Forget Iraq and the War on Terrorism. The left will tell you that our troops belong in Darfur, a region in western Sudan where some 200,000 people have been slaughtered by the Islamist Khartoum regime and its Arab militia allies.
That the victims are black has led observers to label the slaughter as genocide. That’s not entirely true, since a true genocide is racially or ethnically motivated. The ongoing slaughter in Darfur is at least partially motivated by religion.
Khartoum (the Sudanese capital) waged a 21-year war against the mostly Christian and animist south that ended in 2004, resulting in an estimated two million deaths.
In Darfur, the African tribes involved are Muslims, but they are not Arab Muslims, and they reject the government’s imposition of its brand of radical Islam.
In other words, the Khartoum regime is killing off its own Muslim citizens because they aren’t Muslim enough.
Never mind that, though. The new U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, says the culprit isn’t militant Islam, but global warming. In a Washington Post op/ed back on June 15, Ban asserted that “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” The Secretary General connects the dots by noting the drought conditions that exist in the sub-Saharan climate, and concludes that “It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought.”
A week later, the Associated Press picked up the global warming football by spreading the fear that “Darfur’s tragedy could be repeated in much of North Africa and the Middle East, experts fear, because growing populations are straining a very limited water supply. Data show rainfall steadily declining in the region, possibly because of weather changes linked to global warming.”
(Please note that North Africa and the Middle East are Muslim-dominated regions, and the pre-emptive excuse the press makes for future violence in those areas.)
This is the latest global warming template by the left and the mainstream press. Humanitarian disasters and exploitation will no longer be the fault of those who do evil to others, but the fault of global warming which creates aggression.
For example, Reuters ran a story on June 25 where it quoted Jock Stirrup, head of Britain’s armed forces, who asserted that “…the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington showed the devastation that attacks fuelled by political, economic and social deprivation could achieve.”
Mr. Stirrup further added “Now add in the effects of climate change. Poverty and despair multiply, resentment surges and people look for someone to blame.”
So, like 9/11, the mass killings going on in Darfur aren’t the fault of militant Islamists who are doing the killing. The real culprit here is deprivation, due at least in part to global warming, which, of course, is the fault of us rich capitalists over here in the United States. It’s our fault, fellow SUV owners. We brought this on ourselves.
The oddity here is that the left believes our military presence in Iraq, which has become ground zero for al Qaeda and other Islamic militants, is a waste of lives and resources. We should redirect our attention to Darfur, which is also a haven for Islamic militants. Only the left won’t admit that militant Islam is to blame.
Besides, Sudan has a long history of violence and civil war that began long before the global warming hysteria. The current slaughter of non-Arab Muslims is certainly not a novel occurrence in that nation, and if global warming is the excuse du jour for violence in Sudan, what was the culprit before “climate change?”
In the bigger picture, however, is the desperation into which global warming alarmists have descended, where mass killings and other humanitarian disasters are no longer the fault of those who commit the atrocities. It’s now deprivation induced by man-made global warming that is the great evil which turns otherwise peace-loving, innocent people into militants and terrorists. So I guess those who commit evil in the future can just say that global warming made them do it, and they will get a sympathetic ear from the left.
