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Recently, a group calling itself Save Darfur initiated a media campaign calling for President Bush to "stop the genocide now" referring to the ethnic cleansing that is currently taking place in Darfur, Sudan. While any movement to halt the slaughter of innocents in Darfur should be considered a noble endeavor, the message conveyed in the commercial now running in the mainstream media is decidedly misleading in that it infers President Bush either has more power over the situation than he actually has or is doing nothing to stop the slaughter, both notions are factually false. One has to question whether this is intentional and, then, whether it is political in nature.

The facts on the ground in Darfur are disturbing. Almost half a million people have been slaughtered and over two million people have been displaced. To say that genocide is taking place -- no matter what the official definition provided and accepted by the United Nations -- would be an accurate statement.

The situation is exasperated by the fact that the Sudanese government is, to date, refusing to allow the United Nations to replace African Union troops, charged with keeping the peace, with UN peacekeeping troops. Further, Khartoum not only refuses to disarm or effectively demilitarize the Islamist jihadi group Janjaweed, they support them, thus allowing their continued aggression toward the innocents in the Darfur region.

Many in the international community consider the ongoing conflict in Darfur a result of political discontent. Save Darfur identifies the catalyst for the unrest as stemming from, "the rebels...[compelling] the government of Sudan to address underdevelopment and the political marginalization of the region."

But this situation is being facilitated by more than just an ongoing conflict between the government of Sudan and rebel forces calling for government accountability. It is no coincidence that the Islamist jihadi Janjaweed is involved and supported by the Sudanese government, a government controlled by the National Islamic Front since 1989.

In a recent symposium conducted by Dr. Jamie Glazov for FrontPage Magazine, Dr. Walid Phares, a professor of Middle East Studies and Religious Conflict at Florida Atlantic University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies stated:

"...since the modern state of Sudan was established by the British in the 1950s, the northern Arab-Islamic elite attempted to dominate two ethno religious African communities; the southern Black Christians and Animists and the Nubian Black Muslims.

"Since the 1989 coup that brought the National Islamic Front NIF to power with General Omar Bashir and Hassan Turabi, the "Jihadists" in Khartoum focused on the ethnic cleansing of the southern 'Christians,' on the base of religious ideology. They tried to rally the Black Muslims against the Black Christians. But as of the end of the 1990s, and especially since 2001, the Blacks understood that they were under two Jihads. One is religious against the Christians, and the other is racial against the Blacks, and they were being played against each other. Hence, the Nuba mountain Black Muslims started to oppose the Arab-led militias."

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