Surprise: Arabs Do Care About Darfur

One of the most enduring Myths in the western world, that the Arabs don’t give a fig about Darfur, turned out to be false.

You must have read it before, somewhere in the American media, something along the lines of: Arabs and Muslims make a big fuss when westerners kill Muslims, but when they kill each other, like in Darfur, they don’t care one bit.

According to James Zogby, it turned out that Arabs do care after all. In an article in the Daily Star, he wrote

the Arab American Institute, working with the Washington-based Save Darfur Coalition, conducted a poll of Arabs and Muslims in six countries (Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and Malaysia). The poll, carried out by Zogby International, produced findings that shattered the myth that Arabs and Muslims are indifferent to the suffering of the people in Darfur.

What the poll revealed was that strong majorities in the four Arab countries found fault with the Arab media’s coverage of Darfur. Additionally, more than 80 percent of the respondents in the four Arab countries surveyed expressed the view that the Arab media should devote more time to the issue.