Omar al-Bashir: Darfur and So Much More
By Douglas Farah
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. My full blog is here.