The Devil in Darfur: Muslim on Muslim Violence

The Democratic National Convention is about to begin. Never has the world needed a great leader more than it does today. We live in an era characterized by genocide and torture-genocides which we may passively watch on television while we are safe at home. No one can really say that “I didn’t know.” But no one, including the major powers, seem able to say: “I can and will end it.”

Like so many others, I have, for many reasons, been haunted by what is happening in Darfur. Like other good people, I have done nothing to stop it. True, I sounded the alarm about this genocide and gender-cleansing early on-and took hell for doing so from my progressive colleagues. I have continued to write and speak about it but my words have made no difference. It continues despite all my fine words.

I first published this article in Frontpage Magazine on August 9, 2007 before I began blogging for Pajamas Media. I could write this article today.

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In the summer of 2004, I wrote an article calling attention to the tragic plight of black African Muslim women in the Sudan. But my article led to no feminist, African-American, or Islamic-American campaign on their behalf. I described what was being done to the girls and women as “gender-cleansing.” My work did not prompt liberal Jewish groups to take immediate action to aid Darfur’s refugees. (Since then, some liberal Jewish groups have joined Christian groups and have tried to help as best they can.) Many left feminists remained more furious about my publishing in a conservative venue than they were about what was happening to people in Darfur.

So one hopes that a powerful new film about Sudan, The Devil Came on Horseback, will succeed where I did not.

The film documents former American Marine Captain Brian Steidle’s dogged crusade to document this ongoing atrocity. In 2004 and 2005, Steidle volunteered for six months to serve as part of the African Union military-monitoring body in the Sudan. He had unparalleled access to smoldering sites, charred corpses, and weeping women. As the genocide raged, the African Union did nothing other than “monitor.”

And that’s where Steidle came in. He hoped that if enough good people saw his photos, they would understand that the Muslim Khartoum government had sanctioned and financed the Janjaweed (men on horseback) to systematically loot, then burn whole villages as well as refugee centers; to castrate, mutilate, hack innocent civilians to death; to chain them together and burn them alive; to shoot small children in the back; and to gang-rape the women and female children. Then, he thought, Americans would persuade our Congressmen and Senators to order military intervention…Continue reading on Chesler Chronicles >>