To Belabor the Point About Genocide

I listened earlier today to an interview on Fresh Air, the inimitable public radio show hosted by Terry Gross, with Christiane Amanpour. Few people know she was born in Iran to a British mother and Iranian Christian father and left in 1979 after that wicked ayatollah flew in from France. Anyway, she said something very interesting: one of the reasons intervention in Bosnia was finally achieved was through relentless press coverage, yet Rwanda was not so lucky in part because of the circus of the O.J. Simpson trial. Now of course Mr. Simpson's trial deserved media attention. After all, a psychopathic double murderer purchased a not guilty verdict using high-price, race-baiting attorneys. But it is yet another indictment of our frivolous, fatuous society that we require constant preoccupation with celebrities and their depradations.

About Darfur, in the West there has been unconscionable dithering and a capitulation to Chinese bullying. (China is Sudan's most important patron, extracting its natural resources, shielding it from international condemnation, and even promising to build a new presidential palace for its war criminal leader, who danced mockingly on a public platform after the ICC indicted him for committing genocide.) Mia Farrow has been an unyielding advocate for victims in Darfur, calling the Beijing Olympics the "Genocide Olympics" and convincing Steven Spielberg to sever his ties with the olympics after saying he would go down as the Leni Riefenstahl of the games.

One the most eloquent writers who has taken up the cause of Darfur is Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual. He and Ms. Farrow gave a presentation in April of this year at the PEN festival in New York chronicling their travels to Darfur and measures that might be taken to stop the atrocities. He cut right through the shame and ridicule of our inaction:

Does what happened in Darfur deserve, if I dare say, the name genocide or not? I know that there is a polemic on this point. Some say that it is a genocide, others say that it is not quite a genocide. There is a sort of discussion similar to the discussion of the sex of the angels in the Middle Ages. What I saw, what I witnessed... makes this sort of discussion completely absurd and frivolous.