Comments Elsewhere

Dain: Rad, I agree with the French head scarf ban comment, but in the Sudan isn’t the aggresion going in the direction of Christians and ‘animists’?

You’re probably thinking of Khartoum’s war on southern Sudan, which was supposedly settled by a brokered peace treaty in January 2005 (after two years of negotiations). How stable that is remains to be seen, but the human rights catastrophe that currently has Sudan in the news is the ongoing genocide against farming peoples in Darfur, in western Sudan. The victims (as well as the perpetrators) in Darfur are overwhelmingly Muslim; the conflict is divided along ethnic and socioeconomic lines rather than religious or geographical ones as it was before.

I think bin Laden’s claims that this is all the result of divide-and-conquer politics by the “Crusader-Zionist” axis are silly. The imperialists in Khartoum and their hired killers in Darfur have plenty of their own reasons and interests at stake in slaughtering Muslim farmers. But setting the debate over the explanation to one side, it is empirically true that the victims in Sudan are, indeed, Muslims, and that bin Laden is correct to claim that the genocide involves professed Muslims slaughtering fellow Muslims.