arabia at the U.N., nor the predecessor of Arafat as the leader of those Arabs who were soon to metamorphose into “Palestinians,” the forgotten Ahmed Shukairy, had bothered to worry about hiding Arab intentions to wipe out Israel. But after the Six-Day War, those Arabs (“Arab refugees” as well as Arabs who had never left) became the “Palestinian people,” and the Jihad against Israel became a “struggle” for the “legitimate rights” of that “Palestinian people.”
But in Black Africa another strategy was executed. In most countries, at the local level, tribal chiefs told their people whom and what to support, and at the national level, The Big Man with his One-Man Rule would be the Sole Decider. There was no need for the Arabs to win over “public opinion” in sub-Saharan Africa; they had only to win over the rulers and their courtiers. And that is exactly what they did, spreading money around, buying up votes at the U.N. and paying off African leaders to cut ties with Israel, even if that meant losing the benefit of Israel’s aid programs. The latter, after all, were not gigantic construction projects or arms deals where the Big Man could get his cut, but rather programs of direct benefit to the people.
There was Idi Amin, who converted to Islam because the price the rich Arabs paid was right. And, in becoming a Muslim, he found that later on, despite his being wanted for mass murder in Uganda, he was safe, along with many wives and children, in Saudi Arabia, until his death from natural causes many decades later. Later on, there was the man who would declare himself “Emperor,” the fantastical Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who was temporarily persuaded by Khaddafy to become a Muslim, on the promise of enormous reward:
“After a meeting with Qadhafi in September 1976, Bokassa converted to Islam and changed his name to Salah Eddine Ahmed Bokassa, but in December 1976 he converted back to the Catholicism. It is presumed that this was a ploy calculated to ensure ongoing Libyan financial aid. When no funds promised by Gaddafi were forthcoming, Bokassa abandoned his new faith. It also was incompatible with his plans to be crowned emperor in the Catholic cathedral in Bangui.”
Khaddafy apparently thought an initial bribe would be enough. In the case of Bokassa, it wasn’t. And we do not know exactly how much money changed hands, with what booster-shots of bribery required, to keep others doing the bidding of Khaddafy, or the Saudis, or other Arabs eager to make sure that this or that African country would do what it could to prevent relations from being re-established with Israel, and to vote with the Muslim Arabs at the U.N. and other international forums and, more recently, to make their countries more rather than less vulnerable to the use of Arab money to spread Islam.
While Saudi Arabia has funded Wahhabi mosques, or the takeover of non-Wahhabi mosques by Saudi-funded Wahhabi imams (see, for example, the visible changes In the dress and behavior of Muslim women in Togo and Niger), Khaddafy continues to win favor through bribery or the promise of bribes. He was elected, this past year as the head of the African Union (see here). More recently he has, outside of the African Union, been inviting black African tribal chiefs, not heads of state, to come to Tripoli to anoint him as Africa’s Chief of Chiefs, or King of Kings. In so doing, they were also were pledging their (bought-and-paid-for) allegiance to a despotic man who frequently declares – often at meetings of the Arab League – how fed up he is with “the Arabs” (as if Khaddafy were himself not an Arab, but a Berber, or a Black African) and to declare that from now on his attention will be on uniting all of Africa under the obvious choice for leader – Muammar Khaddafy.
In the same year as the Six-Day War, and the subsequent breaking – as a result of Arab bribery or the hope of future Arab rewards—of relations with Israel by the rulers of black African states, another war broke out, and continued for two years. In that war, more than a million black African Christians were murdered by Muslims, and among those Muslims were Egyptian pilots who, in their MIGs, strafed at will the helpless Ibo villagers who were in the self-declared state of Biafra. As some may have forgotten, it was repeated massacres of the Christian, mainly Ibo, people, by Muslims in the north, that finally led to the attempt, by the Christians of southern Nigeria, to declare themselves members of an independent country, Biafra. This was a conflict never understood, outside Nigeria, as a war of Muslims against Christians, but inside Nigeria, among those who called themselves Biafrans, it was well understand. For one example one should look at the Ahiara Declaration of Colonel Ojukwu, which he made in the last year of the war, and in which he mentioned the “Jihad” that had been waged against the southern non-Muslims, of many different tribes (not only the Ibo) who had tried to create – and if conditions warranted it, might well try again – the state of Biafra.
An excerpt from Colonel Ojukwu’s Ahiara Declaration of 1969 may make clear what lay behind the attempt to create an independent Biafra:

"Our struggle has far-reaching significance. It is the latest recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the black man for his full stature as man. We are the latest victims of a wicked collusion between the three traditional scourges of the black men - racism, Arab-muslim expansionism and white economic imperialism.

The Biafran struggle is, on another plane, a resistance to the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries....

"Our Biafran ancestors remained immune from the Islamic contagion. From the middle years of the last century Christianity was established in our land. In this way we came to be a predominantly Christian people. We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea. Throughout the period of the ill-fated Nigerian experiment, the Muslims hoped to infiltrate Biafra by peaceful means and quiet propaganda, but failed. Then the late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto tried, by political and economic blackmail and terrorism, to convert Biafrans settled in Northern Nigeria to Islam. His hope was that these Biafrans of dispersion would then carry Islam to Biafra, and by so doing give the religion political control of the area. The crises which agitated the so-called independent Nigeria from 1962 gave these aggressive proselytizers the chance to try converting us by force.

"It is now evident why the fanatic Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan have come out openly and massively to support and aid Nigeria in her present war of genocide against us. These states see militant Arabism as a powerful instrument for attaining power in the world. Biafra is one of the few African states untainted by Islam.

Therefore, to militant Arabism, Biafra is a stumbling block to their plan for controlling the whole continent. This control is fast becoming manifest in the Organization of African Unity.

"On the question of the Middle East, the Sudanese crisis, in the war between Nigeria and Biafra, militant Arabism has succeeded in imposing its point of view through blackmail and bluster. It has threatened African leaders and governments with inciting their muslim minorities to rebellion if the govern-ments adopted an independent line on these questions. In this way an O.A.U. that has not felt itself able to discuss the genocide in the Sudan and Biafra, an O A.U. that has again and again advertised its ineptitude as a peace maker, has rushed into open condemnation of Israel over the Middle East dispute Indeed, in recent times, by its performance, the O.A.U. might well be an organization an organization of Arab unity.

"From this derives our deep conviction that the Biafran revolution is not just a movement of Igbos, Ibibios, Ijaws, and Ogojas. It is a movement of true and patriotic Africans. It is African nationalism conscious of itself and fully aware of the powers with which it is contending.

For the full text of the Ahiara Declaration, which ought to be studied in courses on Africa, on colonialism, on Islam, and on the definition of statehoood, see here.

Of course, no one paid attention then, and almost no one has paid attention until today, to what the Biafra War was really about. It was the first successful violent Jihad in modern times (the wars against Israel have, so far, not succeeded). The Western nations, especially Great Britain, did nothing to help the Biafrans. Everyone was too concerned with doing nothing to imperil good relations with the “government” of Nigeria, because Nigeria had oil. The fact that all the oil was in the southern regions, where Christian and animist tribes lived, and that the oil could have been supplied by an independent Biafra, was not considered. And the belief that nothing should be done to “break up” Nigeria because…well, because it was the most populous black state, and therefore black amour-propre would somehow be offended, was another, equally idiotic, consideration. In the end, only two states – Ghana and Israel – recognized and maintained relations with the state of Biafra. The failure of the West to come to the aid of Christians being massacred by Muslims , the failure of the world’s press even to cover the story adequately, with two honorable exceptions – the dispatches of Frederick Forsyth, for the British press, and those of Renata Adler, in The New Yorker. Biafra was crushed, and the Christians of West Africa learned in a contest with Muslims, they could not count on the West.
Now, all over black Africa, and through money and money alone, Arabs have been attempting to spread Islam. Sometimes it is the Saudis, with those mosques and madrasas. Sometimes it is Muammar Khaddafy. A few weeks ago, as I said, I ran into an American couple, the wife a native of Togo, who had just returned from a year in Lomé. And their horror at the number of mosques – from 4 a decade ago to 400, they estimated, today, and the sullen Muslims who have suddenly appeared everywhere, with a way of life distinctly different from that of the Christians, is not something that one would necessarily know about if merely looking at an Annual Yearbook and reading that Togo has a population that is “13% Muslim” or some such figure. The American husband and his Togolese wife were equally scathing about the representatives of the U.N. and the F.A.O. and other putative aid organizations whose representatives drove about, they said, in their Mercedes – the white version of East Africa’s “waBenzi” –and saw nothing, understood nothing, stayed well above, in the sphere of the abstract, the reality of Togo, never daring or able to delve beneath the surface of life.
I asked them how it was that so many mosques had been built and how it was that all of these mosques had expensive P.A. systems that enabled the muezzins, five times a day, to force everyone, Muslim and Christian and animist, to hear the Muslim Call To Prayer. Oh, they said. It’s the dictator, Faure Gnassingbé. Khaddafy gave him the money for an $800,000 Lamborghini (in a country where the average wage does not break a thousand dollars a year). There’s not much paved road in the whole country, but the dictator (the son of the previous dictator, Gnassingbé Eyadéma) likes to rev up his Lamborghini and go ten or twenty or even thirty miles in one direction, and then turn around and race back. And though this President-for-life is not known to have converted to Islam, what he has done is allow Khaddafy to give as much money as he wants in order to spread Islam in Togo, and to keep it spreading.
If one thought the American State Department were vigilantly monitoring the spread of Islam in Togo as elsewhere in East – as in West – Africa, and if one thought that people in the American government understood that the spread of Islam in black Africa is not in America’s or Europe’s or Africa’s interest, and that the West had to find a way to check this advance, not merely by relying on private efforts by Christian missionary groups, but by actively raising, at every meeting with every African leader, the matter of the spread of Islam, and of what great concern it is, and giving them the sign that they will be supported by the West if they deal with this problem in their own way, then one might be less worried.

And just imagine how relieved we would feel if we learned that the Voice of America had a special broadcasting effort, aimed solely at Black Africa, in several dozen different African languages as well as in English and French and Portuguese, where black African natives, non-Muslims (Christian or animist), who had themselves endured or suffered from Muslim and Arab treatment (such as Francis Bok, and other Sudanese refugees), or where black Africans who have studied the history of the Arabs in black Africa, including the Arab slave trade – the scholar Tidiane N'Diaye the author of “Le génocide voilé. La traite négrière arabo-musulmane,” comes to mind – could offer historic and contemporaneous accounts of what the Arabs, and Islam as a vehicle of Arab imperialism, have wrought in Black Africa. And others could be brought In – economics, political scientists, sociologists – to discuss all the ways in which the political and economic (especially the economic), and social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim peoples and polities can be rightly attributed to Islam itself, to its texts and tenets, and the attitudes and atmospherics that the teachings of Islam naturally create. The latter requires a little work, but in the end is not very difficult to explain. And this point – relating Islam to political despotism and economic paralysis (oil revenues are not the same thing as an economy, and what is amazing is how little economic progress has been accomplished by the Arabs and Iranians, despite the more than twelve trillion dollars they have received in oil revenues since 1973 alone) needs to be repeated and repeated, and broadcast all over sub-Saharan Africa, by powerful American transmitters, possibly located in friendly states – Ghana comes to mind – where the worry about Islam is palpable among the aware.

And given the changes that Arab money can effect, whether that money is used to bribe a Big Man -- an Idi Amin permanently or a Jean-Bedel Bokassa temporarily -- into embracing Islam, or whether it buys the sworn loyalty of tribal chiefs to Muammar Khaddafy (and to the causes for which he stands), or whether it merely, in supplying a Lamborghini to a local despot, ensures that public address systems will change the lives, for the worse, of the now-imperilled Christians of Togo - that is palpable.

And the Western world does nothing. Or rather, it sends some military aid and advisers to countries near the Horn of Africa, and the rest is left up to the hapless locals.

What the Christians of Africa need is a dramatic sign of Western support in halting the progress of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. An obvious example presents itself: the Sudan. There, a few thousand troops, and a very few planes, could take care of the threat from the Arab north, and hold, and secure, both the Southern Sudan, and Darfur, as part of a well-publicized “humanitarian mission” that would be undertaken after, so President Obama could declare, every possible effort was made to allow the government of Sudan to change its ways. The very next outrage – it need not be a large one – by the Sudanese Arabs should trigger such an intervention.

But would it not, some would say, be a fiasco and a waste, just like Iraq? The answer is: No. In the Sudan, most of those being saved would be non-Muslims. And even the nominal, black African Muslims of Darfur, having suffered so much from Muslim Arabs, might be amenable to hearing about how Islam is and always will be a vehicle of Arab supremacism, and some might even welcome Christian missionaries (possibly black Africans themselves, eager to Christianize as many fellow Africans as possible – they could be brought in, and protected, by American and other Western troops).

Furthermore, there would be no goal other than that of determining the views of the people of the southern Sudan and Darfur as to whether or not they wished to continue to be part of the Sudan, the largest state, by land area, in Africa, artificially constructed by the British government as a way to extend, through Egypt, its own control in northeastern Africa. This child of colonialism has been disastrous for the black Africans. They have been persecuted and attacked by the Arabs for a half-century, and during the last twenty years nearly 2 million were killed by the Arabs – yet this slow genocide was hardly recognized by the U.N. or any other outside power, and even today, it is the war on the black African Muslims that, for reasons that deserve to be pondered, has received almost all the attention at the U.N.

No doubt it is easier for the Western, non-Muslim world, to come to the rescue of people who, as in Darfur, are called Muslims, and to pretend, as such people as Samantha Power do, that such conflicts have “nothing to do with Islam because all parties are Muslim.” But it isn’t true. The war in the southern Sudan, against Christians (almost all Catholics) and animists (about 1/6 of the population), is a classic war against Infidels. But the war made on the Muslim blacks in Darfur by other, but Arab, Muslims (or those who think of themselves as Arabs, and thus in a special and higher category of Muslim) is also attributable to another aspect of Islam – Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism.

Imagine the electrifying effect on the imperiled Christians of black Africa if the most powerful Western army, that of the United States, simply flicked aside like a harmless insect the Sudanese airforce, destroyed it overnight, and then came to the rescue of the black Africans of the south and of Darfur. What a spectacle that would be. And how silent the corridors of the U.N. would be, where the representatives of the Arabs and organized Islam would have a hard time receiving a sympathetic hearing, and even the attempt might finally cause a rift with the black African countries that, ever since the bribery by the Arabs that followed the Six-Day War, might now split, finally, with the forces of Islam, and the local Big Men who have been the bought-and-paid-for agents of Islam, whether or not they actually have themselves converted.

Just how would the sputtering members of the Arab League publicly demand that the Western powers withdraw their handful of troops – so clearly welcomed by the populace that would benefit from its protection from Arab depredations and mass murder? Could they invoke the divine right of Arabs to continue to commit mass murder, or to be in a position to do so if the spirit again so moved them? It wouldn’t look good. The Arabs would be in an impossible position, and they would know it, and so would black Africa. Khaddafy would rant and rave, and so what? Why wait until the complete cleansing of Darfur is accomplished, and the Arabs have moved in? Why wait until, as we all know will happen, the Arabs of Khartoum renege, when the southerners vote for independence, and instead of allowing such a result, renew their war against the black Africans of the southern Sudan?

Is there, anywhere in the Pentagon, or the State Department, an office where people are working to figure out how to halt the advance of Islam here and there and everywhere? If there is, they might start with the Sudan. And before proceeding, they might refresh their memories as to what the forces of Islam have done, to black Africa, in the last half-century, as the Islam of the Arabs, not the syncretistic easygoing slightly-unorthodox Islam of black Africa, has been on the march, with the enslavement and killing millions of non-Muslims – from West Africa (as in Nigeria, during the Biafra war) to East Africa, (as in the Sudan, over the past quarter-century) with the more powerful Western world doing little or nothing to rescue the black Africans to whom, at least, it owes protection from the depredations of the most dangerous, and most successful, imperialism in human history – that of the Muslim Arabs, who not only impose Islam, but in so doing, suppress all interest in, even knowledge of, the indigenous pre-Islamic or non-Islamic civilizations. (View some of the art of Burkina Faso here.)

Islam is visibly expanding its presence all over the place (just look at Lomé), in the enslavement of blacks in West African states such as Mali and Mauritania (a “cultural practice” that Islam will forever legitimize) and in East African states (such as the Sudan (where slavery is only part of a long, drawn-out war conducted by the Arabs against black Africans) of those who are, in the latest decision, out of ownership of an important oilfield that will now go, undisputed, to the North, while the southerners are supposed to content themselves with the notion that someday – so they have been promised, and so they and their Western backers seem to think will happen – a referendum on independence will be held, and if the black African Christians and animists vote for it, then the Arabs of the North will allow them to depart in peace, and with them the remaining oilfields of the south. By now it ought to be clear that the Arabs of the north will never permit this to happen, and it is better to draw a line, against expansion of Islam, now.

Why now? Because the farce and fiasco of the Iraq venture will soon become clear, and might lead some to think that no use of military force is useful. That is the wrong lesson to be drawn. An intelligent application of limited force, with the aim not of creating, as in Iraq or Afghanistan or possibly Pakistan, a “viable Muslim state,” one where the natural tendency of Islam to favor despotism, disfavor democracy, encourage inshallah-fatalism and hatred of innovation that result in economic stasis that OPEC oil revenues have temporarily hidden from view, will somehow – it’s never explained how – be overcome.

Now is the perfect time –under a Presidnent who never lets us forget his African roots – to do something dramatic to halt the advance of Islam in black Africa. If you think that Islam is not a threat, but merely “one of the world’s great religions” that has been “misinterpreted by extremists” – if that is, you wish to ignore the texts and tenets of Islam, and the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, then you will not worry overmuch about the spread of Islam in black Africa, nor worry about the arabization that inevitably accompanies islamization. You will find the suggestions I have made absurd, or even malevolent.

If, on the other hand, you are well-prepared, and know the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam, and are familiar with that 1350-year history of conquest and subjugation in which so many local histories, cultures, artworks were made to disappear, physically and from the minds of those conquered, then you may have quite a different attitude.

Islam in Africa -- at www.newenglishreview.org

by Hugh Fitzgerald (August 2009)

Last week, in an unlikely encounter near the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado, I met a couple who had just returned from a sabbatical year in Togo. I asked them about Togo. They told me they had last been in the country ten years ago, and this time had been horrified by the visible signs of Islam in Lomé. Ten years ago, the wife, a native of Togo, told me, there could not have been more than four mosques in Lomé, and now, she said, “there are four hundred.” And what is more, these four hundred are now equipped with P.A. systems, used by the muezzins to make sure that everyone – Muslim and Christian and animist – all over Lomé, hears five times a day the Call To Prayer.

I began to think about Islam in Africa, and the steady advances it appears, largely, at the level of mosque and madrasa and missionary work, through the deployment of oil money from the rich Gulf states, to be making all over sub-Saharan Africa. It is amazing, when one considers the long history of Arab depredations and Arab cruelty, and Arab seizure of black Africans in the longest-running, and cruelest, slave trade in history.

In the Western world, when we write or speak about Slavery in Africa, we usually have in mind the Atlantic Slave Trade, conducted by Europeans, who never entered the interior of Africa, but instead bought slaves from African tribes, almost exclusively on the western coast of Africa, especially from what is now called West Africa. These slaves were brought to the New World in order to work on plantations. The Arab slave trade in Africa, which began many centuries before, and ended (where it did end, and only where Western pressure was brought) at least a century later, was of a different sort. An important use of African slaves was as eunuchs, for harems, and thus it was that the Arabs entered the bush to seize young – sometimes very young – black males, and then to castrate them in situ, and then bring those who survived the painful operation and then the travel, by slave coffle and then by dhow from East African ports (Pema and Zanzibar were well-known entrepots for the Sultan of Muscat and Oman), to the slave markets of Arabia, where they were sold. According to Jan Hogedoorn, author of “The Hideous Trade,” an economic study of the Arab slave trade in Africa, the mortality rate for the black Africans was about 90% -- that is, only 10% survived – and the millions seized by the Arabs far exceeded the numbers who were bought by Europeans in the Atlantic Slave Trade. And unlike the whites of Europe, the Arabs managed to penetrate deep into the interior of Africa, and relied on their own slave-raiding, which was always regarded by Europeans, rightly, as exceptionally cruel, and we can find descriptions in the works by such travelers and adventurers as Bruce, Livingstone, Burton, and many others.
There never was, and never could be, a Muslim Wilberforce. Why not? Because Muhammad had slaves. It doesn’t matter if he “treated them well” as apologists for Islam suggest. He had slaves, and because Muhammad is the Model for All Time, uswa hasana (a phrase that occurs three times in the Qur’an, twice applied to Abraham, once applied to Muhammad), The Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), his practice, the “sunna” of the Arabs of the seventh-century, can never be declared wrong. And that is why the Arabs most faithful to Islam, the Saudis, refused to abolish slavery, and finally did so only under enormous Western pressure, in 1962, when OPEC had not yet been formed, and oil revenues not nearly as dramatic as they are today.
Again, the “hideous” Arab slave trade began earlier, and ended later, than the Atlantic Slave Trade carried on by Europeans. Unlike those Europeans, who never went beyond the coastal forts to which black Africans brought other black Africans, and traded them for goods (see “What Did They Trade For the Slaves” by the thoroughly-reliable scholar Stanley Alpern who, not holding an academic post, is free to write truthfully about pre-colonial Africa in a way that many of his inhibited colleagues can only dream of emulating). The Arabs went deep into East and even Central Africa, and Arab slavers from North Africa went on raids into West Africa as well to seize mainly young and defenseless boys. The Europeans were interested in both male and female slaves. Both were regarded as valuable property that had been bought from slavers who had bought them, in turn, from black Africans who brought them to the coast, and because both sexes were regarded as valuable property, the Europeans wished, if they could, to keep them alive.
This is still a folk memory in Africa, and the continuing mistreatment of black Africans by Arabs, who continue to enslave them wherever the two populations co-exist, in both West Africa (Mali) and in East Africa (Sudan) suggests that if the Western powers were entirely out of the picture, the Arabs would resume their slave trade, and forcibly bring black slaves to Arabia. And why not? The Qur’an and Sunna tell Muslims that this is not wrong, but right, a practice sanctioned forever by the practice of Muhammad himself.
A brief and true relation, focusing mainly on the period after Africans obtained their independence (in the colonial period, the European powers could control whatever the then-weak Arab states might try to impose), would not be amiss. For so much has been forgotten. How many in the Western world, or for that matter in black Africa, remember the vast, intelligently-run, tremendously successful aid program run by the Israelis all over Black Africa? The Israelis were particularly good at small-scale agricultural projects, intended to increase yields. They did far more, with these projects, than what the larger European powers, lavishing money on Big Men (aid that has been described as transferring wealth from the poor and the middle-class in the rich countries to the rich in poor countries).
That aid program, despite its success was, through Arab pressure, ended after the Six-Day War.
The Arabs, now determined to win through diplomatic and other means what they had failed to achieve, and realized they could not, given the current balance of forces, achieve by making war on Israel any time soon. In order to more easily win over public opinion in the Western world, the Arabs came up with a revised or camouflaged version of the Jihad against the Infidel nation-state of Israel whose real aim had not, by the Arabs, been hidden from view before, even if little attention was paid to it: neither Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League in 1948, nor Gamal Abdel Nasser, the most important Arab leader, nor Jamal Baroody, the representative of Saudi Arabia at the U.N., nor the predecessor of Arafat as the leader of those Arabs who were soon to metamorphose into “Palestinians,” the forgotten Ahmed Shukairy, had bothered to worry about hiding Arab intentions to wipe out Israel. But after the Six-Day War, those Arabs (“Arab refugees” as well as Arabs who had never left) became the “Palestinian people,” and the Jihad against Israel became a “struggle” for the “legitimate rights” of that “Palestinian people.”
But in Black Africa another strategy was executed. In most countries, at the local level, tribal chiefs told their people whom and what to support, and at the national level, The Big Man with his One-Man Rule would be the Sole Decider. There was no need for the Arabs to win over “public opinion” in sub-Saharan Africa; they had only to win over the rulers and their courtiers. And that is exactly what they did, spreading money around, buying up votes at the U.N. and paying off African leaders to cut ties with Israel, even if that meant losing the benefit of Israel’s aid programs. The latter, after all, were not gigantic construction projects or arms deals where the Big Man could get his cut, but rather programs of direct benefit to the people.
There was Idi Amin, who converted to Islam because the price the rich Arabs paid was right. And, in becoming a Muslim, he found that later on, despite his being wanted for mass murder in Uganda, he was safe, along with many wives and children, in Saudi Arabia, until his death from natural causes many decades later. Later on, there was the man who would declare himself “Emperor,” the fantastical Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who was temporarily persuaded by Khaddafy to become a Muslim, on the promise of enormous reward:
“After a meeting with Qadhafi in September 1976, Bokassa converted to Islam and changed his name to Salah Eddine Ahmed Bokassa, but in December 1976 he converted back to the Catholicism. It is presumed that this was a ploy calculated to ensure ongoing Libyan financial aid. When no funds promised by Gaddafi were forthcoming, Bokassa abandoned his new faith. It also was incompatible with his plans to be crowned emperor in the Catholic cathedral in Bangui.”
Khaddafy apparently thought an initial bribe would be enough. In the case of Bokassa, it wasn’t. And we do not know exactly how much money changed hands, with what booster-shots of bribery required, to keep others doing the bidding of Khaddafy, or the Saudis, or other Arabs eager to make sure that this or that African country would do what it could to prevent relations from being re-established with Israel, and to vote with the Muslim Arabs at the U.N. and other international forums and, more recently, to make their countries more rather than less vulnerable to the use of Arab money to spread Islam.
While Saudi Arabia has funded Wahhabi mosques, or the takeover of non-Wahhabi mosques by Saudi-funded Wahhabi imams (see, for example, the visible changes In the dress and behavior of Muslim women in Togo and Niger), Khaddafy continues to win favor through bribery or the promise of bribes. He was elected, this past year as the head of the African Union (see here). More recently he has, outside of the African Union, been inviting black African tribal chiefs, not heads of state, to come to Tripoli to anoint him as Africa’s Chief of Chiefs, or King of Kings. In so doing, they were also were pledging their (bought-and-paid-for) allegiance to a despotic man who frequently declares – often at meetings of the Arab League – how fed up he is with “the Arabs” (as if Khaddafy were himself not an Arab, but a Berber, or a Black African) and to declare that from now on his attention will be on uniting all of Africa under the obvious choice for leader – Muammar Khaddafy.
In the same year as the Six-Day War, and the subsequent breaking – as a result of Arab bribery or the hope of future Arab rewards—of relations with Israel by the rulers of black African states, another war broke out, and continued for two years. In that war, more than a million black African Christians were murdered by Muslims, and among those Muslims were Egyptian pilots who, in their MIGs, strafed at will the helpless Ibo villagers who were in the self-declared state of Biafra. As some may have forgotten, it was repeated massacres of the Christian, mainly Ibo, people, by Muslims in the north, that finally led to the attempt, by the Christians of southern Nigeria, to declare themselves members of an independent country, Biafra. This was a conflict never understood, outside Nigeria, as a war of Muslims against Christians, but inside Nigeria, among those who called themselves Biafrans, it was well understand. For one example one should look at the Ahiara Declaration of Colonel Ojukwu, which he made in the last year of the war, and in which he mentioned the “Jihad” that had been waged against the southern non-Muslims, of many different tribes (not only the Ibo) who had tried to create – and if conditions warranted it, might well try again – the state of Biafra.
An excerpt from Colonel Ojukwu’s Ahiara Declaration of 1969 may make clear what lay behind the attempt to create an independent Biafra:

"Our struggle has far-reaching significance. It is the latest recrudescence in our time of the age-old struggle of the black man for his full stature as man. We are the latest victims of a wicked collusion between the three traditional scourges of the black men - racism, Arab-muslim expansionism and white economic imperialism.

The Biafran struggle is, on another plane, a resistance to the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries....

"Our Biafran ancestors remained immune from the Islamic contagion. From the middle years of the last century Christianity was established in our land. In this way we came to be a predominantly Christian people. We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea. Throughout the period of the ill-fated Nigerian experiment, the Muslims hoped to infiltrate Biafra by peaceful means and quiet propaganda, but failed. Then the late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto tried, by political and economic blackmail and terrorism, to convert Biafrans settled in Northern Nigeria to Islam. His hope was that these Biafrans of dispersion would then carry Islam to Biafra, and by so doing give the religion political control of the area. The crises which agitated the so-called independent Nigeria from 1962 gave these aggressive proselytizers the chance to try converting us by force.

"It is now evident why the fanatic Arab-Muslim states like Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan have come out openly and massively to support and aid Nigeria in her present war of genocide against us. These states see militant Arabism as a powerful instrument for attaining power in the world. Biafra is one of the few African states untainted by Islam.

Therefore, to militant Arabism, Biafra is a stumbling block to their plan for controlling the whole continent. This control is fast becoming manifest in the Organization of African Unity.

"On the question of the Middle East, the Sudanese crisis, in the war between Nigeria and Biafra, militant Arabism has succeeded in imposing its point of view through blackmail and bluster. It has threatened African leaders and governments with inciting their muslim minorities to rebellion if the govern-ments adopted an independent line on these questions. In this way an O.A.U. that has not felt itself able to discuss the genocide in the Sudan and Biafra, an O A.U. that has again and again advertised its ineptitude as a peace maker, has rushed into open condemnation of Israel over the Middle East dispute Indeed, in recent times, by its performance, the O.A.U. might well be an organization an organization of Arab unity.

"From this derives our deep conviction that the Biafran revolution is not just a movement of Igbos, Ibibios, Ijaws, and Ogojas. It is a movement of true and patriotic Africans. It is African nationalism conscious of itself and fully aware of the powers with which it is contending.

For the full text of the Ahiara Declaration, which ought to be studied in courses on Africa, on colonialism, on Islam, and on the definition of statehoood, see here.

Of course, no one paid attention then, and almost no one has paid attention until today, to what the Biafra War was really about. It was the first successful violent Jihad in modern times (the wars against Israel have, so far, not succeeded). The Western nations, especially Great Britain, did nothing to help the Biafrans. Everyone was too concerned with doing nothing to imperil good relations with the “government” of Nigeria, because Nigeria had oil. The fact that all the oil was in the southern regions, where Christian and animist tribes lived, and that the oil could have been supplied by an independent Biafra, was not considered. And the belief that nothing should be done to “break up” Nigeria because…well, because it was the most populous black state, and therefore black amour-propre would somehow be offended, was another, equally idiotic, consideration. In the end, only two states – Ghana and Israel – recognized and maintained relations with the state of Biafra. The failure of the West to come to the aid of Christians being massacred by Muslims , the failure of the world’s press even to cover the story adequately, with two honorable exceptions – the dispatches of Frederick Forsyth, for the British press, and those of Renata Adler, in The New Yorker. Biafra was crushed, and the Christians of West Africa learned in a contest with Muslims, they could not count on the West.
Now, all over black Africa, and through money and money alone, Arabs have been attempting to spread Islam. Sometimes it is the Saudis, with those mosques and madrasas. Sometimes it is Muammar Khaddafy. A few weeks ago, as I said, I ran into an American couple, the wife a native of Togo, who had just returned from a year in Lomé. And their horror at the number of mosques – from 4 a decade ago to 400, they estimated, today, and the sullen Muslims who have suddenly appeared everywhere, with a way of life distinctly different from that of the Christians, is not something that one would necessarily know about if merely looking at an Annual Yearbook and reading that Togo has a population that is “13% Muslim” or some such figure. The American husband and his Togolese wife were equally scathing about the representatives of the U.N. and the F.A.O. and other putative aid organizations whose representatives drove about, they said, in their Mercedes – the white version of East Africa’s “waBenzi” –and saw nothing, understood nothing, stayed well above, in the sphere of the abstract, the reality of Togo, never daring or able to delve beneath the surface of life.
I asked them how it was that so many mosques had been built and how it was that all of these mosques had expensive P.A. systems that enabled the muezzins, five times a day, to force everyone, Muslim and Christian and animist, to hear the Muslim Call To Prayer. Oh, they said. It’s the dictator, Faure Gnassingbé. Khaddafy gave him the money for an $800,000 Lamborghini (in a country where the average wage does not break a thousand dollars a year). There’s not much paved road in the whole country, but the dictator (the son of the previous dictator, Gnassingbé Eyadéma) likes to rev up his Lamborghini and go ten or twenty or even thirty miles in one direction, and then turn around and race back. And though this President-for-life is not known to have converted to Islam, what he has done is allow Khaddafy to give as much money as he wants in order to spread Islam in Togo, and to keep it spreading.
If one thought the American State Department were vigilantly monitoring the spread of Islam in Togo as elsewhere in East – as in West – Africa, and if one thought that people in the American government understood that the spread of Islam in black Africa is not in America’s or Europe’s or Africa’s interest, and that the West had to find a way to check this advance, not merely by relying on private efforts by Christian missionary groups, but by actively raising, at every meeting with every African leader, the matter of the spread of Islam, and of what great concern it is, and giving them the sign that they will be supported by the West if they deal with this problem in their own way, then one might be less worried.

And just imagine how relieved we would feel if we learned that the Voice of America had a special broadcasting effort, aimed solely at Black Africa, in several dozen different African languages as well as in English and French and Portuguese, where black African natives, non-Muslims (Christian or animist), who had themselves endured or suffered from Muslim and Arab treatment (such as Francis Bok, and other Sudanese refugees), or where black Africans who have studied the history of the Arabs in black Africa, including the Arab slave trade – the scholar Tidiane N'Diaye the author of “Le génocide voilé. La traite négrière arabo-musulmane,” comes to mind – could offer historic and contemporaneous accounts of what the Arabs, and Islam as a vehicle of Arab imperialism, have wrought in Black Africa. And others could be brought In – economics, political scientists, sociologists – to discuss all the ways in which the political and economic (especially the economic), and social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim peoples and polities can be rightly attributed to Islam itself, to its texts and tenets, and the attitudes and atmospherics that the teachings of Islam naturally create. The latter requires a little work, but in the end is not very difficult to explain. And this point – relating Islam to political despotism and economic paralysis (oil revenues are not the same thing as an economy, and what is amazing is how little economic progress has been accomplished by the Arabs and Iranians, despite the more than twelve trillion dollars they have received in oil revenues since 1973 alone) needs to be repeated and repeated, and broadcast all over sub-Saharan Africa, by powerful American transmitters, possibly located in friendly states – Ghana comes to mind – where the worry about Islam is palpable among the aware.

And given the changes that Arab money can effect, whether that money is used to bribe a Big Man -- an Idi Amin permanently or a Jean-Bedel Bokassa temporarily -- into embracing Islam, or whether it buys the sworn loyalty of tribal chiefs to Muammar Khaddafy (and to the causes for which he stands), or whether it merely, in supplying a Lamborghini to a local despot, ensures that public address systems will change the lives, for the worse, of the now-imperilled Christians of Togo - that is palpable.

And the Western world does nothing. Or rather, it sends some military aid and advisers to countries near the Horn of Africa, and the rest is left up to the hapless locals.

What the Christians of Africa need is a dramatic sign of Western support in halting the progress of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. An obvious example presents itself: the Sudan. There, a few thousand troops, and a very few planes, could take care of the threat from the Arab north, and hold, and secure, both the Southern Sudan, and Darfur, as part of a well-publicized “humanitarian mission” that would be undertaken after, so President Obama could declare, every possible effort was made to allow the government of Sudan to change its ways. The very next outrage – it need not be a large one – by the Sudanese Arabs should trigger such an intervention.

But would it not, some would say, be a fiasco and a waste, just like Iraq? The answer is: No. In the Sudan, most of those being saved would be non-Muslims. And even the nominal, black African Muslims of Darfur, having suffered so much from Muslim Arabs, might be amenable to hearing about how Islam is and always will be a vehicle of Arab supremacism, and some might even welcome Christian missionaries (possibly black Africans themselves, eager to Christianize as many fellow Africans as possible – they could be brought in, and protected, by American and other Western troops).

Furthermore, there would be no goal other than that of determining the views of the people of the southern Sudan and Darfur as to whether or not they wished to continue to be part of the Sudan, the largest state, by land area, in Africa, artificially constructed by the British government as a way to extend, through Egypt, its own control in northeastern Africa. This child of colonialism has been disastrous for the black Africans. They have been persecuted and attacked by the Arabs for a half-century, and during the last twenty years nearly 2 million were killed by the Arabs – yet this slow genocide was hardly recognized by the U.N. or any other outside power, and even today, it is the war on the black African Muslims that, for reasons that deserve to be pondered, has received almost all the attention at the U.N.

No doubt it is easier for the Western, non-Muslim world, to come to the rescue of people who, as in Darfur, are called Muslims, and to pretend, as such people as Samantha Power do, that such conflicts have “nothing to do with Islam because all parties are Muslim.” But it isn’t true. The war in the southern Sudan, against Christians (almost all Catholics) and animists (about 1/6 of the population), is a classic war against Infidels. But the war made on the Muslim blacks in Darfur by other, but Arab, Muslims (or those who think of themselves as Arabs, and thus in a special and higher category of Muslim) is also attributable to another aspect of Islam – Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism.

Imagine the electrifying effect on the imperiled Christians of black Africa if the most powerful Western army, that of the United States, simply flicked aside like a harmless insect the Sudanese airforce, destroyed it overnight, and then came to the rescue of the black Africans of the south and of Darfur. What a spectacle that would be. And how silent the corridors of the U.N. would be, where the representatives of the Arabs and organized Islam would have a hard time receiving a sympathetic hearing, and even the attempt might finally cause a rift with the black African countries that, ever since the bribery by the Arabs that followed the Six-Day War, might now split, finally, with the forces of Islam, and the local Big Men who have been the bought-and-paid-for agents of Islam, whether or not they actually have themselves converted.

Just how would the sputtering members of the Arab League publicly demand that the Western powers withdraw their handful of troops – so clearly welcomed by the populace that would benefit from its protection from Arab depredations and mass murder? Could they invoke the divine right of Arabs to continue to commit mass murder, or to be in a position to do so if the spirit again so moved them? It wouldn’t look good. The Arabs would be in an impossible position, and they would know it, and so would black Africa. Khaddafy would rant and rave, and so what? Why wait until the complete cleansing of Darfur is accomplished, and the Arabs have moved in? Why wait until, as we all know will happen, the Arabs of Khartoum renege, when the southerners vote for independence, and instead of allowing such a result, renew their war against the black Africans of the southern Sudan?

Is there, anywhere in the Pentagon, or the State Department, an office where people are working to figure out how to halt the advance of Islam here and there and everywhere? If there is, they might start with the Sudan. And before proceeding, they might refresh their memories as to what the forces of Islam have done, to black Africa, in the last half-century, as the Islam of the Arabs, not the syncretistic easygoing slightly-unorthodox Islam of black Africa, has been on the march, with the enslavement and killing millions of non-Muslims – from West Africa (as in Nigeria, during the Biafra war) to East Africa, (as in the Sudan, over the past quarter-century) with the more powerful Western world doing little or nothing to rescue the black Africans to whom, at least, it owes protection from the depredations of the most dangerous, and most successful, imperialism in human history – that of the Muslim Arabs, who not only impose Islam, but in so doing, suppress all interest in, even knowledge of, the indigenous pre-Islamic or non-Islamic civilizations. (View some of the art of Burkina Faso here.)

Islam is visibly expanding its presence all over the place (just look at Lomé), in the enslavement of blacks in West African states such as Mali and Mauritania (a “cultural practice” that Islam will forever legitimize) and in East African states (such as the Sudan (where slavery is only part of a long, drawn-out war conducted by the Arabs against black Africans) of those who are, in the latest decision, out of ownership of an important oilfield that will now go, undisputed, to the North, while the southerners are supposed to content themselves with the notion that someday – so they have been promised, and so they and their Western backers seem to think will happen – a referendum on independence will be held, and if the black African Christians and animists vote for it, then the Arabs of the North will allow them to depart in peace, and with them the remaining oilfields of the south. By now it ought to be clear that the Arabs of the north will never permit this to happen, and it is better to draw a line, against expansion of Islam, now.

Why now? Because the farce and fiasco of the Iraq venture will soon become clear, and might lead some to think that no use of military force is useful. That is the wrong lesson to be drawn. An intelligent application of limited force, with the aim not of creating, as in Iraq or Afghanistan or possibly Pakistan, a “viable Muslim state,” one where the natural tendency of Islam to favor despotism, disfavor democracy, encourage inshallah-fatalism and hatred of innovation that result in economic stasis that OPEC oil revenues have temporarily hidden from view, will somehow – it’s never explained how – be overcome.

Now is the perfect time –under a Presidnent who never lets us forget his African roots – to do something dramatic to halt the advance of Islam in black Africa. If you think that Islam is not a threat, but merely “one of the world’s great religions” that has been “misinterpreted by extremists” – if that is, you wish to ignore the texts and tenets of Islam, and the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, then you will not worry overmuch about the spread of Islam in black Africa, nor worry about the arabization that inevitably accompanies islamization. You will find the suggestions I have made absurd, or even malevolent.

If, on the other hand, you are well-prepared, and know the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam, and are familiar with that 1350-year history of conquest and subjugation in which so many local histories, cultures, artworks were made to disappear, physically and from the minds of those conquered, then you may have quite a different attitude.

I forgot to say Islamic bastards are intolerant, bigoted, misogynistic, child abusing, violence/torture/and death obsessed, sexually deviant and/or repressed, nazi-like, dog-hating, Arab supremacist, de facto Mohammad worshipping Mohammadin A-holes also.

Golda Meir, in particular loved Black Africa and wanted Israel to export its success at nation building to these former colonies.

"Almost immediately after the redemption of the Jewish people, Herzl's interest in helping the Africans was taken up by the leaders of Israel. Their idealistic and egalitarian attitude toward Africa was typified by the architect of Israel's Africa policy, Golda Meir, who believed that the lessons learned by Israelis could be passed on to Africans who, particularly during the 1950s. were engaged in the same process of nation building. “Like them,” she said, “we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together, and how to defend ourselves.” Israel could provide a better model for the newly independent African state, Meir believed, because Israelis “had been forced to find solutions to the kinds of problems that large, wealthy, powerful states had never encountered.”

Hugh, thank you for your extended posts, both from prior years and these more recent ones.

I remember the war in Biafra, but at the time I did not understand the issues. It was similar with the war between Israel and the Palestinians/Rest of the Islamic world, which never quite seemed to make sense when viewed through the distorted prism of Leftist explanations. Neither did the numerous hijackings by Palestinians terrorists, nor Chechnya. More recently it has been the war in Sudan.

It is only with the recent acquisition of an understanding of the history of Islam and its effects in the world that the common denominator to these and other conflicts has become clear. This is a history that is not only NOT taught in our schools, it is suppressed in a program pursued by those who came of age in the 60s and 70s and who have now attained positions of influence and power. The problem now has become not only how to undo the damage that has been done in the past, but how to prevent further damage by the current administration.

I salute Robert, and Hugh, and fellow writers who have done so much to tell us the history behind the news. We simply don't get it from the MSM otherwise, but it is information that is absolutely critical to understanding events in the world.

Hugh, your series of articles reproduced above stopped me dead in my tracks, and sent me scurrying back to re-read the news from Africa from past decades. I hope you are considering editing the articles into a book, or pamphlet, even a white paper or equivalent, that could be distributed widely or otherwise made available to opinion and policy makers, and to the general public.

Please read the book: "What is the What" by Dave Eggers, about a southern Sudanese's experiences. It's really shocking. The What is Islam.

British PM didn't want Lockerbie bomber to die in prison: http://reportonarrakis.blogspot.com/2009/09/british-pm-didnt-want-lockerbie-bomber.html

I've got two African friends. One is from southern Sudan. I've known him for 14 years. From the very beginning of our friendship I learned about the terrible ordeal black, Christian and animist Africans have been going through in southern Sudan to this very day. Hugh is absolutely right, the peace agreement doesn't help them much, it's only eyewash.

My other African friend is from Togo. I've known him for 11 years. Unlike my friend from southern Sudan, he didn't flee from his home because of Islamic persecution but because of the dictator Eyadéma. The present dictator is the son of that bastard and my Togolese friend told me that he is a little bit better than his vile father. So the news of his connection to this monster Khaddafi hit me like a hammer. My friend used to tell me that Islam is only a small religious minority in Togo, most Togolese people are Christians and animists, like in many other African countries. But I can see from Hugh's reports that things are changing dramatically and deteriorating, not only in Africa, but all over the world, on all fronts. For my Togolese friend it's now safe to go home, he's a German citizen, but I wonder what he will tell me when he comes back. It's disgusting. Thanks again for informing us. JW is the only blog that informs us comprehensively, the whole civilised world is at stake.

Yes, tell him to wander the streets of Lome, and listen to the sound-systems that fill the air with Muslim calls to prayer five times a day -- sound-systems supplied by Muammar Qaddafy. And let him talk to his relatives about the new dictator of Togo, the son of the old one, who did not convert, as far as I know, to Islam (unlike Idi Amin, Omar Bongo, etc., for the sake of Arab money), but was given a little reward by Qaddafi for allowing the latter to spend that money on Islam -- the Saudis and Qaddafy are the two most insidious wielders of the Money Weapon in sub-Saharan Africa, but other members of the Arab League also take part. That reward was the tippety-toppest-of-the-line Lamborghini (est. cost: $800,000). And where does the dictator of Togo drive his Lamborghini? On the 30 km. of paved road, a Togolese friend told me the entire paved surface, more or less, in all of Togo. He may have been exaggerating for effect, but not by much.

Israel, "is fuelling the crises in Darfur, Southern Sudan and Chad in order to exploit the riches held by those areas.
....................

Ah, yes--because Christian and animist Africans would have no problems with being murdered, raped and dispossessed, if it were not for those damn Israelis, stirring up trouble. sarc/off

Hugh, thanks for mentioning the conditions in north Africa before it fell to Islam.

It was a cultured, highly civilized place in its time, famous as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. One would never guess in later centuries that it was a lush agricultural area, given how things deteriorated under Islam.

And--unlike Europe on the "other river bank", as the French would say, north Africa never really recovered from the ravages of the dark ages. How could it, with Islam as the prevailing philosophy?

It isn't just Africa where the jihad of the purse is advancing.

The small Afro-Caribbean countries are being intensively wooed by Muslim da'wa and bribery.

I shall reproduce here some most disturbing news from the latest prayer booklet provided by the 'Barnabas Fund' for September-October 2009.

On page 13, they write:
"Though the percentage of Muslims is small in the Caribbean, the influence of Islam is growing, both from Muslims within the Caribbean, and by means of Islamic funding from outside.

"Trinidad (7 % Muslim), Guyana (8 % Muslim) and Suriname (14 % Muslim) are members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. St Lucia refused financial help *from Libya* {my emphasis added - dda} to build schoos, but has recently agreed to accept help from Dubai. Jamaica's power company is 40 % owned by Abu Dhabi. Christians in Anguilla cannot open churches in Muslim areas,because they are required to get permission from the local community, and when the community is Muslim, they do not give permission. In St Vincent there is a growing trend for government scholarships to enable young people to go and study in Arab [Muslim - dda] countries; some of them return strongly Islamised. Hi hop music's leading artists have included many from a sect of the Nation of Islam".

(The Barnabas Fund then urges Christians: 'please pray that Christians in the Caribbean will be alert to what is going on, and will work and pray to help their governments make wise decisions that will maintain the Christian character of the region').

Continuing:

"Islam is growing fast in Haiti. There are now thought to be around 40 000 Muslims in this Caribbean country, up from 4000 in 1993. Muslim missionaries are running feeding programmes and meeting other social needs. They are also promoting the false idea that voodoo, the traditional religion of Haiti, *had its origins in Islam* {where have we heard *that* kind of claim before, eh, people? - dda}.

"They [Muslims] say that 'Book Man', a voodoo priest who led the people in a fight against slavery, was actually a Muslim and the book he read was the Qur'an."...

"The government of the tiny Caribbean territory of St Maarten [a former Dutch colony - dda] received a letter from Muslim leaders {which ones, I wonder? - dda} offering US$ 2.5 million to build sports centres and other community projects and also to help renovate church buildings.
'In return, the Muslims *asked to have four Muslims on the committee* {my emphasis added - dda};
"while the government considered their response, another letter from the Muslims came, asking if they could say an Islamic prayer at the official inauguration ceremony for the government.
'When the request was politely refused, the government found that the Muslims had lost interest in discussing the offer of $2.5 million.
"Muslim money offered 'with strings attached' is a great temptation for poor countries and usually leads to a subtle or less-than-subtle process of Islamisation...Church leaders in St Maarten have agreed that they wlll not accept the Muslim money".

More:
"The USA is deporting many prisoners back to their Caribbean home countries, for example, Trinidad and Tobago.

"*Many of them converted to Islam while in prison [in the USA]* {my emphasis and expansion added - dda} and when they return home it is the Muslim community that helps them to re-establish themselves.

(And observe what 'establishing themselves' involves, in the next paragraph...dda)
"The Muslim deportees are forming gangs, and persuading other young men to join them. The crimes committed by the deportees tend to be of a more serious nature than those of people who have not left their home countries. Pray that their influence will not destabilise their societies" {as it will, if they are not stopped, fast - because what they are doing is waging jihad to overthrow those societies altogether - dda}.

'Pray for Christians involved in prison ministry in the Caribbean and the USA...".

Well, there you have it, on pages 13-14 of the Barnabas Fund prayer guide for September 2009: the current state of play of the Jihad in the Caribbean, primarily among the Afro-Caribbean population whose distant ancestors were probably originally sold as slaves, to European buyers, by ...Muslim slavers.