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It’s the Oil, Stupid!
Move over, Hamas. Currently the most racist, genocidal military force in the world is the RSF in Sudan, which reportedly attacked a maternity hospital(!!?) in El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan. Five hundred patients and families were killed as part of a general extermination of the local population (over 100,000 civilian deaths and counting). An Arab version of racial supremacy now drives outright mass killing of the non-Arab population in the region instead of the more traditional programs of displacement, subjugation and enslavement.
This slaughter is made possible by funding from the UAE, which gets access to gold-producing regions in West Sudan and presumably the deep moral satisfaction of furthering Arab Islamic killing and conquest of infidels. This is in exchange for the massive military and financial aid which they implausibly deny sending.
Oddly enough, elite opinion and the wrath of Europe, Britain and the USA have not been directed at the UAE, similar to the rather muted response to Qatar’s support for the thieving, atrocity-fomenting Hamas leadership given refuge there (or to Saudi Arabia's export of the 9/11 terrorists and their motivating ideology, for that matter).
One wonders if Israel had 150-200 billion barrels in proven oil reserves instead of a mere 0.00085% of the world total, that the volume of the outcry against fighting back against Hamas would have been greatly reduced. When Muslims slaughter Christians across Africa, or Druze, Kurds, Yazidi...one often gets the feeling that 850 billion bbl of proven oil reserves in Muslim countries buys a lot of silence, qualification and inaction.
In our own country it clearly buys support for the preposterous notion that Muslims in the USA are victims of widespread Islamophobic persecution and buys the obedience of whorish university administrators and deference by media outlets.
Getting in touch with my inner Kissinger/Bismark/Richelieu early on a Monday (admittedly, kinda early in the week for big strategic thinking), it occurs to me that toppling the regimes in Venezuela and Iran to install friendlier regimes, and thus put those reserves in the column of the forces of good (while simultaneously aggressively promoting building more LNG port facilities in Europe for US and Canadian exports to greatly limit Putin’s influence), would put the West in a far better position to tell our allegedly great friends on the Arabian peninsula to knock it the hell off with the Islamist mischief.
In any event, it would be salutary to bring more attention to the fact of the unhealthy influence of oil politics and money. Perhaps the US Secretary of State and the UK Foreign Secretary should require those preparing reports and advice to always provide a second version, but with the presumption that there is no big oil in Muslim countries. I suspect it would be clarifying and provide the outlines of a far better world.
Discussion (5)
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Just one more example, as if one were needed, of the incredible hypocrisy and uselessness of the United Nations.
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Of course although the situation in Darfur is horrific, there are things about it that are not currently happening.
So far fewer alarm bells are going on.
The violence in Darfur is not at all forced onto the shoulders of the already beleagured US tax payers.
Nor are leaders in Darfur able to openly suggest that what is needed for their efforts to succeed involves extinguishing the entire First Amendment and encouraging "influencers" to continually prop up their regime.
There are no Darfurian leaders living in the USA and who are citizens of our nation like the Ellisons who are openly able to buy up CBS, Paramount, TikTok or other major news and social media platforms. (Why the FCC allows such a huge conglomeration of major media outlets in the hands of two people, I can't figure out.)
No one in the USA who criticizes Darfur is going to have a heinous label of "anti-darfurian" attached to their name, with such an attachment leading to the end of his or her career.
But I agree the violence is indeed horrid.
And of course, the UN is set up to not intervene. When it does intervene, often it's peace keeping troops end up in trouble, such as last week when the French peace keepers in Lebanon were afraid that Israel's drone was targeting them. They then blew the drone up. Israel retaliated by sending in a grenade that blew up close to their camp. Right now, I don't know if further militant activities occurred on either side or not.
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From a purely evil efficiency standpoint this attack method makes a lot of sense. In the Oct 7 attacks Hamas showed babies are not beyond attacking.
The apparent upward surge in Islamic expansion and aggression (as I stated elsewhere) is just a resumption of the Islam trend prior to the rise of western power during its haydays.
Not sure if it is even politically feasible, but perhaps out-right bans on imported money from these foreign entities should be instituted for many US based interests.
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That's true that people don't get an anti-Darfurian label, but have you ever heard the term "Islamophobic"?
I don't think oil is the factor here. George W. Bush sometimes referred to "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Meaning that some people (without saying it outright) believe that Europeans should be held to high standards of decency, but that people of non-European ancestry shouldn't be judged by the same standards because history/colonization/slavery or something. So when white people bought and sold slaves 500 years ago, we should condemn them today. When present-day Africans buy and sell slaves, just you shut up.
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There is no shooting war in Darfur without oil money to buy the weapons. There is no Hamas, no Hezbollah without oil state sponsors. There was zero reason for George Bush to tiptoe around Saudi perfidy regarding 9/11 but for 300 billion bbls of Saudi oil. Heck, there is no 9/11 if oilless Arabs were back on camels by the oasis instead of projecting notions of global jihad via thousands of madrassas at home and abroad.
There is no Mayor Mamdani without CAIR and its oil money sponsors.
The movement launched by the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt a century ago would not have led to Al Qaeda or ISIS without oil-rich sponsors along the way.
Islam tends to kill innovation and devolve into a passive inshalla culture that Churchill famously denounced. At the end of WWI when the Ottoman Empire was carved up by Britain and France, and when Ataturk created a secular model for the Islamic world in Turkey, Islam was faced with a survival choice to adapt to Western political, philosophical, technological and even metaphysical notions or remain a weak subjugated backwater. Oil relieved the pressure and funded a reaction to try to preserve and even advance a dysfunctional culture entirely unsuited to a technology-driven world. And that effort has to be violent because it does not offer a viable rational choice to those not under its control.