Arab Media Blind to Darfur

[Warning: Clicking on the link will take you to al-Jazeera's website. Be warned.] From Arab Media Blind to Darfur:

More than 200,000 people have died in the conflict in Darfur, with millions more turned into refugees, but for many in the Arab world, the humanitarian catastrophe may as well not exist.

Lawrence Pintak, a journalist and Arab media expert, says the problem with Darfur is that it does not fit the template of Arabs being the victims and other people the aggressors. Thus, the Arab media have largely ignored it.

"I think we are in a state of denial," says Jehad Khazen, a former editor of al-Hayat newspaper.

"People say 'the Arabs or Muslims - cannot do this - it did not happen' - but they did do this and it did happen - and they have to reconcile themselves to the fact."

Sudan Leader to Be Charged with Genocide

Via Sudan Leader to Be Charged with Genocide:

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will seek an arrest warrant Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with genocide and crimes against humanity for a campaign of violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Darfur region during the past five years.

The action by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, will mark the first time that the tribunal in The Hague charges a sitting head of state with such crimes. Khartoum organized a local Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, and conducted a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that has left more than 300,000 people dead and has driven more than two million more from their homes. The Bush administration accused the government of genocide.

An Unlikely Refuge: Muslims Fleeing Darfur Rebuilding Lives in Israel

If Israel is such a horrible country, tell me why Muslims are seeking refuge there. From An Unlikely Refuge: Muslims Fleeing Darfur Rebuilding Lives in Israel:

"Even though we're Muslim, the Islamic world has done nothing to protect us," said Yassin, one of the first Darfurians to make it into Israel across the border from Egypt and now director of Bnei Darfur [Sons of Darfur], which assists Sudanese refugees to integrate into Israeli society. "All of the Arab countries support the government of Sudan - our problem is with the Arab League," he said. As far as Yassin is concerned, Israel has provided for his people in a way that no Arab country would - and for that he's eternally grateful.

Darfur Rebel Movement Opens Israel Office

Via The MEMRI Blog:

Sudan Liberation Amy/Movement (SLA/M) leader Abd Al-Wahid Al-Nur has announced that Darfur refugees who received asylum in Israel recently opened an SLA/M office. He also praised the Israeli government for helping the refugees, and said that the SLA/M's vision was of a liberal, democratic Sudan that would normalize relations with Israel.

More Muslim mythology

Keep moving folks, nothing to see here but more mendacity and stupidity from the Arab world.

What is it this time?

Sudan's defense minister, Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, has accused "24 Jewish organizations" of "fueling the conflict in Darfur" last week in an interview with a Saudi newspaper. Hussein was interviewed during an official state-visit to the Saudi kingdom last week. "The Darfur issue is being fuelled by 24 Jewish organizations, who are making the largest amount of noise over the issue, and using the Holocaust in their campaigning," the Sudanese defense minister replied. We already know that lying is not prohibited in Islam and in fact, may be used as a weapon in order to defeat one's enemy.

The Arabic word, "Takeyya", means "to prevent," or guard against. The principle of Al Takeyya conveys the understanding that Muslims are permitted to lie as a preventive measure against anticipated harm to one's self or fellow Muslims. This principle gives Muslims the liberty to lie under circumstances that they perceive as life threatening. They can even deny the faith, if they do not mean it in their hearts. Al-Takeyya is based on the following Quranic verse:

"Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah: except by way of precaution (prevention), that ye may Guard yourselves from them (prevent them from harming you.) But Allah cautions you (To remember) Himself; for the final goal is to Allah." Surah 3: 28

Regardless of this verse, the fact of the matter is that the International Criminal Court recently issued warrants for the arrest of Ahmed Haroun, the minister for humanitarian affairs of Sudan, and Ali Kosheib, a leader of that country’s notorious janjaweed militia. The Sudanese government has refused to hand over the two for prosecution. Charges include murder, rape, torture and "imprisonment or severe deprivation of liberty." Severe deprivation of liberty is a euphemism for slavery. Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly observed not long ago that in Sudan, "slavery, sanctioned by religious zealots, ravaged the southern parts of the country and much of the west as well."

The government of Sudan and allied Arab militia, called Janjaweed, are implementing a strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement of civilians. The victims of the ongoing war crimes are non-Arab African people who have lived in the Darfur region for centuries.

To be sure, there is no doubt that Islam's selective indignation and projection (mostly toward Israel) on the matter of terror and mass murder is hypocritical. The same Muslims that complain that Arabs are victimized by Israel are totally silent with regard to the Arab Muslim extermination of mostly indigent Africans in Sudan.

Maybe because there are no Westerners or Israelis to be blamed, the crisis in Darfur, in northwestern Sudan, has commanded little international attention - until now. But the proof is in the pudding because the latest word out is that Ahmed Haroun and Ali Kosheib didn't work for any Jewish organizations and they are Janjaweed inspired Muslims and - well, 'nuff said.

For more information on what else Islam says, see this.

Report: Syria Tested Chemical Arms on Civilians in Darfur

Report: Syria Tested Chemical Arms on Civilians in Darfur (AFP/Channel News Asia-Singapore)

Syria tested chemical weapons on civilians in Sudan's Darfur region in June and killed dozens of people. The German daily Die Welt Wednesday, citing Western security sources, said that injuries apparently caused by chemical arms were found on the bodies of the victims. The weapons tests were undertaken following a military exercise between Syria and Sudan. Syrian officers were reported to have met in May with Sudanese military leaders in Khartoum.

The Arab media's indifference to the violence in Sudan

Folks, MEMRI has provided a translation of the commentary by the former editor Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, wherein Al-Rashed decried the Arab media's indifference to the violence in Sudan.

"They are not the victims of Israeli or American aggression; therefore, they are not an issue for concern. This is how an approach of indifference towards others outside the circle of conflict with foreigners, and of permitting their murder, is spread as you read and write about the Darfur crisis and consider it an artificial issue, or one unworthy of world protest.

"Is the life of 1,000 people in western Sudan less valuable, or is a single killed Palestinian or Iraqi of greater importance, merely because the enemy is Israeli or American? According to estimates by U.N. delegations inspecting what is happening in the [Darfur] region, 300,000 Sudanese are in danger of liquidation because of the ongoing war there."

Mideast 'indifferent' to Sudan massacre

Black Leaders Protest Kofi Annan's 'complacency' Toward Genocide in Sudan

Activists plan a demonstration against U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, accusing him of complacency toward the slaughter of blacks by Sudan's radical Islamic regime.

The protest is planned for Wednesday in Boston, the evening before Annan will deliver a commencement address at Harvard University.

Sudan's cleric-backed National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and Muslim north declared a jihad on the mostly Christian and animist south in 1989. Since 1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine. About 5 million have become refugees.

The current slaughter, however, is in Darfur, Western Sudan, where an estimated 30,000 have been killed. Most of the victims are black Muslims who do not support the radical Arab regime.

The protesters say Annan "must not stand by as genocide happens on his watch again, as it did in South Sudan and in Rwanda."

Demonstrators include Sudanese refugees and the groups My Sister's Keeper, the Black Ministerial Alliance, the North America Fashoda Association, the South Sudanese Community in America, the 10-Point Coalition, the American Anti-Slavery Group and the Sudan Campaign.

Rights groups, which call the situation in Darfur the "worst humanitarian crisis in the world," say along with the thousands dead, countless others have been raped, maimed and enslaved in militia raids taking place amid the Islamist government's "racist genocidal campaign against Sudan's black Muslim people."

The activists say villages are being attacked in the Shilluk Land and the Upper Nile Region of South Sudan "as the U.N. stands by."

Meanwhile, despite the peace accord in the South, the protesters say, tens of thousands of Christian and Animist Africans remain as slaves to Arab masters.

Absolute absurdity: U.N. Votes to Keep Sudan on Human Rights Commission

The United States walked out of a U.N. meeting Tuesday to protest its decision minutes later to give Sudan a third term on the Human Rights Commission, the world body's human rights watchdog.

U.S. Ambassador Sichan Siv called the vote an "absurdity'' and accused Sudan of massive human rights violations and "ethnic cleansing'' in the western Darfur region before getting up from his chair and walking out of the Economic and Social Council chamber.

U.N. Votes to Keep Sudan on Human Rights Commission

Crisis in Darfur

According to the United Nations, one of the world's worst humanitarian crises now afflicts a Muslim people who face a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing driven by massacre, rape and looting. These horrors are unfolding not, as Arab governments and satellite channels might have it, in Iraq or the Palestinian territories, but in Sudan, a member of the Arab League.

Maybe because there are no Westerners or Israelis to be blamed, the crisis in Darfur, in northwestern Sudan, has commanded hardly any international attention. Though it has been going on for 14 months, the U.N. Security Council acted on it for the first time yesterday [April 2, 2004] , and then only by issuing a weak president's statement. More intervention is needed, and urgently.

The victims of the ongoing war crimes are non-Arab African people who have lived in the Darfur region for centuries. In February 2003, as the Sudanese government began to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel movements representing the non-Arab peoples of the south, an insurgent movement appeared in Darfur demanding more government resources and power-sharing.

The Khartoum-based government responded by sending troops and by enlisting Arab tribes in the region as allies. Early this year, after the breakdown of a cease-fire, it launched a scorched-earth offensive in the region that, according to the United Nations and human rights groups, has taken on the character of an ethnic war.

According to a report issued this week by Human Rights Watch, "the government of Sudan and allied Arab militia, called janjaweed, are implementing a strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement of civilians."

More than 750,000 people have been forced from their homes, and 100,000 more have fled across the border to neighboring Chad, an area of desperate poverty and little water. The dead number in the tens of thousands, though no one knows for sure how many: Humanitarian aid groups have had almost no access to the Darfur region.

For years Sudan's government, a dictatorship headed by Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, waged a similarly ruthless campaign against the rebellious south. At last, under considerable international pressure -- much of it from the Bush administration -- it agreed to a cease-fire and negotiations that now inch toward a peace settlement.

Some of the governments that pushed for that accord are concerned the deal may be disrupted if the international community also presses Mr. Bashir about Darfur. They should take a lesson from the 10th anniversary this month of the Rwandan genocide, which the United Nations failed to stop: Political and diplomatic calculations should never prevent the international community from intervening to stop mass murder. Washington Post/Editorial)