Connecting the Dots in Darfur

Kenneth Levin, in a FrontPage Magazine interview that is worth reading in its entirety, puts Darfur into a geopolitical context, by connecting various dots:

Certainly, Jews have been more than sensitive to the victimization of others, including those subjected to the extremity of genocidal assault; yet there remain areas of myopia in drawing political conclusions from assaults on others.

For example, many Jews are aware of the intense Jew-hatred that has for decades been promoted in media, mosques and schools throughout the Arab world.  But a general assumption is that it has all been due to the conflict with Israel and will be resolved by a “land for peace” agreement . . . .

But there is a larger pattern.  For in reality virtually all the minorities living amid the Arab nations have been under siege, with a number suffering much worse depredations than the Jews of Israel.

Christian communities are almost everywhere under intense pressure.  Egypt, the most cosmopolitan of Arab states and run by a secular government, has long required its large Coptic Christian community, numbering perhaps ten million, to live with onerous restrictions; even renovation or addition to a church needs approval at the ministerial level. 

Pressures applied to Christian communities have led to high rates of Christian emigration from nations throughout the Arab world.  Of course, in Saudi Arabia no citizen can be a Christian, Christian prayer is officially forbidden, and conversion from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death.

The most horrific assault on Christians in the Arab world has been the decades-long campaign of enslavement, rape and murder waged against the Christian blacks of the southern Sudan.  Begun virtually with Sudan’s independence in the 1950s, the attacks and the killing have proceeded under both secular and Islamist regimes and have claimed more than two million lives — one of the worst acts of genocide since World War II. . .

[I]n addition to the assaults on non-Muslims, there is a targeting of those who may be fellow Muslims but are also non-Arabs. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein pursued the forced expulsion and mass murder of Kurds living in Iraq’s north, killing some 200,000 . . . and he did so without criticism from his fellow Arab leaders. 

In Algeria, the Muslim but non-Arab Berber population did more than its share of the fighting against the French in the war of independence; but, with independence won, the Arab-dominated government embarked on a campaign of forced "Arabization" of Berber communities. . . .

The people of Darfur — Muslim, but black — now being raped and murdered by the Sudanese government with the support of other Arab nations are only the latest example of Arab assaults on non-Arab Muslim populations living within the Arab world.

This chronic pattern of Arab intolerance and aggression on both religious and ethnic levels has implications for the Jews. . . . [M]any Jews delude themselves that the Arab world is prepared to make an exception for the Jews and reconcile itself to a Jewish state in its midst if only Israel will make sufficient concessions on borders.

Is peace in the Middle East really a matter of whether the Palestinians get 90 percent or 95 percent of the West Bank?  Or is there a larger problem, one exemplified by the current genocide in Darfur?