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Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

telegraph.co.uk

121–130 of 211 posts

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s dumb to frame every foreign policy issue through Israel. It’s simple. It will get views. But it’s dumb. > Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter? Precludes? No. Politically balanced. Absolutely. You’re not going to win votes promising higher oil prices and stalled construction projects to plant a moral flag in Africa so the guys backed by Iran, Saudi Ara…

> It’s dumb to frame every foreign policy issue through Israel. It’s simple. It will get views. But it’s dumb. Why? I get nothing from views, and much of our foreign policy is based around Israel, which serves the needs of our state in almost uncountable ways. Is it not just as dumb to ignore this? Acting as if our relationships with foreign countries appear in a vacuum seems.... absurd, to put it charitably.

Even if Israel literally didn’t exist, we’d still be doing the same thing with the UAE. Maybe even more, since Israel is sucking up capital that would otherwise go to Dubai.

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#122
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts Economics motivates. But these divisions dominate in determining magnitude. You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields. (You need labour.) The dial turns from enslavement to extermination when there is deep-rooted fury. That sort of fury can really only be channeled on divisions of race and religion. (You need a way f…

So Arabs fly planes into the world trade center, commit mass genocide at darfur and are still support this dude and his band of thugs with their colonialist rape of Africa? The US could drop a nuke on UAE and tell them to stop funding colonialist expansion. The war against evil is never ending playing nice is a fools game.

You know if we nuked the UAE, everyone would just start funding the folks that make Hamas seem like the church social committee right?

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#123
'Visible from space' loses its bite when you see they're using cameras that can practically read your mail from space.

Yes, this is terrible, but atrocities like this happen all over Africa on a daily basis for innumerable reasons, and Sudan specifically has been in civil wars longer than I have been alive. The piece's structure: 'look at how terrible this is, don't you just feel soooo bad?' + 'by the way the UAE has been accused of facilitating this' signals to me that the writer is primarily motivated by a desire to make the UAE and all muslims by comparison look bad. Notice how they focus on the atrocities by the RSF, ignoring the fact that all sides in this war are complicit in slaughter.

America, Europe, Russia, China, and their satellite countries have been starting and fueling wars in Africa since before these countries became independent.

They deliberately draw borders that cut ethnic populations and religious groups in half.

They flood these regions with weapons and mercenaries.

They replace incentives to develop stable societies, robust agricultural industries, and infrastructure with 'just good enough to survive' aid.

They bribe local warlords with collective billions of dollars.

Global power blocs have effectively enforced a continent of lawlessness where you're only safe from war in the immediate vicinity of resource extraction sites, and lucky for you those sites are the kinds of places small children handle mercury without PPE and die of exhaustion and chemical burns. All of this to give you fiber optic cables.

Yes, the UAE is complicit, but so are you if you're reading this. This is not a 'muslim' problem. This is not a 'UAE' problem. This is a structural problem driven primarily by increasing population, materialist consumer habits, and the geopolitical reality that if any bloc stopped doing all of this horrible stuff the only outcome would be that the other blocs get a bigger share.

This article is not written with the intention of solving these problems, it is written with the intention of keeping you just angry enough to do what they tell you, without making you so angry that you replace the ones making these decisions.

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#124
post #28

Sadly, yet another bloody chapter of the Abu Dhabi (al Nahyan) - Doha (al Thani) feud that has been going on since the 2011 coup attempt [0], which itself is part of a longer multi-generational blood feud going on between the royal families [4]. The Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Balkans are all burning because of this saga [1]. The UAE backs the RSF [2] (formerly known as the Janjaweed of the Darfur Ge…

The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.

OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#125
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whataboutism fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The silence from the west on what's going on in Sudan is deafening. It's a completely fair question to ask why, when people are so vocal for Palestine? Why not Sudan? Throwing out "whataboutism" every time someone dares ask a question like this is a fallacy in itself, intending to distract from the question of why genocide in places like Sudan are so thoroughly and utterly ignored and even buried.

Because we dont fund or assist what's going on in Sudan? We have sanctions in place against the RSF rather than applauding their leaders in congress every year.

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#126
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.

OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?

In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia.

There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.

A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?

In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia. There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are. A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as wel…

Like I said, I'm not apologizing for any of the many bad things Qatar has done, but I don't understand how this, where Qatar is supporting the legitimate-ish and not-especially-genocidal side, is being used as evidence by the "Qatar sucks" camp.

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia. There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are. A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as wel…

Like I said, I'm not apologizing for any of the many bad things Qatar has done, but I don't understand how this, where Qatar is supporting the legitimate-ish and not-especially-genocidal side, is being used as evidence by the "Qatar sucks" camp.

Becuase this is one proxy war that is part of a larger proxy war across the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia.

I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#129
This is horrible but I feel like the "visible" from space headline is becoming increasingly less impressive as satellite imagery becomes more impressive.

You could say, I drink so much coffee it's visible from space and it's literally just a coffee mug sitting on a park bench.

Re: Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

#130
post #72
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UAE has crafted itself as a new Switzerland And whenever someone is talking fondly about UAE that's all you need to know about that person

The comment merely said UAE has become strategically influential in finance, transport (cargo shipping (#5 in world), world's busiest international passenger airport), tourism. Nothing about being fond. 5% GDP growth in non-oil. More diversified than Saudi. #2 globally for being "easy to do business in and with". Top-10 in Global Soft Power Index since 2023 [0], rose from #18 in 2020. Dubai has become a global influe…

>Looks like the US is backing UAE as Saudi wanes

How exactly are they waning? Last I heard everyone there was still as rich as ever due to the oil money.

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