I deplore the "savagery" and world’s idleness about the bloodshed in Darfur.

The UN is made up of National Representatives!

As civilians this includes each and everyone of US!

Australians must feel outraged and learn to raise their voices about this kind of neglectful inaction.

What happened to “never again” that oft-quoted promise made after the 2nd world war and the Holocaust?

We need to revisit the "Marshall Plan"!

A NEW developmental plan to work towards "sustainable ecological and economic social development" in Africa and especially for DARFUR. A plan with the same line of committment as occurred through the assistance of the Marshall Plan, where world governments constructed a joint strategy for rebuilding and integrating the war-torn economies of Western Europe.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=marshall+plan+rebuild+&meta=

If we directed the same energy and mindfulness towards the strategy of PEACE and WELLBEING through TRADE as we do to CONFLICT and WAR........ we would have a far SAFER WORLD.

http://www.miacat.com/

A good article that hits the mark exactly. In Rwanda the international community claimed that events unfolded to quickly for them to react in time. In Darfur, we don't have even this lame excuse.

We seem to suffer selective moral outrage - depending on our ideological bent we'll expound the sins or virtues of Israel, Palestinians, North Korea, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan or Cuba. But nothing in sub-Saharan Africa seems bad enough to spur us to serious attention, let alone action

There is silence and inaction on Darfur because "the plight of the Palestinians" (how sick am I of this overworked phrase) has sucked all the oxygen from every other cause in the world.

Don't forget, Arabs can only ever be victims, and their suffering is more worthy than any other. So when Arabs rape, pillage and slaughter black Africans - Christian, animist or even Muslim - the brigades of professional protesters in the West just ignore it, whitewash it or blame the Jews somehow. Obviously in the eyes of Western lefty protesters one Palestinian is worth more than a thousand black Africans. We never hear the end of it when Israel "cruelly tears up Palestinian olive groves" yet when Arabs in Darfur raze villages and rape women we hear nothing. The sooner we stop wasting air-time on Palestinians the better. There are hundreds of causes so much more worthy than the Palestinians and their olive groves and it's time their voice was heard.

Naturally I agree with the outrage expressed. Who could not?
But we need cool heads to analyse the causes of inaction. It is not the lack of humanitarian spirit. It is not merely economic considerations. The questions are fundamentally the ones of (1) who do you believe - impartial information (2) the rules of intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state (3) the problems of getting consensual action in the UN when votes are determined by national interest (4) the problem of condemnation of a particular nation when it decides to go-it-alone in an intervention.
Naturally, I want something to happen for the people of Darfur before these issues are resolved, but until they are I think the people of the world are doomed to a succession of genocides stretching well into the future and numbering millions of victims rather than hundreds of thousands. It is time to supplement the cries of outrage with positive suggestions about how to design systems that work better.

These genocides will cease the day after the victims are trained, armed and sent back to combat their oppressors with superior weaponry.

-Stingers
-Rpg's
-Assault rifles.

(footnote- worked for Afghanistan)

Until then, the various wanna be Hitlers will just keep their stalling while killing methods going and the rest of us will be doing number crunching about how much this is likely to effect 'our interests'.

Dafur is ARAB Muslims ethnically cleansing NEGRO Muslims. I'm not sure how the breakdown is between the various rebel groups, but the West needs to wake up to that fact that its more likely just a part of the Arabization and Islamization going on around the world.

The LAST thing we need is an influx of culturally incompatable people on our doorstep.

They are being hunted down by weapons.... let them fight back with weapons. The idea that 'human conflict cannot be solved by violence' is just another rediculous and shallow mantras the left have used with considerable effectiveness against our increasingly washed minds.
Violence/War DOES solve conflict and the peace we now enjoy has as its foundation WAR and a damn brutal one at that.
Chamberlain tried the 'lets talk about it' approach and we all know the outcome.
All those Chamberlain wanna-be's can line up to walk the plank.

Aside from all that. Happy new year to all.

As a consumer-driven society, the masses are only concerned with the food the hand is offering them. If in this society, our attentions are deflected by myopic introspection, fed by a bombardment of intellectual "fast food", then the plastic hamburger is where the the appetite will gravitate towards. Our concern over the such important topics as cricket and Paris Hilton, will always take precedence over real issues, which don't even register a blip on the radar of the average and apathetic Australian. Having said this, where and how does a concerned working class Aussie start to make a difference? Stuff that happens "over there" will always be "over there" until, horror of horrors, it ever happens here.