"Can The Cushite Change His Skin?"

Only about twenty per cent of the Southern Sudanese are Christians, and the separatist fighters there are no slouches when it comes to recruiting child soldiers, or to attacking African Union peacekeepers. However, they have become celebrity culture's favourites, aided and abetted by the lazy use of "Arab" and "Muslim" as synonyms, as well as by the failure to comprehend the basic fact that an Arab is anyone whose first language is Arabic: Semitic, Caucasian, or black African; Muslim, Christian, or Jewish; and so on. Arabic used to be a very successful lingua franca in that sense, above all in Mesopotamia and in the old Levant of Muslims, Christians, Jews and Druze, with its de facto capital at Damascus. But a grievous wound was inflicted on the latter in 1948, while the former has been utterly devastated since 2003.

From coast to coast, from Nigeria to Kenya, that band of Africa is becoming evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, as Lebanon used to be. But as the Levantine and Iraqi models have been ruined by ignorant clod-hopping, Zionist and neoconservative, so the examples of co-existence and co-operation are either gone or, at best, not a patch on what they once were. Syria and Lebanon still hold out hope, as does the Iranian model and example, which also has reserved parliamentary representation for Jews as surely as Hezbollah is backing the restoration of Beirut's historic synagogue. But those are now only lakes where once there was an ocean.

The neocon-backed Islamist dismemberment of Yugoslavia has not helped, either. Nor has the neocon-backed, including Islamist, dismemberment of what had been the Soviet Union. And nor is any help being provided by the neocon-backed Islamist dismemberment of the Russian Federation, or by what is at least putatively the neocon-backed, including Islamist, dismemberment of China.