ROME, MAY 10, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Violence has produced thousands of victims in the war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan, where "a process of Arabization" is under way, says a Catholic bishop. In a U.N. report, Bishop Macram Max Gassis of El Obeid gave evidence of the subjection of Darfur to a regime of terror by the Khartoum government. The strife is reckoned to have claimed 10,000 victims, forced 800,000 to 1 million from their homes, and left a legacy of 130,000 refugees in neighboring Chad. Since February 2003, Darfur has been the scene of violent confrontations between two rebel groups -- the Justice and Equality Movement, and the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement -- and the Sudanese regular army. In leaving Iraq to its own devices, which I devoutly hope will happen soon, the American government has to do certain things to ensure that the Muslims of the world understand that this is not a retreat, but now a war in every direction, using more cunning, and no longer a misallocation of men, money, and materiel to win unwinnable hearts and minds. Some of things that should be done: 1) The "money weapon." Raise taxes on gasoline, and announce that they will continue to go up, and that this is a measure undertaken deliberately to capture some monopoly rents from OPEC, to make other energy sources more attractive, with the declared aim of depriving "Jihadists" of income to pay for arms and those "institutions" (the words "mosques" and "madrasas" can be left unsaid but understood) that help to spread Jihad. 2) Infidel foreign aid to Muslims.Cut off all American id to Egypt and Jordan and other Muslim countries. Let Pakistan be made to understand that after the years of double-dealing, and of A. Q. Khan and the ISI scandal, Pakistan is lucky to be left unscathed.. Let the economic failures of Islam be apparent, and require Muslims to work for their money, or at least not to be able to blackmail ("give us the aid or we'll turn radical") the West any further. The $60 billion already sent to Egypt has already been wasted; no more. If they want aid, let them rely on rich Muslims rather than extorted "zakat" from Infidel states 3) Re Arab propaganda: eliminate, or at least damage, the ArabSat network, so that Al-Jazeera and similar stations no longer run, or at least cannot be beamed into the dar al-Harb -- 180,000 subscribers in the U.S. alone to Al-Jazeera are 180,000 enemies of Infidels; there is no other conceivable interpretaton. 4) In Europe, take money that would otherwise have gone to Iraq, and spend it in conducting campaigns to establish a centrist, rational, appealing anti-Islamic immigration movement, that focuses on the threat of Islam to skepticism, rationalism, the artistic achievements of Western civilization -- and that make the lives of Infidels in their own countries more unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous than they would be without such immigration. All measures, including expulsion, should be discussed in a reasonable and unintimidated manner. Subventions to newspapers, journalists, other media outlets, and to political figures -- on the model of what was done with the anti-Communist left and right after World War II in western Europe --- as well as promotion, and wide distribution and broadcasting, of the testimony of former Muslims as to the reality of Muslim doctrine and Muslim practice (ex-Muslims who were either born into Islam, or for some reason, such as marriage, converted into it). Let everyone have dinned into his skull the reality of Islamic tenets, the complete, nearly totalitarian, regulation of human life that it purports to prescribe, the immutability of its texts, both Qur'an and hadith, and the inculcated hostility, even hatred, for all Infidels. The American government may wish to sponsor studies of those students and faculty who will study aspects of Jihad, in time and space, and of dhimmitude under different Muslim regimes. In that way, a cadre of experts -- quite different from the army of apologists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who either mislead as the nature of Islam (Esposito, Yvonne Haddad, John Voll, Michael Sells, etc.) or try to deflect attention away from the tenets of Islam to the "Palestine" problem (Rashid Khalidi, Fawaz Gerges, Shibley Telhami) as the putative source of Arab hostility, and not 1400 years of Islamic teachings about Infidels, and Muslim fury that they do not "dominate" as, by rights, they should. If most universities have now entrenched and tenured apologists, then institutes funded by the government and private foundastions can supply the experts who are needed, so that they, and not the apologists, will appear on NPR, the BBC, and everywhere that opinion can be molded, by the truth, or by nonsense and lies. 5) Bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Nothing should get in the way of this, not embarrassment over the WMD business in Iraq, not worry that it might be used by the current Iranian regime to rally support (actually, the attaining of such weaponry would guarantee their permanence in power; the removal of such weaponry would be a blow to their public image from which they would not recover). 6) And finally, coming back to the beginning, by swerve of bend in the Finnegans Wake manner, the Sudan. Here no more than 5,000 American soldiers could seize the southern Sudan, and protect the southern blacks, and now those in Darfur, from further persecution, rape, murder, enslavement, and deliberate mass starvation. And what would the UN do -- could Kofi Annan, who did nothing during the Rwandan massacres, dare to object? Could the Arab League demand that Americans leave becaue the northern Arabs have a divine right to rape and kill the southern blacks? Could the EU regard the southern blacks in the Sudan, as they have allowed themselves to regard the Israelis (who also have suffered 56 years of Jihad against their tiny Infidel state), as unworthy of sympathy and support? While the Israelis have been depicted as "European colonialists" (nonsense, but effective nonsense) it is a lot harder to do that with the Dinka, the Nuer, and the other black tribes of southern and western Sudan. By seizing the southern Sudan, with very little expenditure of men, money, and materiel, and protecting its people until, after a referendum, they can establish their own independent state carved out of the south, with its own oil deposits, its fertile agricultural land, which might in turn help, with American effort, the Ethiopians. An American base in this new state would, so close to the MIddle East, allow Americans to leave Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and from this new base, cover both the Middle East and North Africa much more effectively. And in the future, if and when Egypt, for example, attempts to threaten Ethiopia over its planned diversion of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigration projects, American forces in this new country, deliberately and spectacularly carved -- for humanitarian purposes, mind you, that are as obvious as they can be -- out of what the Arabs see as dar al-Islam -- will hearten African Christians in Kenya, Tanzania, all the way across to Nigeria (where the southern Christians may yet again have to demand their independent Biafra). These five measures, if undertaken, will do far more than any "democracy" that might, after another fifty years of American effort, and hundreds of billions of American dollars, and tens of thousands of American casualties, and the wearing-out of American helicopters, Humvees, and tanks, and the dangerous fixation on "democracy" and not on Islam itself as the source of the problem, an Islam that can and must be contained because it cannot, by its very belief-system, be reformed, be established in Iraq. The Sudan, not Iraq, is the place to do something that will actually hearten Christians in Africa, help to diminish the appeal of Islam in Africa and elsewhere, threaten physically with American bases the greatest sources of our danger (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria), and get our men further away from Iran, which will give Iranian reformers more space in which to work their own brand of de-islamization (and perhpas, who knows, also bring it to the benighted Shi'a of Iraq).
In a U.N. report, Bishop Macram Max Gassis of El Obeid gave evidence of the subjection of Darfur to a regime of terror by the Khartoum government.
The strife is reckoned to have claimed 10,000 victims, forced 800,000 to 1 million from their homes, and left a legacy of 130,000 refugees in neighboring Chad.
Since February 2003, Darfur has been the scene of violent confrontations between two rebel groups -- the Justice and Equality Movement, and the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement -- and the Sudanese regular army.