The Arab World has made it very clear that they could not care less about the ongoing atrocities committed in Sudan by Arab Muslim militias against native black African Muslims. And now that Western nations have been expressing concern, the Arab World has a new scapegoat behind which to hide their tacit support of racist genocide: Arab fears of another western intervention in Sudan.

LONDON, Aug 03, 2004 (Financial Times) — While western media and politicians rail against inaction in the face of a human rights catastrophe in the region, Arab media and intellectuals express a very different view, based on ingrained suspicion of western motives. Many Arabs believe that talk of United Nations sanctions and military deployment to protect Sudanese civilians masks a new offensive against yet another Arab regime: “Sudan Next” in the words of an editorial in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper.

Hassan Abu Taleb, deputy director at the Al-Ahram centre for political and strategic studies in Cairo, said US failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had fuelled doubts about the west’s credibility and broader motives in the Middle East. “The tendency is to see anything that comes from the US as a big lie. Some even doubt the [veracity of] catastrophic images of Darfur because they come from the western media,” he said.

Arab governments are taking a more conservative position on Darfur than their western counterparts, urging restraint. The Arab League has been attempting to win a more prominent mediating role over Darfur, where more than 1m people have been displaced, and thousands killed since the Sudan government made common cause with nomadic Arab militias to counter a rebellion last year by black African groups.