Double Standards ...

Yazza was worrying in Monday's Indie that no-one, either in the West or the Muslim world, seems to give a hoot about mass murder in Darfur, or for that matter in the Congo.

The answer is obvious. To a Muslim, Darfur is unmentionable because Muslims are doing the killing (and never mind who's being killed - I don't remember protests against Saddam's victims, or the million dead in the First Gulf War (Iraq/Iran)).

And the Congo ? Just one lot of infidels slaughtering another lot.

To Western liberals, the trouble with Darfur and the Congo is pretty much the opposite problem that Muslims have. No Westerners or white people are involved in the killing, so there's not a lot of breast-beating to be done. Were 8,000 US or British troops in Sudan while Western companies had oil contracts there (as China has troops and contracts in Sudan), it would never be off the Guardian's front page or the Today programme. I could write the headlines myself.

"As British troops guard oil installations, thousands are being killed"

"Blood For Oil"

Yazza is right to detect a sort of racism in the blind eyes being turned, but she doesn't seem to have grasped that it's all about us, not them. There's a reason why the Lancet looks at deaths in Iraq, not the Congo.

This tendency for white liberals to bemoan the oppressions of their fellow-Caucasian while ignoring those of Johnny foreigner extends to even the most decent of people. I'm reading Denis Healey's autobiography 'The Time Of My Life' at the moment. As Shadow Foreign Secretary, he tours South Africa (Steve Biko takes him round Zululand) and notes the injustices of the apartheid state. All well and good.

But earlier in the book, Healey is in Abu Dhabi.

"When I visited Prince Sultan in his palace, I sat on a low cushion and was served with fragrant tea by a negro slave. Then the Prince leaned forward and asked for the latest news of Nye Bevan's illness."

At that time, slavery had been unlawful in the UK and her colonies for some 130 years. Healey makes no comment at all on the fact of slavery existing in the Gulf in 1960. It's different for "them".