Export Sanity Now

Nat Hentoff notes the NYTimes' odd juxtaposition - running an editorial condemning the government of Sudan for the atrocities in Darfur...:

"After the Holocaust, the world vowed it wouldn't stand back and allow genocide to happen again. Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda showed how empty that promise was. . . . Is this really what we have come to? The United Nations has described the carnage as the world's biggest humanitarian crisis but continues to prove itself completely useless at doing anything to stop it.

"In the Security Council, China protects Sudan. Europe, for its part, has been inert."

...while accepting a large, full-color advertisment (and $900,000) from that same government, extolling the virtues of Sudan as an investment opportunity.

Hentoff quotes Nick Kristoff:

"It is brutally demoralizing for people in these villages to be hunted down as if they were wild beasts, to have their children pulled from their arms and thrown into burning huts. But we should be just as demoralized by our own indifference. The shame belongs not to the good people of Darfur and Chad, but to ourselves."

Hentoff, for his part, is publicizing a rally to draw attention to the genocide:

The organizers and participants in the April 30 Washington "Rally to Stop Genocide" are, to say the least, not indifferent. And by April 30, the Save Darfur Coalition expects to have at least a million postcards to send to George W. Bush from its Million Voices postcards campaign (you can sign an electronic Million Voices card at savedarfur.org: click on "Million Voices for Darfur"). This is the postcard:

"Dear President Bush: During your first year in the White House, you wrote in the margins of a report on the Rwandan genocide, ' Not on my watch.' I urge you to live up to those words by using the power of your office to support a stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur."

The president is making a lot of speeches to lift his poll ratings. Can't he find time for one to save the survivors in Darfur?

Here's hoping.

It's enough to make one cynical:

The New York Times says it took nearly a million dollars from bloody Khartoum in its "strong belief" that "all pages of the paper . . . must remain open to the free flow of ideas . . . [but] we do not endorse the politics . . . or actions . . . or the character of [the country's] leaders."

I won't be surprised— although no less disgusted— to see a bountiful special advertising Times supplement paid for by Robert Mugabe on how the people of Zimbabwe enjoy unprecedented prosperity and a free press under his deeply compassionate reign. That should cost $2 million.

Consistency in fighting genocidal, eliminationist totalitarianism at all levels - the media, the UN, the feds, and throughout society in general - would be truly priceless.

Posted by Mitch at April 5, 2006 12:18 PM | TrackBack