1096 Raising Awareness--Darfur

Save Darfur is a coalition of 129 organizations including Amnesty International and National Council of churches which tries to educate the public through ads, speeches, rallies, banners, yard signs, etc. Those two organizations alone would keep me from contributing, as awful as I think that tragedy is.

Raising awareness is NOT action, it is not research, it is not a cure and it definitely isn't a political solution. And yet, how many times have you been asked to contribute money to a disease race, walk or a cause only to find that the money goes to perpetuate the organization which advertizes the problem? I know where this particular ad campaign is going, because I've watched it progress on the op-ed pages. At first the Darfur civil war was reported as a massacre by the light skinned Arab Moslem Janjaweed militia murdering, raping and slaughtering the black African Moslem Darfurians. Then later it was reported that the U.N. peacekeepers and observers were standing by doing nothing in Darfur. Then this week I noticed that Nicholas D. Kristoff said the United States was not acting against the atrocities in Sudan (never mind the public outrage on the left that we acted against the atrocities in Iraq--now we're supposed to spread to Africa).

Kristoff is moving quickly toward blaming George Bush personally, because Bush mentioned Sudan on January 10, but things have gotten worse. Bush has provided food and shelter for 2.2 million homeless Sudanese, but he has not intervened and stopped the slaughter with American troops. Watch. This is going to end up being George Bush's failure--not the U. N.'s, not the Moslem racists', and not greater Africa's. Kristoff wrote, "above all they need the international community to shame Sudan for killing and raping people on the basis of their tribe."

When was the last time international moral outrage stopped the rape of women during wartime? Kristoff started his article with the words of some nobody, an isolationist, who had written, and then he put those words into the mouth of George Bush. What? Who and which party have been the isolationists a la 1930s?