DARFUR UPDATE: I’m not all that surprised to read this:

EL FASHER, Sudan (Reuters) – The Sudanese government has disappointed Secretary of State Colin Powell in talks on the crisis in the troubled western region of Darfur, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

Powell, on the second day of a visit to Sudan, arrived in Darfur Wednesday for a first-hand look at some of the million people displaced by marauding Arab militias in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. . . .

“They are in a state of denial. They are in a state of avoidance. They are trying to obfuscate and avoid any consequences,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

More here:

Human rights campaigners accuse Sudan’s pro-government Arab militia of carrying out genocide against black African residents of the Darfur region.
They are accused of forcing some one million people from their homes and killing at least 10,000.

Many thousands more are at risk of starving due to a lack of food in the camps where they have fled.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has refused to use the term genocide, which would carry a legal obligation to act.

But of course.

UPDATE: Stephen Manning emails that there’s a double standard here:

Imagine, if you will, that Sudan is actually a Catholic country and marauding Catholic militia were raiding, say, Muslim blacks in the region, murdering and reducing them to slavery. It might be imagineable a couple hundred years ago, but now it would be unthinkable. And the uproar would make the planet deaf. Islam is the Religion of Peace. Yeah.

And where are the fatwa’s against this behavior? If people don’t think the war on terror is not about a serious structural problem with the religion of Islam, they are living in PC paradise, where only white males can be bad.

Well, sort of. In fact, both the victims and the perpetrators here are Muslim. And the perpetrators are white (Arabs) while the victims are black. I suspect that the real reason for the world’s disinterest is that nobody’s figured out a way to blame the United States, or Israel.

Some people, however, are noting the hypocrisy.

More thoughts here.