Silence in the Islamic World

The silence of the Islamic world in view of the horrors in Darfur, combined with continuing violence and other expressions of irrational hate against Jews and Israelis as well as Christians is more evidence of the moral emptiness of that violence. Instead of doing something positive for their co-religionists, the Islamic world has been content to watch their African co-religionists die and starve. It is not as if they haven't got the resources. This is apparently a conscious choice.

It is not new behaviour. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 hundreds of thousands of Jews in Arab countries were forced from their homes and were resettled by the Jewish community in Israel.

Following the war for Independence, the refugees from formerly Arab areas returned to refugee camps after they were booted out of Jordan, Egypt, etc., which chose not to absorb those people into their general populations. This was done, history shows, with the express intent of maintaining those populations as refugees which would and have acted as a thorn in the side of Israel ever since its inception. Again, the leaders of the Islamic world would rather act to continue the misery of their populations than help their fellow Arabs obtain a better life. Better than the land, funds, and all that is necessary for a civilization come out of Israel, a tiny, tiny, state than for them to be offered normal lives in already Arab lands.

The same decisions have been made with respect to the Muslims of Darfur. The silence from the Arab world is criminal in light of their abilities to help. For anyone to stand silent in view of what is happening in Darfur is unacceptable, but especially for those that would otherwise proclaim their religious unity with those that are directly and horribly affected.

Randy



Nicholas Kristof
November 14, 2006, 11:52 am
The Silence in the Islamic World
Ann Curry of NBC is traveling with me, and she asked me a good question that I’ve been thinking about. It’s why Muslims haven’t been more outraged by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow-Muslims in Darfur and now Chad.

It’s important because it would make a tremendous difference if there were more rage in the Muslim world, especially the Arab world. Sudan is now able to say, largely correctly, that most of the criticism is coming from the U.S. and Christian countries, and it portrays the objections as an effort by neo-Crusaders to invade Sudan and steal Arab oil. If the Muslim world were only half as concerned by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people as it was by the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, then vast numbers of lives could be saved.

So why isn’t the Islamic world upset? For starters, we all have blind spots, and we all tend to be more interested in brutality committed by outsiders. The world was furious when white South Africans were oppressing black Africans; the world isn’t much concerned by blacks like Robert Mugabe oppressing blacks.

There is also an element of racism, I think. One of Islam’s great strengths is the dignity it confers on even the poorest person. But the Arab world (as a region, not the religion of Islam as such) has a history of enslaving blacks and looking down on blacks, and I think there is less concern for the victims of Darfur because they are dark-skinned.

More broadly, we all see events through narratives. And the Arab narrative (and to some extent the larger Islamic narrative) focuses on Western colonialism and the sins of Zionism.

There isn’t much room for fussing about Muslim-on-Muslim oppression, whether of Kurds, or Western Saharans, or Darfuris. I’ve sometimes thought that the only way to get the Arab news media interested in the plight of Darfur would be for Israel to lob a few shells into the Darfur desert.

In contrast, a major element in the Western narrative is the Holocaust and genocide, and so that gives genocide in Darfur a prominence that it lacks in the Arab world.

I do hope that the Arab television networks and newspapers will give more prominence to Darfur and Chad, however. That would make a huge difference in getting Sudan to back down and seek a political solution rather than a military one. And as I noted in a post a couple of weeks ago, there are a few more voices in the Arab world speaking up against the slaughter in Darfur. More power to them.