PrintJune 8, 2010
Does Abbas' Support for Black Genocide Offend Obama?
Unlike Prime Minister Netanyahu, who reportedly caused President Obama to become "livid" over the timing of an apartment-building announcement, Palestinian President Abbas comes to the White House this week knowing there is nothing he could possibly do that would offend the President.
The Palestinian Authority's terrorist-atrocity celebration coinciding with Vice President Biden's visit triggered no rebuke. Nor does the PA's crude anti-black racism seem to bother our allegedly thin-skinned president.
Shortly after PA-controlled media depicted presidential candidate Obama as an ape in the summer of 2008, Obama rewarded Mahmoud Abbas with a meeting in Ramallah (so much for his opposition to "racial profiling"). One week earlier, Abbas and his Fatah Party had celebrated the freedom and the deeds of released serial killer Samir Kuntar, whose murder victims included a 4-year-old girl, whose head he bashed in.
Obama had every reason to feel offended, even sickened, by these two "badly timed" insults to him -- one as an African-American, and the other as the father of two young girls. Yet it apparently never crossed his mind to cancel the meeting or at least express anger by keeping Abbas waiting ninety minutes. Six months later, immediately after being sworn in as president, Obama gave Abbas the unique honor of calling him before any other world leader.
The racist degradation of Obama by Palestinian media was not an uncharacteristic lapse, but rather the continuation of a pattern. The PA daily controlled by Abbas depicted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a "raven," a "black spinster," and other epithets, and portrayed her in a cartoon as pregnant with a monkey.
Dehumanizing words and images are the first step on the path that leads to aiding and abetting discrimination, lynching, and mass murder. Shortly after Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in "... murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians" in Darfur, Abbas told the Arab League summit in Qatar, "We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir."
Last year's indictment against Abbas' buddy Bashir was long overdue. Early last decade, journalist Michael Coren described the plight of the victims:
Women and children abducted in slave raids are roped by the neck or strapped to animals and then marched north. Along the way, many women and girls are repeatedly gang-raped ...
Survivors report being called "Abeed" [black slave], enduring daily beatings, and receiving awful food. Masters also strip slaves of their religious and cultural identities, giving them Arabic names and forcing them to pray as Muslims.
Thus says one leading slavery abolitionist group. A former slave writes of "the rape of girls and boys alike, the forced circumcision of boys and girls, often with them fully conscious and screaming and having to be held down by many people. Sodomy and sadistic torture are common.
Another says. "Families were broken up, with children sometimes murdered
in front of their mothers as a warning and because they were too much trouble. We cried out to the West, to the countries who said they believed in human rights, but they were indifferent to our agony."
... This horror has taken place for two major reasons. The people of southern Sudan are black, and they are not Muslim ...
To paraphrase Pastor Martin Niemöller, "first they came for the Christians" and other non-Muslims in the south; then they targeted fellow Muslims in the Darfur region of western Sudan, for no reason other than skin color. The Janjaweed militias that carry out the regime's jihad "are like a grotesque mixture of the mafia and the Ku Klux Klan," according to human rights activist John Prendergast. "These guys have a racist ideology that sees the Arab population as the supreme population that would like to see the subjugation of non-Arab peoples. They're criminal racketeers that have been supported very directly by the government to wage the war against the people of Darfur."
Following the genocide-endorsing Arab League summit (which somehow produced no "international outrage"), Tom Gross noted that Bashir "traveled on ... to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia ... The hundreds of thousands of non-Arab Muslims Bashir has ordered to be slaughtered and raped in Darfur won't have that opportunity."
In dramatic contrast, Israel has granted citizenship to Darfur's black Muslim refugees, who celebrated the war-crimes indictment of Bashir in their new home, provided financial aid, and supplied arms, as would be expected from the nation that rescued 20,000 black Ethiopians and rushed in to help suffering Haitians.
The radical Left is conspicuously silent about these realities that expose their worldview as a lie. Don't bother telling them that the Arab Muslim world, including Palestinian leadership, is openly imperialistic, genocidal, racist, and pro-slavery. The storyline they will never give up is that it is the Israelis, into whose arms black Muslim African refugees rush to be welcomed, who are committing apartheid and genocide against people of color.
President Obama, who might be thoroughly sincere in seeking to advance peace and justice, was shaped by this same radical, anti-Israel Left. Might this explain the contrast between his obsession with denying housing for Jews in Jerusalem -- which in his own mind advances the peace process -- and his weak response to the atrocities in Sudan?
Last year, Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers expressed alarm over the president's hapless policy:
... some worry that the mastermind of all this suffering, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, is manipulating Obama's special envoy to Darfur, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration. Bashir has charmed outsiders who believe (erroneously) that he sincerely desires to work to end the suffering. Activists were especially alarmed when Gration provided an overly sunny report of Darfur's ground situation and told some privately that it could be time to ease sanctions and remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
In recent days, Gration outlined a Sudan policy that sounds alarmingly like allowing a corporation with a criminal history to police itself. Actress Mia Farrow, a tireless activist on this issue, wrote, "Perversely, Mr. Gration has now thrown U.S. government support to a [African Union] tribunal that does not and probably will never exist. Even if it did, the ‘locally owned accountability' he refers to is not feasible under prevailing political conditions, as any Sudan-based court will be controlled by the perpetrators themselves."
At a time when victims are pleading for the outside world's help, it almost defies belief: a Sudan policy that defers to local control. Ironically, local control is a right this administration seeks to deny to Jerusalem housing authorities, as well as to the state of Arizona, with which the Justice Department is preparing to go to legal war. None of this should come as a surprise. In Obama's Cairo speech, he told the Muslim world -- and no one else -- that the U.S. "does not presume to know what is best" for others.
Could Obama's lackadaisical response to "containing the blood spill" be traced back to his education in the Wright-Farrakhan-Ayers-Khalidi school of international relations, in which he was trained to "see no evil" except that of the United States and Israel?
Consider the revealing fact that there's only one response to the Sudan Holocaust more stunning than Arab Muslims aiding the murderers of black Muslims, and that's black Muslims themselves supporting the murderers of black Muslims. And this insanity is to be found not in Riyadh or Ramallah, but in Obama's own Chicago neighborhood, in a part of the black community that played a key role in shaping him politically.
In February 2007, hundreds of members of the Nation of Islam -- whose leader, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, Obama had followed all the way to Washington in the Million Man March -- cheered Sudan's President Bashir as he spoke to them by satellite, chanting "Allahu Akbar" in response to his denial of slavery and genocide charges.
Before the year was over, Obama's church would honor Farrakhan with the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Trumpeteer award. Wright said, with unintentional irony, "His love for Africa and African-American people has made him an unforgettable force[.]"
The African Holocaust denial that is part of Farrakhan's "lifetime achievement" did not suddenly begin in 2007. It was reported in May 1995 that Abdul Akbar Muhammad, International Representative of the Nation of Islam, called reports of Sudan's black slavery a "Jewish conspiracy." Neither this, nor Farrakhan's support for claims that Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS, could deter Obama from joining his march on Washington five months later. (Speakers included Steve Cokely, originator of the charming tale about Jewish doctors.)
Rather than being driven away by the rhetoric of Chicago extremists, Obama consistently gravitated to them, reportedly going on to hire members of the NOI cult as Senate staffers. He continued to embrace Rev. Wright well into 2008, seemingly unconcerned that the church newsletter praised Hamas and supported Hezbollah while these terror gangs were supporting Sudan's genocide of blacks as enthusiastically as they support a future genocide of Jews.
The influence of these mentors might be an underlying reason why Obama cannot be expected to express concern over Abbas' support for the murderers of black Africans. As author Kenneth Levin points out, "those in the Muslim world whose good opinion he is most seeking to win are not the Muslims of Darfur but rather Darfur's oppressors and their supporters."
And if Abbas' connection to black slavery and genocide does not stir his outrage, Obama is likely to remain oblivious to other concerns: the PA's death penalty for selling property to Jews; the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, on PA television, calling for the murder of every last Jew and American (would Obama meet them halfway on that demand?); a Fatah official admitting that terror on a grand scale will resume when Fatah is "capable," and that "our goal has never been peace ... the goal is Palestine." (That's Palestine by the Helen Thomas definition, meaning all of Israel.)
What Abbas revealed at the Arab summit is that he is not simply a Palestinian nationalist terrorist who would stop killing after achieving the goal of land and nationhood, but rather an international Islamic supremacist, an eager participant in the quest to establish a caliphate that subjugates or eliminates Jews, black Christians and Muslims, Egyptian Christian Copts, Iraqi Kurds; in short, all non-Arabs living on land previously conquered by Arabs.
If Obama's father had never left Africa and were alive today, and if both he and Barack had ended up within reach of Bashir's militias, both would be at risk of being enslaved, tortured, and murdered by jihadists backed by Arab leaders, with Abbas being among the most vocal. Where is our president's outrage? Where is his compassion? And -- if it's not too politically incorrect to ask -- where is his racial pride? At a time when millions of blacks and Jews (among others) face the same lethal threat from Islamic extremists, the president's handling of the Darfur genocide provides insight into how he might respond to an emergency in which Israel is fighting for its life.
