Darfur: The shame of Muslims

News of the genocide in Darfur seems to have vanished from headlines, and as a consequence, from the mind of the world community as well. Darfurians have been suffering from unspeakable atrocities since 2005, when the conflict erupted between them and the government of Sudan. There has been much speculation as to the exact cause of this genocide, but one thing is sure: the American Muslim community is apathetic. Ask any educated and well-informed Muslim about Darfur and he or she will respond with blank stares and confusion. The reason? There has been little talk in the Muslim community about Darfur. So far, there has been little or no serious outrage from community leaders, Islamic organizations or the common person. The excuse seems to be lack of information, or rather the purported disinformation coming from Christian and Jewish groups known for their pro-Israel stance.

Some Muslims embrace this thinking and declare ignorance in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. These same Muslims have many times rightly voiced outrage over the suffering of fellow Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Chechnya. But the atrocities in Darfur brought little or no outrage to speak of. The lack of accurate information is nothing more than a shameful excuse to keep quiet because we are all afraid to say aloud what we think quietly, namely that the perpetrators of this genocide are Muslims. Sunni Muslims to be precise... like most of us. Pointing the finger at the Sudanese government would seem akin to pointing the finger at ourselves, wouldn’t it?

It is so easy to go on a cyber fact-finding mission to unearth the truth about Darfur. There is ample evidence of genocide from various sources such as human rights organizations and world government agencies. Most important of all, there are hundreds of individual eyewitness accounts from survivors of war crimes perpetrated by the Sudanese military and its proxy, the cowardly and thuggish nomadic tribes known as Janjaweed (...)