Idi Amin, another Moslem despot – or maybe he was a 'Christian'?

There seems to be an infinite number of savage Moslem leaders who have engaged in barbarity and butchery, the first of course being Islam's founder the now-sainted Muhammad. Moslems and Islamophiliacs whine that leaders as diverse as the Arabs who led the early Caliphate, the Ummayids, the Fatimids, the Spanish Almoravids, or the Turkish sultans, not to mention the Arab-Turkic-Persian Amirs who decimated India over a 1000 years killing and enslaving some 100 millions; are not 'real Moslems'. Over 1400 years the endless number of Moslem leaders who have engaged in barbarity are just simply categorized as people who did not follow the 'true' teachings of the 'holy' Koran. The list of such figures is impossibly and impressively massive. Quite a coincidence indeed.

Idi Amin is another modern Moslem despot who murdered and warred his way into power and who used unfettered violence and force to cleanse Uganda of non-Moslems, targeting specifically Asians and the small Jewish population. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were exiled from Uganda by Amin's regime during the 1970s, their property and wealth appropriated, their estates stolen by Amin's cult. Jews were likewise ostracized from Uganda dispossessed of their businesses and monies and forced to flee. Uganda's loss was England and America's gain, as well-educated, hard-working and socially responsible Hindus and the few Jews who had tried to survive in a Moslem state, started new lives and businesses overseas. You don't have to travel far in either London or New York to meet someone whose family had fled the wreckage of Moslem Uganda.

According to the CIA Factbook most Ugandans are not Moslem. Fully 85% are Christian.

“Roman Catholic 41.9%, Protestant 42% (Anglican 35.9%, Pentecostal 4.6%, Seventh Day Adventist 1.5%), Muslim 12.1%, other 3.1%, none 0.9% (2002 census)”

Films, books, CIA fact sheets, historical analysis all leave out the fact that Amin was a Moslem and a practising one at that. His expulsion and murder of non-Moslems is barely commented upon. His 10 year or so reign of terror [1971-1979] is usually described by the bien-pensant as simply a 'dictatorship'. Rest assured if Amin had been a Roman Catholic zealot, the clever people would categorize his regime as a formulation of Medieval Christian totalitarianism.

“The death toll during the Amin regime will never be accurately known. The best estimate, from the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, is that it was not less than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000. Another estimate, compiled by exile organisations with the help of Amnesty International, put the number killed at 500,000.”

That is the Guardian UK's assessment. But how many of the 500.000 dead or exiled were Jews and Hindus? No compiled numbers exist. This figure has escaped almost every published history of Amin's Moslem despotism:

“[mid 1970s] Amin now challenges Britain and the United States, breaks relations with Israel, and throws his support behind the Palestinian liberation movement. British property in Uganda is appropriated, business relations between the two countries are restricted, and those Britons remaining in Uganda are threatened with expulsion.

To secure his regime Amin launches a campaign of persecution against rival tribes and Obote supporters, murdering between 100,000 and 500,000 (most sources say 300,000).

Among those to die are ordinary citizens, former and serving Cabinet ministers, the chief justice, Supreme Court judges, diplomats, academics, educators, prominent Roman Catholic and Anglican clergy, senior bureaucrats, medical practitioners, bankers, tribal leaders, business executives, journalists and a number of foreigners.

In some cases entire villages are wiped out. So many corpses are thrown into the Nile that workers at one location have to continuously fish them out to stop the intake ducts at a nearby dam from becoming clogged.”

When the Tanzanians invaded in 1979 Amin's regime fell and he fled the country going into exile in Saudi Arabia. In 1999 he gave an interview with a Ugandan newspaper in which he described his quiet life as one of exercise, fishing, brothels, reading the Koran and staying close to home. He expressed no remorse for his barbaric regime. The man who deposed Amin was the socialist Tanzanian President Nyerere who in 1999 when Amin died gave a damning indictment of the Moslem madman calling him “a murderer, a liar and a savage.”

Amin was uneducated and stupid. But like many thugs he had, at last for the ignorant part of the population, a certain level of charisma and charm. He also possessed a peasant cunning, in the same vein as a Hitler or a Stalin, able to exploit people's weaknesses and use force to impress and enslave the cowardly and fanatically misinformed.

But one fact is usually missing from history's indictment. Amin was a practising Moslem and he tried to take a largely non-Moslem state and Islamicize it. The vast ruin and penury which he bequeathed to Uganda is still in evidence today. But few people comment upon Amin's Jihad against the Infidel in this central-eastern African nation. As usual Islam is given a pass and we refer to Amin only as a 'dictator'. How convenient indeed. One doubts the same would occur if Amin had been a 'right wing evangelical'. Whatever that means.