DARFUR UPDATE: Nicholas Kristof writes:

All countries have rapes, of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive them from “Arab lands” – a policy of rape.

One measure of the international community’s hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp – a teeming squatter’s camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned villages – still face the risk of gang rape every single day as they go out looking for firewood.

Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.

“They said, ‘You are black people. We want to wipe you out,’ ” Nemat recalled.

I think we need to be doing more. A lot more.

UPDATE: More commentary here:

After reading Nicholas Kristof’s piece on the Sudanese government’s “systematic campaign of rape” in Darfur, I have a question for Europe:

Where the hell are you?

Are you waiting for the U.S. to take action? We’re rather busy in Iraq and Afghanistan at present. So why don’t you do something? France, Germany, Belgium: For years you’ve claimed moral superiority to us. Prove it now.

France, at least, seems more interested in oil and arms sales.