Child Rape as Genocide

David Rubenstein writes:

On Sunday December 10th, as part of UN World Human Rights Day, activists in cities around the world will hold demonstrations in front of the Sudan’s embassies to "Raise the Alarm" on Darfur. We have called on communities of faith to participate through the "Weekend of Prayer and Action," December 8th-10th.

I would like to invite you to participate in this weekend’s important activities by asking your house of worship to add its name to an urgent sign-on letter to President Bush.…

We hope to use this weekend to bring diverse communities of faith together in calling on the president to take immediate action to stop the genocide in Darfur.

In particular, we hope to raise awareness of the horrific situation women and girls face every day in Darfur.

Women and girls as young as 8 years old are being raped and sexually assaulted by the Janjaweed on a daily basis as part of a calculated strategy of genocide.

They live in constant fear of attack. Even routine tasks such as searching for firewood have become perilous for them.

Please ask your house of worship to sign on to the letter urging President Bush to act immediately to end these atrocities. Click here to let us know if you plan to ask the leaders of your house of worship to add its name to the letter.

You will be joining hundreds of thousands of concerned people around the world who will be calling on their respective leaders to act for the people of Darfur.

Please forward this message to your friends and family and invite them to join you in participating in this effort.

Thank you again for your dedication.

Best regards,

David Rubenstein
Save Darfur Coalition

P.S. Are you looking for a meaningful holiday gift? If so, click here to visit the Save Darfur Coalition’s online store to browse our selection of t-shirts, wristbands, and much more. Our merchandise is the perfect way to give a gift to someone you love and help people in need at the same time.

Remember Darfur on Thanksgiving

Take a moment, go on line during halftime, and sign this petition. Have the rest of the family do so as well. It will cost you nothing but a few minutes of time, and you might save lives.

Prof. Yehuda Bauer: Gaza Settlers Holocaust Deniers

Shahar Ilan interviews Professor Yehuda Bauer, perhaps the world’s greatest authority on genocide and the Holocaust. What follows is a brief excerpt from a much longer and very thought provoking interview. The Gaza settler Holocaust denier remark is at the end of the excerpt:

There are several dozen refugees from Sudan in Israel today. Most of them have been in detention for months and have never been brought before a judge. In April, Bauer wrote a letter to the editor of Haaretz harshly condemning Israel’s treatment of these refugees. "What kind of law do we have that allows genocide refugees to be detained without trial, leaving them to rot in jail for months?" he wrote. In the wake of this letter, Attorney Anat Ben Dor of the Refugee Rights Program at Tel Aviv University contacted Bauer. She asked him to become one of the undersigners of an appeal demanding that the detention of refugees be carried out only under court supervision.

In an affidavit submitted to the High Court of Justice, Bauer compares the detention of these Sudanese refugees to the detention of German Jewish refugees by Great Britain and the United States in the late 1930s. "The Jewish people have a long history of refugeehood," writes Bauer. "A handful of black refugees, whose families have been murdered because of the color of their skin and their ethnicity, have come to Israel. They are seeking asylum. The idea of deporting them to some other country is horrifying. To cast them out of yet another country is immoral."

He adds: "I think it’s a scandal. There’s a law from 1954 against infiltrators, and this law has been used to send these people to jail. It’s not that there was any government resolution or ministerial decision, you know. It just slipped through. It’s an administrative thing, as they say.

"These refugees from Sudan should be granted asylum because they’re political refugees," he continues. "They should be allowed to stay here as long as they like. If the agreement signed by the Sudanese government and some of the rebels holds up, they will want to go back to their homes and families. But we shouldn’t be pushing them or deporting them. People who came here to seek refuge should be given refuge."

Even if they come from an enemy country?

"Darfur is not an enemy country. Sudan is an enemy country, and these people are being persecuted by the government of Sudan. This is exactly what the British said. Jews came from Germany, and certain government officials decided they were ‘citizens of an enemy country.’ They built a detention camp on the Isle of Man, between England and Ireland, and sent thousands of them there. After a while, there was an outcry. These were people who were being persecuted by an enemy country and seeking refuge. Incidentally, the United States did the same thing. It rounded up a thousand or so Jewish refugees and sent them to a camp in Oswego in upstate New York."

Isn’t that a good way to smuggle in spies?

"That’s what the British said, too. So they started checking them out, one by one, and soon discovered that these were people who were against Germany – not for it."

"In Darfur, black Muslims are being persecuted by Muslim Bedouin tribes who are allies of the extremist Islamic government. 400,000 of them have been murdered – not 200,000 as it says in our papers, or 180,000 as it says in The New York Times. I don’t know where they got those figures. Out of a population of 4.6 million in Darfur, at least 2 million are sitting in refugee camps."

Aren’t you worried that the moment we grant asylum to Sudanese refugees, they’ll come pouring in?

"Not really. I don’t think there’s any real threat here. So a few people will escape from the camp in Egypt, get through all the Egyptian checkpoints and sneak across the border. How many will make it? Another hundred, another two hundred? There have been precedents that worked out well. We took in refugees from Vietnam, from Bosnia. Why not follow that model?" …

What do you think about the comparison drawn between Israeli occupation and the Holocaust?

"There is no basis for comparison. People can resist occupation. I don’t think our actions are acceptable, but to compare that to genocide? To compare that to the Holocaust? It’s totally ridiculous. When the settlers were being evacuated from Gush Katif, nearly everyone who was interviewed said Holocaust this and Nazi that. How dare they cheapen the memory of the Holocaust? How dare they make light of the murder of 5.8 million Jews? In a certain sense, any Jew who said such things in Gush Katif is a Holocaust denier."  …

Israel Has More Than 40 Darfur Refugees – Most Held In Military Prison

Israel is holding more than 40 Sudanese refugees who crossed into Israel from the Sinai and gave themselves up to the IDF, seeking asylum. Most are being held in military prison. 10 were released to the care of kibbutzim until asylum can be arranged in other countries. These people fled the genocide in Darfur and subsequent persecution in Egypt and other Arab countries. What should Israel do? Readers?

Darfur

Did you mention the Darfur genocide at your seder? If you did, please tell us about it.

Remember Darfur At Your Seder

Please click on image here to enlarge.

Don’t forget to remember the ongoing genocide in Darfur at your seder.

Edah Wants Darfur At Your Seder

Click to enlarge

Edah wants us to remember the ongoing genocide in Darfur at our seders. I’ve never been one who is moved by this type of symbolism-for-symbolism’s-sake action. But I do think we all should spend a few moments discussing the Darfur genocide and what our role should be as Jews and human beings to stop it. This discussion should include practical options for action, as well.

Elie Wiesel On Darfur

Elie Wiesel on Darfur:

I am haunted by what I know of Darfur.

In Darfur, humankind’s center of suffering today, men, women and children are uprooted, starved, tortured, mutilated, humiliated and massacred — and the whole civilized world knows it. And little or nothing, nothing significant, is being done to stop these massive violations of human rights.

Who is guilty? Those who commit these crimes. But to the question, "Who is responsible?" we are compelled to say: "Aren’t we all?"

We can no longer stand idly by.…

As a Jew, and a survivor, I do not compare any events to the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet how can anyone, anywhere who sees the loss of life in Darfur, the systematic deportation, the killing of a people, not feel outraged? How can anyone who remembers other genocides – Cambodia, Rwanda, the Holocaust, the former Yugoslavia – remain silent?

If we neglect the suffering victims of Darfur, their plight will be our fault – and, perhaps, our guilt.

That is why we must act today.

Won’t you make your voice heard?

Click here to sign a postcard urging President Bush to take action.

All are entitled to live with dignity and hope. All are entitled to live without fear and pain.

For the victims of Darfur, we must intervene.

Thank you,
Elie Wiesel

Rabbi Meets The Hitler Of Our Times

Nat Hentoff writes in the Village Voice about Mordechai Liebling, a rabbi who met with the head of Sudan’s ruling junta and the country’s elite while on a mission to end the genocide in Darfur:

I have wondered what it would be like to be in the presence of Sudanese president General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the apprentice Hitler of our time, who is responsible for the genocide in Darfur, which is
very likely to surpass the Rwanda genocide in the number of slaughtered corpses. Rwanda’s atrocities lasted less than a year, but Darfur’s started in 2003, and in addition to the killings, more than 2 million
black Africans have been displaced from their razed homes and villages.

Recently, however, I talked to an American rabbi who actually
has been in the same room with the mass murderer Bashir, members of his
cabinet, and other officials.

The rabbi is Mordechai Liebling, vice president for programs
at the Jewish Fund for Justice. In June of last year, he was invited by
the Muslim American Freedom Foundation to be part of an interfaith,
interracial delegation of religious leaders to Sudan.

Rabbi Liebling was briefly in a quandary. Since his first wife
died four years ago, he has been raising four young children. And as he
wrote in the March–April Jewish Currents, Bashir’s government had "arrested the two
senior members of Doctors Without Borders for releasing a report on
rape . . . and journalists were being detained and accused of being
spies. . . . I imagined myself being arrested as a Zionist spy."

"But how could I not go?" he said in the article, "A Rabbi
Investigates in Sudan." He was to be the only rabbi in the delegation.
Moreover, he added, "My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I grew up
in a home crowded with murdered grandparents, aunts, uncles, and
cousins."

The delegation had access to the top rank of Sudanese
officials and even had a motorcycle escort on their rounds. Not
surprisingly, however, as the rabbi noted, "President Bashir and senior
Sudanese officials repeatedly lied, with great sincerity, right to our
faces about the past, and about their intentions."

Over the years, I’ve interviewed all kinds of people,
including some I would not want to meet on the street at two in the
morning. Once, covering a gang of very wayward youths, I overheard a
plan to dispose of me permanently, but the leader called it off. Yet
I’ve never met an actual organizer of genocide.

"What was General Bashir like?" I was compelled to ask  Rabbi Liebling.

"The general," he began, "is a master politician. He exudes
warmth, congeniality, and seeming sincerity. And he denies any
involvement in the murders and rapes by the janjaweed." These Arab
militias armed and financed by the Bashir government, along with
Sudanese army officers and soldiers, are on the front line in the
killing fields of Darfur.

The rabbi also met, as he described in Jewish Currents, "the
cultural and political elite of the country, among them scores of
elderly Sudanese with Ph.D.’s from European and American universities.
They were charming, erudite, lovely people who did not admit to us any
government wrongdoing. . . . I think I now understand how privilege and
denial function together—as happened in Germany. It made me reflect on
my own levels of denial as a privileged person in our global society."

When the rabbi and
I spoke, he added: "These genteel, cultivated people showed me no
consciousness of the rapes and murders by the janjaweed. They would not
engage in any discussion of the slow genocide that keeps going on. It
was a classic example of cognitive dissonance, of denial, and that is
how it also happened in Germany."

Hentoff also notes the involvement of rabbis from across the Judaic spectrum in the fight to end the genocide in Darfur:

Mordechai Liebling is far from the only rabbi intently
involved in ending the Darfur genocide. He will join an extraordinary
range of religious and secular organizations and prominent individuals
in a huge demonstration for that purpose in Washington on April 30.
George W. Bush will be invited to speak. Let’s see if he comes.…

Meanwhile, as reported in the March 17 Jewish Week—and hardly
anywhere else—on March 14, a rally by 150 rabbis at Dag Hammarskjold
Plaza, near the United Nations, "drew rabbis from across the New York
area and from all four branches of Judaism."…

Said Rabbi Saperstein: "I think the message from the rabbis is
that in the end, if thousands more die in Darfur, we’re all going to be
held accountable. [Already] we all have to live with the responsibility
of what happened in Rwanda."

Haredim are disproportionately Holocaust survivors or their descendants. Yet how many haredi rabbis attended that demonstration? How many have tried to help end the genocide in Darfur (or earlier in Rawanda)? Disproportionately few (if any).

Perhaps haredi ideology can be summed up this way: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself? That’s the way God wants it.

Why should non-Jews care about helping Jews if the most visible Jews do not care about helping them?

What Should Jews Do? Darfur Genocide Spills Into Chad

The conflict and resultant genocide in Darfur has now worsened and spread into neighboring Chad. The New York Times reports:

ADRÉ, Chad — The chaos in Darfur, the war-ravaged region in Sudan where more than 200,000 civilians have been killed, has spread across the border into Chad, deepening one of the world’s worst refugee crises.

Arab gunmen from Darfur have pushed across the desert and entered Chad, stealing cattle, burning crops and killing anyone who resists. The lawlessness has driven at least 20,000 Chadians from their homes, making them refugees in their own country.

Hundreds of thousands more people in this area, along with 200,000 Sudanese who fled here for safety, find themselves caught up in a growing conflict between Chad and Sudan, which have a long history of violence and meddling in each other’s affairs.

"You may have thought the terrible situation in Darfur couldn’t get worse, but it has," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement. "Sudan’s policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad."

Indeed, the accounts of civilians in eastern Chad are agonizingly familiar to those in western Sudan. One woman, Zahara Isaac Mahamat, described how Arab men on camels and horses had raided her village in Chad, stealing everything they could find and slaughtering all who resisted.

The dead included her husband, Ismail Ibrahim, who tried to prevent the raiders from burning his sorghum and millet fields. Like so many others in this desolate expanse of dust-choked earth, she fled west with her three children, much as people in Darfur have been forced to do in recent years.

"I have lost everything but my children," she said, her face looking much older than her 20 years. She is now a refugee, with thousands of other displaced Chadians, in Kolloye, a village south of here.

"We have three bowls of grain left," she said. "When that is gone, only God can help us."

American Jewish World Service has done good work during this crisis. Donations can be made securely online. Edah, the Modern Orthodox breakaway from the ever-calcifying Yeshiva University-inspired ‘Centrist’ Orthodoxy, has made this a front burner issue as well.*

On the other hand, haredim of all stripes and YU’s ‘Centrist’ Orthodoxy have been silent. It is exactly these people who are the first to claim antisemitism and condemn non-Jews for failing to help Jews.

But I wonder – if the Nazis had only killed Gypsies, had set up Auschwitz only to gas and burn them and not us, would Jews have done anything to save them? Should we have? If not, why not?

* [More ideas to help bring security to Darfur can be found on the SaveDarfur.org website.]

American Jewish World Service Calls For Expanded US Role In Darfur

American Jewish World Service has launched a call to action on Darfur. The petition, which can be signed here, calls for an expanded US role in ending the genocide. Let’s hope it works.

Sudan Blog

Here’s an up-to-date blog on the crisis in Sudan – Sudan: The Passion Of The Present.

Famine Ravages Southern Sudan

Sudanese children eat boiled leaves – their only meal of the day.

They’ll run out of leaves soon.

Not Now, Not Ever – End The Genocide In Darfur

New York City Rally

TODAY!

Sunday, May 8^th at 4:30pm at Cherry Hill on 72^nd Street in Central Park

 (Click here for a map)
            
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