Andrew Sullivan notes this item about Kola Boof, a Sudanese black feminist writer, now in hiding in California, who has been condemned to death by beheading by a Sharia court in London. (That's globalization for you.) The death sentence was announced by "Islamic Sudanese diplomat" Gamal Ibrahim, giving "diplomacy" a whole new meaning. She also claims to have received a call from Osama himself in 1998: "if I had the time to waste," he said, "I would slit your throat myself."
This is from her statement in response to the fatwa:
Sudan is ruled by fundamental extremism now. There is no Allah involved whatsoever. As a black African woman, I cannot and will not be silent as black men in Arab nations are chained up like dogs to the back doors of Muslim households and fed, literally, from doggie bowls.I will not be silent as African women are raped, mutilated and mentally demeaned by sadistic human beings calling themselves children of Allah. I will not be silent as the number of little black boys who are sodomized by their Arab masters continues to soar, while even worse atrocities attend the lives of little black girls.
The more important reason, though, is that Sudan has been pretty much off the mainstream Depravity Radar. It's not just the slavery, which is vaguely associated with Sudan in the same way that Holland is associated with wooden shoes, France with cheese, etc. and is bad enough. Did you know that Khartoum's "civil war" against the people of the non-Muslim south has caused two million deaths? I didn't, till I read the cursory "background" sentence at the end of the article. The Sudanese government dismisses criticism of this and such-like on the grounds that it is motivated by "religious hatred." Look, if you can't hate slavery, torture, and genocide, what are you allowed to hate these days?