On the eve of the hearing, a friend messaged me from Cape Town: “It feels a little bit like Christmas Eve or something here. Or the night before a big final.” Because of the time difference, I watched a recorded version once I got to my office on Jan. 11, the first of two days of hearings. By then, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on Palestine, had already sent a message on X that “watching African women & men fighting to save humanity” from the “ruthless attacks supported/enabled by most of the West will remain one of the defining images of our time. This will make history whatever happens.”As a Black South African who grew up during the nation’s liberation struggle and came of age watching the birth of South African democracy, for me, Albanese’s words resonated.[By] forcing the International Court of Justice to act, South Africa is putting down a marker for global civil society. South Africa stepped up. It showed what we could be and how groups that have faced oppression and violence can stand up confidently for one another on the world stage.
So moral! So righteous!
And so silent on Arabs deliberately murdering many black Africans on the same continent, in the same place that there has been a real genocide two decades ago!
As summarized in Just Security last month:
Less than 20 years after the Darfur genocide unfolded, history is repeating itself. The current conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group established by Sudan’s deposed president Omar al-Bashir, has already claimed the lives of more than 12,000 and displaced more than six million people since it broke out in April.This is all happening against the backdrop of one of the world’s largest, most pressing humanitarian disasters. According to the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), approximately 25 million Sudanese people, or half the country, are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. In Darfur, hundreds of miles away from Khartoum, the indigenous non-Arab ethnic groups are even more vulnerable, living under the reign of RSF terror and genocidal violence. The RSF has left a trail of mass atrocities in its wake with near impunity, reminiscent of the same brutal tactics used by the Janjaweed in the 2000s. Today, the RSF, as the Janjaweed’s successor entity, is committing the same atrocities and targeting the same indigenous groups on the international community’s watch. During the Janjaweed atrocities of the 2000s, policymakers not only failed to act in time to prevent genocide but even downplayed the nature of the violence to preserve other political interests. This time, there can be no debate over the magnitude of the horrors facing non-Arab ethnic groups at the hands of the RSF, or excuse for the repetition of our collective failure to uphold the promise of never again.
Hanan Khamis just wanted to get to safety. In mid-June, after surviving weeks of gunfire and rockets directed at the Masalit, a black African ethnic group, she fled el-Geneina, the capital of the state of West Darfur in Sudan. Hoisting her 23-month-old baby boy, Sabir, onto her back she started walking towards Chad. Yet fighters wearing the uniforms of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soon surrounded them. They dragged men to the side of the road and told the women to run. Before she could do so, a gunman wrenched open the shawl on her back that covered Sabir. “No men can escape to Chad,” he shouted. Then he shot her baby in the head.In Chad a humanitarian worker identifies four other mothers who tell of similar horrors. One says she was stopped at a roadblock where Arab militiamen murdered the men in her group. When they saw her 15-month-old son strapped to her, they shot him dead as he clung to her. The bullet burst through his tiny body and into hers, where it remains lodged. “If that isn’t a genocidal act, I don’t know what is,” says Mukesh Kapila, a former un chief in Sudan who blew the whistle on massacres in Darfur 20 years ago.Zahara Adam Khamis, a women’s rights activist, weeps as she recounts how a 27-year-old university student she knows was gang-raped by five militiamen in front of her mother. ”The baby will be Arab,” they said as they finished.
In November, CNN aired this searing report showing videos of atrocities by the Arab gangs against Black African tribes:
Sean Jacobs founded a website called Africa Is A Country. But he hasn't written or tweeted a word about Darfur or Sudan over the past year. And he has tweeted obsessively about Israel, dozens of times, i the same timeframe.
And the government of South Africa has been curiously silent about the targeting and murder of Black Africans much closer than Gaza. The only statement they made was out the outset of the war, expressing concern - but the words "Masalit" and "RSF" or "Darfur" are not to be found in any of their official statements.
Using the ICJ case as proof of South Africa's concern over human rights is absurd, when that country doesn't defend Black Africans being systematically murdered on its own continent. The South African case against Israel while ignoring actual attacks against its fellow Africans in truth indicates antisemitism, not human rights.
Not surprisingly, in its bio of Jacobs, the New York Times edited a book titled "Apartheid Israel." The New York Times didn't mention that he has a vested interest in this topic.
And if you want one more example of the world's hypocrisy, in 2009, the UN said that what happened in Darfur was not genocide, saying, "the crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing, at least as far as the central government authorities are concerned."
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