A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

About nine months ago I wrote a piece in The Washington Post noting the curious position of the Arab countries with respect to the ongoing genocide in Darfur.  I said, in part:

Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states could pay for more aid out of petty cash than Darfur could use, but Canada, by itself, has pledged more aid than all the Arab countries combined. The number of Saudi, Kuwaiti or Syrian relief workers in Darfur is, as best one can tell, precisely zero. Arab press references to Darfur consist mostly of reprints from Western news services about official government statements, many of them from the Sudanese government itself.

One might think this would be a subject worthy of comment or at least curiosity by the U.S. government and the Western media. One would be wrong. Virtually without exception, the Western reaction to Arab silence about genocide being committed by Arabs has been -- silence. The American government has said nothing about it; Western newspapers can write months of news stories and editorials about Darfur without mentioning Egypt or other Arab countries except in passing.

It is as if Egypt and Sudan occupied different planets instead of sharing a common border.

Now, it seems, an Arab voice has at last spoken up about Darfur.  This is not what I was hoping for:

The tape attributed to bin Laden slammed U.S. and British efforts and their past actions in Sudan, where bin Laden lived in the mid-'90s before being expelled by the Sudanese government.

"I call on the mujahedeen [Islamic fighters] and their supporters, especially in Sudan and the Arabian peninsula, to prepare for a long war against the crusaders and plunderers in western Sudan. Our goal is not defending the Khartoum government but [to] defend Islam, its land and its people," the speaker said.

My first question whenever a bin Laden tape surfaces is always why this person is still walking around free four and a half years after 9/11.  This time, though, I have a second question:  now that bin Laden has (apparently) come out in vehement opposition to efforts put a stop to genocide in Sudan, can Arab governments and media continue to treat Darfur as a minor internal issue for Sudan with which no Western government should dare concern itself?  Here's a third:  if the Bush administration's recent policy of neglect toward the Darfur situation is related to the counter-terrorism intelligence it hopes to get from the Khartoum regime, how much is it actually getting?  Bin Laden doesn't seem to feel the government of Sudan has gone over to the other side, now does he?