The Movement for Reform Judaism

I can't recall if I've spoken to you before on the subject of Darfur, but if I have I don't apologise for repeating the topic.  I am enormously concerned about what is happening there, particularly because of the seeming lack of awareness around the world that a genocide is occurring.  I had a discussion with a group of fourteen and fifteen year olds at my Synagogue, who had absolutely no idea of where Darfur is, let alone the events of the past four years there.  Having learned something about it, they have organised a programme of political lobbying, fund-raising and increasing awareness among their peer group and other children at school.

My teenagers are following a biblical instruction, not to stand idly by the blood of your neighbour.  The Jewish tradition is that your neighbour is not the person living next door or across the street, rather everyone in your village or town or city is a neighbour.  With the technological advancements in communications, we all inhabit a global village and so everyone becomes our neighbour.  But somehow that message hasn't got through to those with power and responsibility.  Just as in the 1930s and 40s, the world stood idly by while a third of the world's Jews were massacred, and Muslims were annihilated in Kosovo, and Cambodia and Rwanda were allowed to happen unchecked, now the people of Darfur are the innocent victims.  More than four hundred thousand have been murdered, two and a half million have been forcibly uprooted from their homes, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped and ill treated, millions are without food, water and shelter, the basic needs that are the right of every human being.  The pious promise after the Holocaust: ‘never again' has once again been discarded in the interest of politics and economics.

The Sudan, in which the Darfur region is in the north-west of the country, is rich in oil and timber, and the United Nations and the Organisation for African Unity are being hampered in their efforts to influence the Sudanese Government to bring the hostilities between their army and associated independent militias and the unarmed Darfuris to an end.  This, it should be noted is not a religious war, both perpetrators and victims are Muslim, rather a tribal conflict, much as was the case in Rwanda.  However, that shouldn't stop religious people, people of all faiths, from becoming involved, from letting our Government know that this situation cannot be allowed to continue.

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