Sudanese President Denies Genocide Citing American Fabrications

Last night on NBC, Ann Curry interviewed President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the man currently ruining Sudan. She waved a photo under his nose and accused his government of cooperating with the militias that have made Darfur in Western Sudan a living hell. The president replied, “What do you think about the picture that Colin Powell presented before the national security that confirmed and illustrated the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? What do you think about it?” Then he added, “This picture is the same fabrication and the same picture as the ones Colin Powell presented about Iraq.” That’s the trouble with governments that stretch the truth; they lose the ability get others to believe them.

The mess in Darfur has come about thanks to the cooperation of the government in Khartoum with the Muslim janjaweed marauders who view the Christians and animists of Darfur as subhuman. Around 200,000 are dead and another 2.5 million are refugees. Rape has been used as a weapon of terror. This is the kind of displacement, murder and plain evil that can only occur with the connivance of a government.

Yet there was President Bashir saying, “Yes, there have been villages burned, but not to the extent you are talking about. People have been killed because there is war. It is not in the Sudanese culture or people of Darfur to rape. It doesn’t exist. We don’t have it.” He argued that because it was a crime against Allah, no Sudanese would ever commit rape. And the man kept a straight face as he said this.

Ms. Curry also questioned him about one of his lackeys, Ahmed Haroun (state interior minister when things in Darfur were extremely awful), he told her, “We have a judicial system in Sudan. Anyone who committed a war crime, anti-human crime or any other crime will be locked up.” And since Mr. Haroun isn’t in prison, clearly, he must be innocent. This is from the Joe Stalin School of Tortured Logic.

Yet, given that the US government has blown its credibility in matters of intelligence, President Bashir’s replies resonate in parts of the Muslim world. When he asserts that the US wants trouble in Darfur so it can split it off from Sudan, taking the oil wealth with it, he has a receptive audience in parts of the world. As the Romans would have said, “falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus,” or as Mom would say, “no one believes a liar.”

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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