Friday, August 18, 2006

DARFUR: AN URGENT CASE FOR HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

More Euston related stuff to tell you about. Next month sees another Euston Manifesto Group meeting, this time on the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

Here's the skinny:
Darfur: An urgent case for Humanitarian Intervention

Euston Manifesto Group Meeting
Tuesday 5th September 2006
Kings College London
7:00pm

Speakers:
  • Linda Melvern

    An investigative journalist, Linda is the author of A People Betrayed. The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide and Conspiracy to Murder - The Rwandan Genocide.

  • Lord Clive Soley

    Clive is an advocate of intervention and reform of the UN. He blogs as Lord of the Blogs.

  • A Representative from the Aegis Trust

    The Aegis Trust is an independent, international organisation, dedicated to preventing genocide worldwide.
Chair:

The meeting will be chaired by Phillip Spencer. Phil teaches at Kingston University and is a founder signatory of the Euston Manifesto.


For tickets, email: tickets@eustonmanifesto.org

Further details of the venue will be sent with your ticket confirmation.
If Iraq has slipped off the media's radar with recent events in Lebanon, Darfur has been pushed back even further.

Here's André Glucksmann's take on this:
The outrage of so many outraged people outrages me. On the scales of world opinion, some Muslim corpses are light as a feather, and others weigh tonnes. Two measures, two weights. The daily terrorist attacks on civilians in Baghdad, killing 50 people or more, are checked off in reports under the heading of miscellaneous, while the bomb that took 28 lives in Qana is denounced as a crime against humanity.

Only a few intellectuals like Bernard-Henri Lévy or Magdi Allam, chief editor of the Corriere della Sera, find this surprising. Why do the 200,000 slaughtered Muslims of Darfur not arouse even half a quarter of the fury caused by 200-times fewer dead in Lebanon? Must we deduce that Muslims killed by other Muslims don't count - whether in the eyes of Muslim authorities or viewed through the bad conscience of the west?

This conclusion has its weak spots, because if the Russian Army - Christian, and blessed by their popes - razes the capital of Chechnian Muslims (Grosny, with 400,000 residents) killing tens of thousands of children in the process, this doesn't count either. The Security Council does not hold meeting after meeting, and the Organization of Islamic States piously averts its eyes. From that we may conclude that the world is appalled only when a Muslim is killed by Israelis.
Hat-tip: Jonathan Smith over at All The More Reason.

posted by Dan @ 1:55 am