I know this isn't going to come as a shock to many but the Instapundit's Darfur piece at Comment is Free is drawing all sorts of unpleasant responses from Grauniad readers who don't appreaciate being told what to think by American professors (unless their name happens to be Chomsky).
The comments mostly focus on Glenn's opening statement:
There's a genocide going on in Darfur. That much is widely accepted.
It seems that many of these folks wish to deny that there is in fact a genocide there. The white Nile does indeed run through Sudan, but curiously it seems that somethign similar, white denial, runs through the commenters on CiF. Curiously some feel determined to pick on Glenn's usage of a WaPo article as evidence that either genocide is not occurng or that there is wide acceptance that it is, without, say looking at reports in their own newspaper that put the toll there at 255,000. Now it is true that the deaths of 255,000 people may or may not be genocide per se - if you carefully define genocide to be the deliberate killing of one ethnic group rather than collateral deaths caused by and attempt to ethnic cleanse the land of a particular group - but you know I'd have thought that 255,000 dead and ten times that number of refugees etc. etc. would possibly cause people who protested say Serbian aggression in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo some sort of discomfort, but apparently not.
The problem, neatly (if accidentally) explained by one zbuster, is that Darfur suffers from the problem of the wrong sort of killers. It seems that "white" killers such as Americans or Serbs, or jewish killers, such as the Israeli Defense Forces, are automatically guilty of genocide as soon as they cause a single casualty but darker skinned killers, particularly those who claim to be Muslims, get a free pass. In fact the problem appears to be worse. If America calls something a 'genocide' it is automatically considered by these folks to be anything but 'genocide'. This is explained in the bizarre comment where the republican Bush regime's claim of genocide in Darfur is denied because previous US regimes - e.g. the democratic Clinton, Carter and Johnson regimes - failed to call Rwanda, Cambodia and Sukarno's purges in Indonesia genocides.
I think all this white denial is summed up best by the Grauniad's Simon Jenkins today. Apparently the Grauniadistas don't give a tinkers cuss for anyone else, they are selfish and feel that the West should leave the rest of the world to kill each other because it is unaceptable for us to impose our moral standards (things like not killing your neighbour because he is black or non-Muslim or both) on other people because all such intervention is wrong and neo-imperialist/colonialist. This leads to two corollaries. Firstly we should make no attempt to stop those doing the killers and secondly the only thing we should do is send unarmed "aid" convoys to help any survivors. God forbid that we should actually take a moral stance because if we did we'd have to provide the troops to stop the killers and the Guardianistas won't even kill a sheep let alone a mass murderer.
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