Arrest Warrant for Sudan's President al-Bashir

From Doug Farah's blog:

Mar 5, 18:25

Why The Al Bashir Arrest Warrant is Important

Beyond the genocide and mass murder that Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has presided over in his 20 years in office, it is important to remember what al-Bashir is: a radical Islamist imposing the type of sharia law and carrying out policies that most Islamists approve of.

While the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir for Darfur (and most of the Muslim world has rallied to his defense, as they have remained silent and unmoved by the genocides his regime has perpetrated), that genocide was only one in a long series of actions taken in the name of Islam that have caused us all great harm.

In a case I testified in (now under appeal by the government of Sudan), the court in the Eastern District of Virginia accepted that Sudan “provided material support in the form of funding, direction, training and cover to Al-Qaeda, a worldwide terrorist organization whose operatives facilitated the planning and execution of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole” in October 2000, while in the port of Aden, Yemen.

When he seized power in 1989 he did so as a self-proclaimed Islamist, in the company of Hassan al-Turabi,” who is not only an extremely influential intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood, but one of Osama bin Laden’s earliest and most ardent backers.

The regime of al-Bashir is not an “ordinary” criminal regime, such as that of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Charles Taylor in Liberia. Rather, it is a theologically-motivated regime that provided some of the important theological and financial support for radical Islamist movements around the world.

Al-Bashir and al-Turabi hosted not only al Qaeda, but Hamas, Hezbollah, whose members were able to enter without visas in order to foster revolutionary solidarity and networks.

Sudan, under al Bashir, became an Islamist terrorist Disneyland, where all could mix and mingle. The imposition of sharia law, the war against non-Muslims in the south, and the Darfur genocide, are all follow-ons to those years.

While al-Bahir and al-Turabi parted ways in a power struggle, their political/theological project was one and the same. It is worth recalling all the prestigious meetings, awards and boards that al-Turabi was a part of as he and al-Bashir opened their borders to a host of Islamist terrorist organizations in the 1990s.

(Among the banks al-Turabi helped found, and served on the board for a decade, is Dar al-Maal al Islami Trust, a premier Muslim banking institution.) According a Jan. 31, 2007 Wall Street Journal piece, which I can’t find online, Overland Capital Group, a subsidiary of DMI, is under Justice Department investigation for possible tax violations. A prosecutor from the Counterterrorism division of DOJ was handling the case, the story said.

The al-Bashir regime facilitated the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bosnian Muslim movements in the early 1990s through the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), run by Sudanese diplomats in Vienna, Austria.

TWRA, posing as a charity, provided the template for the fraudulent use of charities by al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups around the world.

After 9/11, al-Bashir, sensing the shift in the winds, turned over some old and harmless intelligence on radical Islamists in Sudan and al Qaeda, to the United States. It was just enough to avoid serious sanctions.

Emboldened, the regime then went on to the Darfur atrocities while maintaining a chokehold at home, and reaping billions of dollars in new revenues as the Chinese poured into the Sudanese oil fields.

Al-Bashir represents the end product of what the Muslim Brotherhood proposes combined with what al Qaeda and violent Islamists seek: an Islamist government ruled by sharia law, with no separation at all between church (mosque) and state, and one that is willing to sponsor and facilitator of violent Islamists who carry out terrorist attacks.
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Al Qaeda Does Some Religious Cleansing in Iraq

A U.S. commander in northern Iraq said it was “ethnic cleansing” when al Qaeda in Iraq killed as many as 500 members of an ancient religious sect on Wednesday. (“'Act of ethnic cleansing'.”)

“’This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will, almost genocide,’ Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told CNN.”

But as the Detroit News report indicates,

“The victims of Tuesday night's coordinated attack by four suicide bombers were Yazidis, a small Kurdish-speaking sect that has been targeted by Muslim extremists who consider its members to be blasphemers.”

Killing people because you think they are blasphemers isn't ethnic cleansing, but religiously-motivated murder. Motivated, that is, by the Islamic religion, which considers blasphemy against Islam a sound justification for homicide.

Gen. Mixon is correct that the murders were “almost genocide.” But we’d all be better off if we could be more careful to understand what the actual motive for the genocide is.