Ali A. Rizvi, a muslim blogger, asks the hard questions:

Where are the large-scale protests and outrage from the Muslim
community over the senseless deaths and rape of hundreds of thousands
of poverty-ridden African Muslims?

Why is there such a glaring
discrepancy between the Muslim world’s response to the atrocities in
Gaza and the atrocities in Darfur?

If the Darfur genocide was being carried out by Jews or Christians instead of Arab Muslims, would we see a different response?

Note that the point of this is not to suggest that there should be no outrage over Gaza. But in terms of the scale of human life – 300,000 people dead according to estimates from 2005, equivalent to 300 Gazas – Darfur should at least merit comparable energy and action and blog posts and outrage. Rizvi’s post documents just how little outrage there is to spare.

When the International Criminal Court finally indicted Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan for his role in arming and supporting the janjaweed militias who are carrying out the literal genocide of non-Arab muslims in Darfur, what was the response of the Ummah? Accusations of bias and injustice, but not for the victims of Darfur, but rather their murderers. Muslim murderers.

It should be noted that two and a half years ago, there were large-scale demonstrations in the US to draw attention to Darfur. Those demonstrations were largely organized by American Jews. The muslim-American community’s response? A press release.

Again, I reiterate – I do not suggest that we should be blind to the suffering of the innocents in Gaza. But just as muslims point out the calculus whereby one Jewish life is worth 100 Palestinian lives, so too it seems that one Palestinian life is worth 300 African lives.

Related: discussion at Talk Islam on this issue.