OpinionWhat now of the Not In My Names, who opposed all military action against Iraq without UN authorisation? An African country is being torn apart with medieval savagery, its black population put to the sword, its womenfolk raped, its villages torched, its men murdered. Who is doing this? Why, their own government, which also sits on the UN Commission of Human Rights, write Kevin Myers
We're talking about Sudan, of course, and no doubt it can get technical advice on ethnic cleansing, murder, and rape from a fellow member of the self-same UN Commission of Human Rights, Zimbabwe. (So spare a thought for The UN Independent Expert on Human Rights in Sudan: step forward, Mr. Emmanuel Akwei Addo, of Ghana, and take a well-earned bow.)
An old refrain here: I simply don't understand how so many NIMNs were so utterly opposed to the use of force to overthrow Saddam. You all knew the terrible truths about the man. So how could hundreds of thousands of NIMNs have marched against the US-led action to overthrow a man who repeatedly violated countless UN resolutions, whose regime had caused millions of deaths, and continued to cause tens of thousands of deaths a year? Needless to say, those marches, from around the world, were shown on a 24-hour loop on Saddam's television stations.
History doesn't give us precise guides to modern crises; but it gives us clues. Throughout Europe in the 1930s, totalitarianism was extremely popular throughout Christian democracies. There was no real difference between the communists and fascists: they both wanted absolute state power, backed by secret police and concentration camps. After Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, they learnt to treat the League of Nations with contempt, for what had been the League's withering response to it? Sanctions.
Totalitarian movements comparable with the Christian varieties of the 1930s thrive today across the Arab-Muslim peoples. Shia and Sunni Muslim extremists loathe one another, just as European communists and fascists detested one another in the 1930s.
But they each seek to create Muslim states, not just in the existing areas of Islam, but across the entire world, and using any means available, mass murder included.
The traditional left of Europe, and of Ireland in particular, prides itself on its watchfulness against religious extremism. So if Opus Dei had flown a couple of planes into an abortion clinic in New York, there would have been no end to the howls for retribution from the left. Muslim terrorism, however, prompts a guilt-ridden inquiry as to how the victims had provoked this sort of thing.
But of course, the left is a peculiar thing. In Britain in February 1937, while the left opposed fascism in the Spanish civil war, inside parliament in Britain the Labour party vehemently opposed rearmament by the Tory government to confront fascism militarily. Which suggests that much lefty posturing is in fact oedipal: the left wants action by non-paternal (i.e., non-state) institutions, as meanwhile it howls down measures by the state which will constructively aid the cause the left purports to defend.
Otherwise known as the adolescent ranting in the bedroom.
Which brings us to the grotesque conjunction of the Euroleft and Islamo-fascism, even as the latter spreads anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, anti-libertarianism, anti-Christianity, anti-democracy across Europe. So when today's Euro-chics denounce "Fundamentalism" they refer to the American Protestant variety generally and the Bush regime in particular, but not, of course, to the al-Qaeda franchise, with its branded offshoots in every country in Europe.
The variegated strands of Islamic totalitarianism know that there is now no systematic world-will to oppose them. They can murder, they can expel, they can maim - God knows, maybe some loony feminist lesbian-left group will even declare that rape is part of Sudan's priceless cultural heritage.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of Islamo-fascist/Loony Euro-left is a fact, and perhaps Sudan is their Poland.
In France in particular, multicultural feminists defend the burqa on schoolgirls: next item on the new, Islamo-friendly Franco-feminist agenda - Pharaonic circumcision? (Maintenant, maintenant, maintenant!) In almost every capital in Europe, we have seen oedipal-socialist slogans on banners fluttering alongside those of Islamic jihadistas: an inane grin of amiable solidarity on one set of liberal faces, a determined look of historical certainty on the other. Whalers and whales, in common cause.
The government in Sudan probably takes the long view: it can actually get rid of these tiresome animist-Christian kaffirs (an Arab word, not an Afrikaans one, meaning "unbelievers"), without the UN raising a hand until it is too late. The Sudan government knows that people once expelled by tyranny seldom return except by force of arms: and it knows also that in taking decisions of any kind, the UN moves with the speed of the Ice Age. Which means, of course, that no one will undo the genocide and ethnic cleansing now sweeping across Sudan.
The dead are dead, and not even the UN High Commission on Human Rights can unrape the raped.
Manmade catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan. It is not a humanitarian disaster, any more than Auschwitz was a humanitarian disaster.
This is government policy, by a sitting member on the UN High Commission For Human Rights. Janjaweed Islamic terrorists are murdering Christian-animists by the thousand, and the UN's response is to fume and fret and call for food.
Meanwhile in the Sudanese capital, The UN Independent Expert on Human Rights, Mr Emmanuel Akwei Addo of Ghana, gazes out across the Khartoum skyline.
His face bears a worried frown - as well it might, as in the dark of the distant Sahara, one by one, he sees the lights go out.