Demonstrations are taking place on college campuses and elsewhere against Jews and Israel and in support of Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. Meanwhile, there is silence about the continuation of horrific and indisputable war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and, yes, genocide in another place.
That other place is Darfur.
Why the silence? Is it because the perpetrators are Arabs and the victims are Blacks?
Maybe Black lives in Darfur don’t matter to college students at Columbia and Yale.
Incidentally, until evil British colonialists put an end to it in the nineteenth century, Darfur was the center of a slave trade run by Arabs. Perhaps that’s why in Darfur today, Arabs refer to their Black victims as slaves, as they rape, slaughter, and burn them alive in their huts.
Fire damage in 11 Darfur villages has been confirmed through satellite images analyzed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab. Ironically, that is the same Yale where anti-Israel demonstrations have taken place.
The current mass killings in Darfur continue the genocide that occurred between 2003 and 2007, when an estimated 300,000 Darfuris died.
Farther west is the Sahel, the semi-arid area of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Atrocities are taking place there, especially in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. The religious fanatics of the Islamic State are trying to turn it into a medieval paradise, where ignorant men rule and keep women subservient, uneducated, and dressed in sack cloth.
As with Darfur, there aren’t demonstrations about the Sahel on college campuses and elsewhere.
Naturally, as with other atrocities taking place in other parts of Africa and the Middle East, the fault doesn’t lie with the killers and rapists, according to the dominant narrative on campuses. It lies with Western colonialism and imperialism.
As the narrative goes, if Europeans hadn’t carved up the regions into artificial countries that obliterated traditional ethnocultural boundaries, the various tribes, sects and races would be as peaceful and harmonious as the scenes shown in American TV commercials of diverse Americans of every possible skin shade, facial feature and gender, loving each other and driving to a mountaintop together in their Subaru.
Given that I’ve been a history buff since elementary school, my personal library is pretty extensive. But it’s a grain of sand on a beach compared to the size of the libraries at Columbia, Yale, and other universities. Still, my library is diverse enough to not only include books that detail the evils committed by European and American colonialists, imperialists, and enslavers,
but also books that detail the evils committed by other races and nationalities throughout history, as well as the evils committed by indigenous peoples throughout both history and pre-history.
Certainly, university libraries cover the full panoply of human history. It’s not certain, though, that students have gotten past the history of what White Europeans and Americans have inflicted on Blacks, indigene, and people of color (BIPOC). Judging by their words and actions, and their apparent hatred of their own country and Western civilization, they have no idea what BIPOCs have inflicted on each other.
Like brains pickled in a jar of formaldehyde, their brains have been steeped in the sophomoric, nay, juvenile, notion that all Whites are oppressors and all non-Whites are the oppressed. For some, the notion serves as a convenient excuse for their own failures.
Depending on one’s biases and what slice of history is selected to make a point—and what book is selected from my library or a university library—the history of Jews, Zionism, Israel, and Palestine cam be either simple or complex, or black-and-white or gray, or good guys versus bad guys, or oppressors versus the oppressed.
My biases match my Judeo-Christian beliefs and upbringing, as well as my experience as a kid in eighth grade, when the nuns at my parochial school showed a film of the Nazi concentration camps being liberated. The ghastly scenes led me to wonder how humans could do that to each other. That question in turn led me to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when it came out in paperback. I’ve been reading history and moral philosophy ever since.
That doesn’t make me particularly insightful or erudite, but it does make me realize that the group-think and mob mentality on college campuses are both anti-intellectual and dangerous.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.
good article although many WILL NOT read or have the opportunity to do so. Anything published in this paper online is limited in viewership thus you are mainly preaching to the choir. Ive called the dems deminazies as they are using the same tactics used by the original nazi party and are enjoying the same results. History is NOT taught in the schools nor in universities. Back in the 60’s when at the ua profs pushed the same things as now. When they tried to say the usa and other western countries were evil no one would fight back. Personally I did and it required an extra year on a 4 yr schedule, yes the profs did not like any opposition to their stances. Now there are millions indoctrinated and they cant face reality. I actually had 1 prof tell me we were diabolically opposed to each other BUT I could actually present my side so HE COULD NOT downgrade my grade earned! The dems/left do not care about anything but themselves and the rest can go to hell as far as they are concerned, truth be damned. just look at assu so indoctrinated they dont know if its day or night.
Excellent reply to a very good article! Thanks