The third in a series on How to Think About Darfur, by James North:
Barack Obama’s big speech in Berlin was generally short on specifics, but he mentioned Darfur twice. He called the conflict "genocide" and later said, "never again." He thereby endorsed the Holocaust Template to understand the conflict in the Sudan, but this has not always been a helpful frame of analysis.
Take, for instance, the Sudan’s government’s announcement two weeks ago that it has appointed a high level committee to counter the International Criminal Court’s accusation of genocide against president Omar al-Bashir. The defense committee will be headed by Salva Kiir, the first deputy president, who is theoretically the second-most powerful man in the country.
Anyone who stopped paying attention to the Sudan a few years ago would be flabbergasted at this choice. Salva Kiir is also the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which until 2005 was waging a several-decades long war to win greater autonomy, and possible independence, for southern Sudan from the regime in Khartoum.
The southern Sudanese struggle is the longest conflict on the African continent, and it actually fits the "Arabs" against "Africans" pattern (which I described in an earlier post) better than the more recent fighting in the western province of Darfur. Sudan, Africa’s largest country, is 1200 miles from north to south. British colonialism joined millions of "Africans," who practiced Christianity or traditional African religions, to the "Arab" Muslims of the north. Fighting broke out at independence in 1956, and has continued, almost without interruption, since then. During the latest phase of the conflict (1983-2005), nearly two million people died.
But three years ago, partly due to pressure from the West, the warring sides signed a fragile peace treaty and formed a government of national unity. The truce has held despite occasional clashes. And southern Sudanese will have the right to choose independence in a 2011 referendum.
I wish I could read Salva Kiir’s mind. President Omar al-Bashir ordered the bombing raids and the military attacks that killed so many of Kiir's fellow southern Sudanese. At the same time, he recognizes that al-Bashir is a canny political survivor, who is apparently prepared to finally let southern Sudan go so he can preserve his own power over the rest of the country. Kiir may well feel that if you haul al-Bashir off to the Hague to face the International Criminal Court, the peace deal could unravel, and hundreds of thousands more could die in renewed fighting.
If we really wanted to apply the Holocaust Template, the analogy would go like this: in 1938, Chancellor Adolf Hitler appoints his number two – a Jewish leader of the Social Democratic party, with whom Hitler governs in uneasy coalition – to defend him before the League of Nations. The impossibility of this scenario shows us that the Holocaust Template does not help us much in understanding Sudan today.
P.S. The Times touched on some of these issues re Sudan yesterday. Mike Desch has written of the misuse of the Holocaust analogy in Middle East policy in this important paper.
The best thing I read about Darfur was an article a few months ago in the London Review of Books. The writer made the point that liberals convinced of the idiocy of the Iraq invasion are also convinced that "the west" should go into Darfur. His point is that we knew little about internal Iraqi politics back in 2002. We in the west know just as little about the Sudan today.
Thinking we understand countries just because we read a few articles in the NY Times or saw something on Sixty Minutes is hubris. Hubris got us into Iraq. Let us realize how much we don't know before we decide to send in the troops.
I'm just not impressed. James' brother Peter is much more convincing when he lets loose on the page, and when he does so he goes on much longer than most others.
Look him up, he's on the web too.
Was James the brother of Jesus perhaps?
The Letter of James is an uplifting part of the New Testament.
It may be dropped at any times from the New Testament. So much for a good one. It will not survive in the Holy Scripture.
My guide on Christianity is the only Geza Vermes.
My reason for rejecting Obama is his intellectual poverty.
He and his handlers are an insult to intelligence. I guess, I am not alone.
The Anonymous above is not monkey me.
The London Review article is an excellent resource for those interested in Darfur politics.
It probably is also relevant that the charge of genocide gained traction when the Washington Holocaust Museum made the accusation against Sudan. I would guess that the neocons and their Zionist backers pushed them into that declaration.
The Darfur rebellion is basically a civil war that could possibly result in the dissolution of the existing state of Sudan. A Moslem state that is hostile to Israel. Isn't it only natural for Israel to try to fragment that state? They, ie Israel and their American backers, have certainly succeeded in fragmenting Iraq into probably three states or autonomous zones.
I cannot criticize Israel for advocating the fragmentation of Moslem and Arab states — such divisions will make it easier for them to fight their enemies. It is obviously in their interests to divide their enemies. But it is not in the intersts of the US. Unless, of course, we define our interests as Israel's interests.
There is more ethnically defined and ethnically motivated mass murder to the point of genocide in Darfur, than there is in Palestine.
In Palestine, there is suppression and persistent ethnic separation/cleansing.
In Darfur, there is mass murder on the scale of thousands.
While the exact parallel between nazi Germany and Darfur is innaccurate (history NEVER repeats), the term genocide is likely accurate relative to Darfur.
Its UPSETTING, to watch you join the rationalization that what is occurring in Darfur is not significant, because some of the people involved have different political combinations of concerns than you.
Richard: Thanks for your comment. I will be responding to you in my upcoming posts on Darfur. James North
I just recognize that I know very little about Darfur. I think it is dangerous for us so far away to be urging our govt to get involved when we do not recognize that our ignorance about Darfur far exceeds our knowledge.
If we as a nation recognized how much we didn't know about Iraq, we would never have invaded.
That said, it does seem that pastoralist tribes are indeed slaughtering more sedentary tribes. That this is wrong is unarguable, that we should get involved much more questionable.
great blog – this article about the racial politics of the save
darfur campaign came out a couple of year ago – and is the best
thing i've read about the darfur/holocaust template
Slavery, Genocide and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the New
“Racial Olympics”
link to merip.org
Reviving the Black-Jewish Alliance
American Jewish activism in Sudan did not begin with the explosion
of state-sponsored killing in Darfur into the global consciousness.
Charles Jacobs, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, has
argued that Jews should be active in opposition to Sudanese
slavery: “What can we former slaves do to help those in bondage
today?”[51] Israel and Zionist organizations have long been
interested in issues of race and ethnicity in the Arab world.
Israel has a long record of training and arming groups in Kurdistan
and southern Sudan “fighting for their freedom from [Arab]
imperialism.”[52] The Zionist concern for minorities in the Arab
world is strategic: by focusing on how Arab states (mis)treat their
minorities, pro-Israel scholars can shift the spotlight from
Palestine, highlight Arab double standards, demonstrate how the
subordinate status of minorities in the Middle East necessitated a
Zionist project to lift Middle Eastern Jews “up from dhimmitude”
and show how Israel protects minority rights better than any other
state in the region.[53] Given the American Jewish community’s
silence over the Congo, Uganda and Sierra Leone, it seems the
outrage over Darfur is as moral as it is political. “Now millions
of African people face genocide and the UN’s top priority is
condemning the Israeli security fence that saves lives on both
sides of the security barrier,” stated Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY).[54]
Moreover, Jacobs is also the founder of the David Project, which
monitors the teaching of Middle Eastern studies on American
campuses and promotes a Sudan divestment campaign expressly to
counter the Israel divestment campaign. As Jacobs put it, “Israelis
are put to a test that is not applied to anyone else. You will not
hear any murmur about the people of Sudan but…Israel is singled out
in a way that is racist.”[55]
Jewish activists’ involvement in Sudan activism—like
African-American leaders’ support for Israel—is seen as a sign of
“reciprocal respect” for each community’s historical suffering, a
linking of the Holocaust and slavery that can close the social
distance between blacks and Jews in America. In 2001, in an effort
to ameliorate black-Jewish relations, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach tried
to organize a trip for Michael Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton to
Sudan that would help the King of Pop “reconnect to his people,”
and then a trip to Israel for the reverend to meet with Israeli
victims of terrorism. Although Jackson withdrew at the last minute
and Sharpton angered trip organizers when he visited Yasser Arafat,
many praised Sharpton’s trip to Sudan and Israel. “If Sharpton
returns to New York proclaiming the Arab-Israeli conflict to be
nuanced and complex with justice somewhere in the middle, it will
have a positive impact on race relations in the city,” wrote one
columnist. “On the fringe of black (and white) America are some,
like Minister Louis Farrakhan, who are trying to sell a
blame-the-Jews explanation of Islamic anti-Americanism. Personal
witness by Sharpton that Israel isn’t the devil—or even the
sorcerer’s apprentice—will make that kind of scapegoating
harder.”[56] More recently, Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ) flew to Darfur
and then to Israel, with a symbolic trip to Yad Vashem, and likened
the Darfur situation to the Shoah: “I think this ties together with
the concerns I have about Darfur. I believe we must challenge the
genocide there.”
The cause of Sudan has become a way to ease what some have
sardonically termed the “comparative victimology” plaguing African-
and Jewish-Americans.[57] Relations between African-American and
Jewish communities began deteriorating in the late 1960s, for
reasons including conservative Jewish opposition to affirmative
action and left-leaning African Americans’ support for the
Palestinian cause. As an angry Michael Lerner told Cornel West, “We
have a genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in
Rwanda, and yet African-Americans have more to say about the
undemocratic nature of Israel than they do about the oppression of
blacks by blacks in Africa.”[58] But many have argued that the main
reason for the tensions was that the Holocaust, as a tragedy, had
gradually come to overshadow slavery in American political
discourse. According to a 1990 survey, a clear majority of
Americans, when presented with a list of catastrophic events, said
that the Holocaust “was the worst tragedy in history.”[59] As one
historian put it, the “[African-American] grievance was that in
America, the group that was by a wide margin the most advantaged
was using European crimes to trump American crimes against what
was, by an equally wide margin, the least advantaged group.“[60]
Black criticism of this “hierarchy of victimization” goes back at
least to 1979 when Rev. Jesse Jackson visited Yad Vashem and
infuriated many when he described the Holocaust as “tragic but not
necessarily unique.” More recently, Randall Robinson, the former
president of TransAfrica whose book The Debt launched the debate
over reparations in the US, observed, “Slavery was and remains an
American holocaust. It lasted 20 times as long as the Nazi
holocaust. It killed at least ten times as many people.” Yet while
there is a Washington museum honoring the victims of the Nazi
genocide and the Native Americans’ tragedy, “nowhere on the Mall
can anything be found—monumental, memorial or stone tablet—to
commemorate the hundreds of millions of victims of the American
Holocaust.”[61]
In the same vein, the US government’s refusal to partake in the
reparations debate at the UN Conference on Racism at Durban, South
Africa in 2001—only a few years after creating a presidential
commission demanding that Swiss banks pay recompense to the victims
of the Holocaust—incensed many African-Americans. “Slavery is more
than 150 years in the past … We have to turn now to the present and
to the future,” rejoined Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s
national security adviser. “I think reparations, given the fact
that there is plenty of blame to go around for slavery, plenty of
blame to go around among African and Arab states and plenty of
blame to go around among Western states, we are better to look
forward and not point fingers backward.”[62]
Since a number of Jewish American figures have argued that the
Atlantic slave trade and Native American tragedy did not constitute
genocides akin to the Holocaust,[63] many in the African-American
community were exhilarated by the Holocaust Museum’s labeling of
Darfur as a “genocide” and the support that conservative Jewish
groups were lending to the Save Darfur campaign. They hoped that
Jewish support would confer much-needed legitimacy on the
reparations initiative and on the claim that the Atlantic slave
trade did constitute “a crime against humanity,” helping
African-Americans to inch up the “victimization scale” and,
subsequently, the country’s racial hierarchy. Jewish progressives
have long argued that Jews are uniquely qualified to help
African-Americans in their reparations initiative because of their
“less guilt-ridden history vis-à-vis black oppression,”[64] and
many reparations advocates now see the Darfur campaign as a chance
to bring Jewish conservatives on board. One journalist talking to
Joe Madison, president of the Sudan Campaign, made exactly this
point: “Do you see that if we can get past this Darfur and Sudan
issue in a positive way that the Jewish political establishment
would lock arms with you on the issue of reparations for black
America?”[65]
The Darfur and Sudan campaigns have their critics within black
America. Jesse Jackson has been harshly criticized for refusing to
take part in Jacobs’ anti-slavery campaign, which he has called
“anti-Arab,” and material published by Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition
avoids the Arab/African dichotomy when referring to Darfur. Bill
Fletcher of TransAfrica, the black advocacy group that led the
sanctions campaign against South Africa, strongly protests that
binary: “The Arabs in Africa are African….They are African. And it
is important to understand the important role that North African
Arabs and Berbers played in supporting continental
independence.”[66] Others have quipped that the US is only able to
reckon with slavery when it is in the Islamic world. Yet despite
the critiques and calls for nuance, the Darfur campaign is gaining
momentum, propelled by powerful nationalist forces and the racial
flux unleashed by September 11.
Trading Places
9/11 was a nigger-ass wakeup call. White folks were so concerned
with the land niggers, they forgot about the sand niggers.
—Comedian Paul Mooney on ABC’s Nightline, September 30, 2002
When I heard that Osama destroyed the World Trade Center because he
was tired of having the white man humiliate him in his country for
the last ten years, I said, “Please! We’ve been humiliated by the
white man for 400 years, and you never see a black man crash a
Cadillac into a chicken stand!”
—Rickey Smiley on BET’s Club Comic View
Many black humorists have been joking about their post-September 11
“racial reprieve.” Shortly after the attacks, the African-American
strip Boondocks featured a hilarious vignette where the ten-year
old protagonist, Huey Freeman, announces that “the annual Newsweek
‘Most Hated Ethnic Group’ poll showed that black Americans went
from first to third most hated among white Americans this month—the
biggest jump in history.” But while many have noted that a shift has
taken place in the American racial hierarchy, few can pinpoint who
moved where.
Conservatives have been warning of a new peril facing America—what
some have termed the “Latino tsunami.” Samuel Huntington, who
famously argued that America faces an external Islamic threat, now
admonishes the literati to watch the internal “Hispanic
challenge.”[67] Others have linked the two threats, cautioning that
Latino immigration could balkanize America into a “Euro-Anglo
nation” and a “Latino nation” during a time of war, and that a
non-integrated Latino underclass could become sympathetic to the
Islamic world. “It is probably too much to predict that there will
be widespread fear of Latino terrorism in the Euro-Anglo nation,
although young Latinos in the United States may learn something
from their [Arab] counterparts in Europe,” wrote one scholar.[68]
Others have cautioned that while Latino evangelical Christians
strongly support Israel, there are troubling levels of
anti-Semitism among new immigrants.[69] Many may be more
sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel, which has led
Jewish organizations to woo Latino leaders and voters, for instance
organizing trips to Israel through programs such as Israel Project
Interchange.
One way the government has sought to integrate Latino immigrants is
through the military. The Pentagon‘s recent recruitment drive
targeting the Latino “recruiting market aims to boost Latino
numbers in the military from roughly 10 percent to 22 percent.”[70]
Some conservatives have argued that an interventionist foreign
policy provides minorities with an excellent opportunity for upward
mobility. “It’s just possible,” wrote Niall Ferguson, “that
African-Americans will turn out to be the Celts of the American
empire, driven overseas by comparatively poor opportunities at
home. Indeed, if the occupation of Iraq is to be run by the
military, then it can hardly fail to create career opportunities
for the growing number of African-American officers in the
army.”[71] The presence of tens of thousands of Latino and
African-American troops in Iraq has not been well-received in the
Arab world, however, and seems, in some cases, only to have stirred
up a vicious nativism. One Iraqi insurgent profiled by The Guardian
said that some rebels deliberately target black soldiers: “To have
Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation… Sometimes we
aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.”[72] The Iraq war
and the Darfur campaign, with the prominent roles of Powell, Rice
and Annan, have led to charges of “African-American imperialism”
and much racialist talk.
Despite protests over their targeting for military recruitment,
Latinos remain strongly pro-war. The suspicion that Latino
immigration could undercut the US national interest, may have led
Latino voters to be hawkish on the Middle East. According to a
Zogby poll done shortly after Powell’s February 5, 2003
presentation to the UN, 62 percent of whites and 60 percent of
Latinos, but only 23 percent of blacks, supported the invasion of
Iraq. In November 2004, President Bush was able to win five heavily
Latino battleground states—Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and
New Mexico—in part because Latino voters have conservative stances
on abortion, religion and same-sex marriage,[73] but also,
increasingly, on the Middle East and the war on terrorism. “As a
general rule, Puerto Ricans tend to sympathize with Palestinians,
because of the colonialism of the island, the camaraderie of an
occupied people and because Puerto Ricans have long been
stigmatized for links to terrorism,” explains Howard Jordan, who
teaches Latino studies at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, in
an interview for this article. “Recall that four Puerto Ricans and
Nelson Mandela were on the State Department’s terrorist list.
Dominicans are similar because of the 1965 American invasion of the
Dominican Republic. But Mexicans, and more recent arrivals from
Central and South America, tend to be more pro-war, more Republican
and more conservative on the Middle East. That’s their American
credential…. That’s how they show their patriotism, and prevent the
animosity of the US government. Richard Pryor used to joke that
‘nigger’ was the first word an immigrant would learn to fit in. Now
the word is ‘Islamic terrorist.’”
When the US Census Bureau announced on January 21, 2003 that
Latinos, numbering 39 million, had surpassed African-Americans as
the largest minority group in the US, leaders of other groups
wondered aloud what that development meant for them. Some Jewish
leaders worry about rising anti-Semitism as Hispanic immigration is
augmented by Muslim immigration. African-Americans have expressed
anxiety over how the growing Latino presence could “destabilize”
the historic ”black-white dialogue on race,” jeopardizing hard-won
political concessions as Latinos press for the recognition of their
“long history of suffering at the hands of America.”[74] Some Latino
intellectuals have already called for a museum on the Mall “in honor
of the many, many undocumented immigrants from south of the border
and from Cuba who have died anonymously.”[75]
Despite the historic enslavement and continued marginalization of
Afro-Latinos across Latin America, the Latino is rarely seen as
“guilty” in black America. In fact, according to one Latino
scholar, what distinguishes the Latino immigrants from their
European counterparts is that the “African-Americans cannot hold
Latinos responsible for their historical social, economic or
political conditions. The [Latino] psyche is devoid of guilt…. They
come to the table with a clear conscience.”[76] Given the
competition for jobs and economic resources, the growing
conservatism of Mexican-American voters and the growing tendency of
Hispanic immigrants, once naturalized, to identify as “white,”[77]
black-Latino relations could deteriorate and the Latino might very
well emerge as “guilty” for past crimes against blacks. In the
meantime, however, a variety of grievances are being “externalized”
onto the Arab world. Blacks may not be as pro-war as their Latinos,
but polls after September 11 showed African-Americans
overwhelmingly supporting measures to profile and track Arab- and
Muslim-Americans.[78] In the Latino community, one hears a litany
of accusations regarding los Arabes, notably that immigration
reform has not been undertaken because of Arab terrorists trying to
“pass” for Mexican and enter the US via Mexico. After the Madrid
bombings, which sent shock waves throughout the Spanish-speaking
world, one is also hearing, especially from Hispanic evangelicals,
warnings about Moorish invaders and how the “Orient” had tainted
Hispanic civilization in Islamic Spain, introducing a mentality of
machismo, racial intolerance and despotism that is still afflicting
Latin America.
Another factor that has led many Latinos and African-Americans to
evince hawkish attitudes towards the Middle East involves what one
Hispanic scholar described as the “tragic American inability to
discern racial combinations.” Given the widespread angst about
al-Qaeda sleeper cells, and given that Arab-Americans make up less
than 1 percent of the population, much mainstream anxiety is
displaced onto other minorities who “look Arab.” As
African-American novelist Ishmael Reed recounts, “Within two weeks
after the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, my youngest
daughter Tennessee was a called a dirty Arab twice. An elderly
white woman made such a scene on a San Francisco bus that my
daughter got off.”[79] The mistaking of non-Arab minorities for
Arabs has led to the “double profiling” of Latinos and
African-Americans. One African-American legal scholar describes how
her NYU-attending son, who can “phenotypically pass for Arab,” goes
to the airport dressed “in the popular ghetto-styled baggy pants,”
wearing corn rows and intentionally speaking in “an Ebonics
dialect” to “ensure that he is not racially profiled as an Arab. Of
course, when he lands in New York, his failure to be able to hail a
cab indicates he is clearly seen as a black—too risky to pick
up.”[80] This “double profiling,” what some have called “DWB plus
FWA” (“Driving While Black” and “Flying While Arab”) has angered
many African-Americans mistaken for Arab. The idea of the Arab as
“basically white” and “guilty” has since September 11 come to
coexist uneasily with the realization that many Arabs are “black,”
and that many African-Americans can be mistaken for Arab. Every
time the media flashes images of dark-skinned Arabs, whether of the
janjaweed militia in Sudan or “twentieth hijacker” Zacarias
Moussaoui, conventional views of Sudan and “the Arabs” are jolted.
Comedian Drew Carey has joked that “Arabs in America should just say
they’re Mexican and they’ll be fine,” but Hispanic intellectuals who
have reflected on the “Arab-Latino resemblance” find it no laughing
matter. Sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel, who studies how different
“looks” and identities are racialized in the West, notes that in
France he is often harassed and prevented from entering different
venues because he’s mistaken for Algerian (“le look beur”), but
when he tells his harassers that he is Puerto Rican, he is allowed
to enter. In the US, by contrast, when waylaid by a gang of
anti-Latino white supremacists, he said he was Algerian and the
confused youths let him go.[81] After September 11, however, few
Latinos would try the same ruse. When the Pentagon began targeting
Latinos for higher recruitment in the military, conspiracy theories
abounded that Hispanics were being sent to Iraq because they can
“pass” for Arab. As one blogger put it, “The enemy is brown. We
need brown troops. [Hispanics] blend in better.” While some Latinos
and African-Americans may embrace a position of pro-Arab solidarity,
others try to signal that they are not Arab or Muslim, most often by
vociferously adopting anti-Arab positions.
The “looking Arab” phenomenon is further complicated by the fact
that, since September 11, many Arab- and Muslim-Americans are
trying to “pass” for black or Hispanic. “After September 11, shave
your head, grow a goatee, that’s it—you’re Dominican,” said one
Yemeni grocer in Harlem.[82] The sudden interest of Arab-Americans,
who have long dissociated themselves from minorities, in racial
politics and black and Latino identity has annoyed more than a few
observers. “Arabs and black Americans have had a quiet disdain for
each other…and it has been brewing unabated for a decade or
better,” commented one African-American writer. “Why did whites
have to come for you, before you sought my friendship, before you
realized you were from Africa after all? Why did you wait until you
were the new American nigger to become mine?”[83] The racial baptism
of post-September 11 discrimination seems to be pushing many Arab-
and Muslim-Americans toward black America. A recent study of
black-Arab relations in New York and Detroit shows that Arabs and
Muslims who had experienced racial harassment—either in the form of
verbal insults or physical attacks—showed higher levels of “trust”
in their African-American neighbors than those who had not
experienced racial harassment, and the survey showed an overall
sharp increase from pre-September 11 trust levels.[84] The fact
that Arabs today are drifting toward black America and “passing”
for black or Hispanic, in contrast to yesteryear when
African-Americans were converting to Islam and donning robes and
turbans in an effort to “pass” for Arab, is a clear sign that a
shift has taken place in the American racial hierarchy.
“Conspiracy of Silence”
Bernard Lewis has lamented the “remarkable dearth of scholarly work”
on race and slavery in the Muslim world, noting that the subject
remains a “highly sensitive topic, the mere mention of which is
often seen as a sign of hostile intentions.”[85] Decades after
Lewis first broached the subject, wariness on the part of Muslims
and Arabs remains entirely justified. Most Western scholars,
journalists and activists who approach the subject of race in the
Arab-Muslim world impose Western—most often American—racial
categories, speaking glibly of “white” Arab masters and “black”
slaves, “settlers” dominating indigenous Africans and “Arab
culpability.” Slavery in the Arab world, especially in North
Africa, requires a different analytical language than in the New
World. The one-drop rule cannot help distinguish the descendants of
slaves from the descendants of slave-owners, because, unlike in the
West, in the Arab world people of European as well as Turkic and
sub-Saharan stock were enslaved. While many Arab states, like
Egypt, are indeed “pigmentocracies,” many of Egypt’s political
elites are descendants of the Turkic Mamluk slave dynasty. Does
their slave descent, which many black nationalists deem crucial to
African identity, render them bonafide Africans, free of racial
guilt? In addition, despite the North African regimes’ insistence
on the primacy of Arab identity, the northern tier of the African
continent is home to an extraordinary ethnic, linguistic and
phenotypical diversity, and one cannot treat North Africa as
geographically distinct and detached from a racially unified,
indigenous “Black Africa.”
Furthermore, most of those who address the subject of race in the
Arab world—starting with Lewis himself—have a political axe to
grind. They seek to use race as an ideological weapon to counter
African-American claims that Islam is “better on race” than the
West, or to shift attention from Palestine to Arab oppression of
some minority. Many in the Arab world believe that if the
victimizers in Sudan—the Khartoum regime and its proxy janjaweed
militia—did not self-identify as “Arab,” Darfur would hardly be an
issue. Many also wonder why the moral indignation behind the Sudan
campaign in the United States rarely stirs on behalf of Palestine,
why the same voices so eager to term the Darfur tragedy a
“genocide” would be quite loath to use the term to describe the
forced removal of Palestinians in 1948. When New YorkTimes
columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that “Israeli brutality” in the
Palestinian territories “is small potatoes by Arab standards,” that
two million people had died in the Sudanese civil war “with barely
anyone [in the Arab world] noticing,” and that, after all, Sharon
is the “Middle Eastern leader who gives his Arab citizens the
greatest political freedom,” he confirmed suspicions that his
writing on Darfur was intended, in large part, to highlight the
“hypocrisy” of Arab rage (“the frenzy”) over Israeli policy.[86]
American discussions of race and ethnicity in the Arab world also
tend to mirror the parochialism of American identity politics.
Thus, African-Americans will write movingly of whomever they
adjudge as “black” and “indigenous,” evangelicals will defend
Coptic rights and the “Gay International” will agitate for
homosexuals in Egypt, always casting these communities as victims
of the “Arab Muslim majority” and possible allies of the West, but
rarely placing their very real oppression in the larger context of
Arab countries where the entire population, including the “Arab
Muslim majority,” chafes under dictatorial rule. Such a selective
concern for minorities by different American interests is seen as
self-interested, divisive and all too reminiscent of European
colonial powers’ coopting of minorities and Western Zionists’
efforts to “rescue” the Jews of the Arab world.
Arab leaders have certainly used Palestine as an ideological weapon
to stifle talk of minority rights, ethnic pluralism and slavery in
Sudan. When asked about Darfur, the Sudanese foreign minister
shrugged, “Aren’t more children dying daily in Palestine?”[87] In
Arab and Muslim eyes, the issues of Palestine and Sudan are not
political equivalents. Historic Palestine is soaked with a
nationalist and theological significance that southern Sudan is
simply not imbued with. Most importantly, discussion of racism,
ethnic pluralism and the Sudanese civil war has long been taboo,
considered divisive and even treasonous as “the Arab nation” faces
“the Zionist threat.” Not only is talk of racism suppressed in
individual states, but discussion of human rights violations in
other Arab states is also smothered.
But things are changing. With the rise of independent media, the
forbidden subjects of race and racism in the Arab world are being
raised. Al-Jazeera’s critical coverage of the Darfur crisis led to
the arrest and conviction of its Khartoum bureau chief, Islam
Salih, for “disseminating false news.” Calling on the Arab League
to act, the Daily Star of Beirut opined, “Darfur. The name is
becoming synonymous worldwide with shame and outrage, and it is a
purely homegrown calamity. There is not an outside hand to
conveniently blame.” Recently, Egyptian pro-democracy activist
Saadeddin Ibrahim denounced the “racist tendencies of the Arabs”
noting that Arab silence in face of killings of non-Arabs by Arabs
was “a cowardly and hidden racism.”[88] Similarly, Gamal Nkrumah
has written forcefully against color prejudice (“shadism”) in the
Arab world, as symbolized by the penchant for hair dying and skin
bleaching creams.[89] Arab scholars are also increasingly
challenging the age-old claptrap about “Muslim colorblindness” and
the “benignity of Oriental slavery,” and questioning national myths
of origin. Hilmi Shaarawi recently called for a new “Afro-Arab
cultural dialogue,” warning that the more Arab intellectuals rebuff
the overtures of African intellectuals, the more the latter will
gravitate toward theories of Arabs as slavers and destroyers of
African civilization.
The discourses of Palestine and the Holocaust are linked. Political
developments since World War II have turned both tragedies into
causes on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the
Arab world and America respectively, and the discourses of both
causes are all too often based on reciprocal denigration. Arab
nationalists will thus deny the Holocaust because it is seen as the
justification for the conquest of Palestine, so that in rejecting
the Shoah they think they are undermining the Zionist case—a non
sequitur if there ever was one. Similarly, Holocaust consciousness
in the US is often predicated on the denial of the Palestinian
tragedy. Both discourses also rest on the downplaying of other
tragedies and injustices: “Palestine” has long been used by Arab
and Muslim ruling elites to justify or gloss over the oppression or
killing of different populations, while Holocaust consciousness in
the US, according to many African-Americans and Native Americans,
has sidelined the Native American genocide and the Atlantic slave
trade. The growing political influence of African-Americans
following the civil rights movement has translated into increasing
demands that American slavery be recognized as a crime against
humanity and given its pride of place in American history. To evade
a head-on collision with different domestic political actors who
think slavery is a painful and divisive issue, and to avoid being
seen as trivializing the Holocaust, segments of the
African-American community have discovered that the discourse on
slavery and African-American suffering can receive a tremendous
boost if “externalized” onto the Arab world. So to the “Arab
maladies” of misogyny, terrorism and authoritarianism, one can now
add racism.
Since September 11, Arabs thus find themselves linked to and caught
between the American discourses on slavery and the Holocaust, two
tragedies that took place in the West but have somehow been
projected onto the “Orient.” Jewish nationalists’ decades-old
portrayal of Arab nationalists as Nazi-like and wanting to
annihilate Israel dovetails with black nationalists’ portrayal of
Arabs as invaders and genocidal slavers. Despite common diasporan
and scriptural roots, the discourses of Zionism and black
nationalism in America have evolved largely separately over the
past decades, but the two worldviews seem to have merged following
September 11, making common cause with evangelical Christians over
the Middle East. The myriad moral and cultural connections that
different communities in the West have with North Africa and the
Middle East are fascinating, if not endearing, but when they begin
to make irredentist or redemptive demands, as with the reparations
campaign, such movements must be countered with the truth that
slavery and genocide (like misogyny, terrorism and
authoritarianism) are not unique to the Arab world. But presently
any effort to remind African-Americans that slavery existed and
exists in various parts of Africa, not just in the Sudan, is as
impolitic as mentioning that there were other genocides besides the
Holocaust. This state of affairs was made possible by the Arab
world’s long-standing refusal to discuss the issues of race, ethnic
difference and Afro-Arab identity.
Thanks for the confirmation pw. The Darfur issue is being pushed by the zionists. To get the rest of the world and the US involved there would help Israel.
The reason that I am concerned about Israel is not because Israel is so bad, but because the US is bankrolling her actions to our detriment. We have no responsibility for what is going on in Darfur and it is not in our interests to get involved.
great entry on the racial politics driving the darfur campaign – i totally agree — this article is the best on the subject and on how 9/11 changed the american racial landascape:
Slavery, Genocide and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the New “Racial Olympics”
link to merip.org
this is the best line:
But the Save Darfur campaign is better understood by looking at the post-September 11 domestic political scene. Unlike other “hot spots” across Africa, the Darfur tragedy reverberates deeply in the US because it is represented as a racial conflict between “Arabs” and “indigenous Africans,” because Sudan is where the “moral geographies”[47] of black, Jewish and Christian nationalists overlap and because the Darfur crisis offers a unique opportunity to unite against the new post-Cold War enemy.
Mexicans have no Jew Guilt.