April 8, 2012, Niesan 16, 5772
These are the words of Simon Deng, once a Sudanese slave. He is addressing
the Durban Conference in New York.
I want to thank the organizers of this conference, The Perils of Global Intolerance.
It is a great honor for me and it is a privilege really to be among today’s
distinguished speakers. I came here as a friend of the State of Israel and the
Jewish people. I came to protest this Durban conference which is based on a
set of lies. It is organized by nations who are themselves are guilty of the
worst kind of oppression. It will not help the victims of racism. It will only
isolate and target the Jewish state. It is a tool of the enemies of Israel.
The UN has itself become a tool against Israel. For over 50 years, 82 percent
of the UN General Assembly emergency meetings have been about condemning one
state – Israel. Hitler couldn’t have been made happier! The Durban
Conference is an outrage. All decent people will know that. But friends, I come
here today with a radical idea. I come to tell you that there are peoples who
suffer from the UN’s anti-Israelism even more than the Israelis. I belong
to one of those people. Please hear me out.
By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN
has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale.
For over fifty years the indigenous black population of Sudan — Christians
and Muslims alike — have been the victims
of the brutal, racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum.In South Sudan, my homeland,
about 4 million innocent men, women and children were slaughtered from 1955
to 2005. Seven million were ethnically cleansed and they became the largest
refugee group since World War II.The UN is concerned about the so-called Palestinian
refugees. They dedicated a separate agency for them, and they are treated with
a special privilege. Meanwhile, my people, ethnically cleansed, murdered and
enslaved, are relatively ignored. The UN refuses to tell the world the truth
about the real causes of Sudan’s conflicts. Who knows really what is happening
in Darfur? It is not a “tribal conflict.”
It is a conflict rooted in Arab colonialism well known in north Africa. In Darfur,
a region in the Western Sudan, everybody is Muslim. Everybody is Muslim because
the Arabs invaded the North of Africa and converted the indigenous people to
Islam. In the eyes of the Islamists in Khartoum, the Darfuris are not Muslim
enough. And the Darfuris do not want to be Arabized. They love their own African
languages and dress and customs. The Arab response is genocide! But nobody at
the UN tells the truth about Darfur. In the Nuba Mountains, another region of
Sudan, genocide is taking place as I speak. The Islamist regime in Khartoum
is targeting the black Africans – Muslims and Christians. Nobody at the
UN has told the truth about the Nuba Mountains.
Do you hear the UN condemn Arab racism against blacks?
What you find on the pages of the New York Times, or in the record of the UN
condemnations is”Israeli crimes” and Palestinian suffering. My people
have been driven off the front pages because of the exaggerations about Palestinian
suffering.
What Israel does is portrayed as a Western sin. But the truth is that the real
sin happens when the West abandons us: the victims of "Arab/Islamic apartheid".
Chattel slavery was practiced for centuries in Sudan. It was revived as a tool
of war in the early 90s.
Khartoum declared jihad against my people and this legitimized taking slaves
as war booty.Arab militias were sent to destroy Southern villages and were encouraged
to take African women and children as slaves. We believe that up to 200,000
were kidnapped, brought to the North and sold into slavery.
I am a living proof of this crime against humanity! I don’t like talking
about my experience as a slave, but I do it because it is important for the
world to know that slavery exists even today. I was only nine years old when
an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat. The
boat wound up in Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For
three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child
should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the
clock; sleeping on the ground with animals; eating the family’s
left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word “no.â€
All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs.
Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the
Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group — sixteen years to acknowledge
what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr. Charles Jacobs for
leading the anti-slavery fight.
But the Sudanese government and the Arab League pressured UNICEF, and UNICEF
backtracked, and started to criticize those who worked to liberate Sudanese
slaves. In 1998, Dr. Gaspar Biro, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on Human
Rights in Sudan who reported on slavery, resigned in protest of the UN’s
actions.
My friends, today, tens of thousands of black South Sudanese still serve their
masters in the North and the UN is silent about that. It would offend the OIC
and the Arab League.As a former slave and a victim of the worst sort of racism,
allow me to explain why I think calling Israel a racist state is absolutely
absurd and immoral. I have been to Israel five times visiting the Sudanese refugees.
Let me tell you how they ended up there. These are Sudanese who fled Arab racism,
hoping to find shelter in Egypt. They were wrong. When Egyptian security forces
slaughtered twenty six black refugees in Cairo who were protesting Egyptian
racism, the Sudanese realized that the Arab racism is the same in Khartoum or
Cairo. They needed shelter and they found it in Israel. Dodging the bullets
of the Egyptian border patrols and walking for very long distances, the refugees’
only hope was to reach Israel’s side of the fence, where they knew they
would be safe.
Black Muslims from Darfur chose Israel above all the other Arab-Muslim states
of the area. Do you know what this means!!!?? And the Arabs say Israel is racist!!!?
In Israel, black Sudanese, Christian and Muslim were welcomed and treated like
human beings. Just go and ask them, like I have done. They told me that compared
to the situation in Egypt, Israel is “heaven.”
Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism – the
answer is absolutely not. Israel is a state of people who are the colors of
the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black. I met with Ethiopian
Jews in Israel. Beautiful black Jews. So, yes … I came here today to tell
you that the people who suffer most from the UN anti-Israel policy are not the
Israelis but all those people who the UN ignores in order to tell its big lie
against Israel: we, the victims of Arab/Muslim abuse: women, ethnic minorities,
religious minorities, homosexuals, in the Arab/Muslim world. These are the biggest
victims of UN Israel hatred.Look at the situation of the Copts in Egypt, the
Christians in Iraq, and Nigeria, and Iran, the Hindus and Bahais who suffer
from Islamic oppression. The Sikhs. We — a rainbow coalition of victims
and targets of Jihadis — all suffer. We are ignored, we are abandoned.
So that the big lie against the Jews can go forward. In 2005, I visited one
of the refugee camps in South Sudan. I met a twelve year old girl who told me
about her dream.
In a dream she wanted to go to school to become a doctor. And then, she wanted
to visit Israel. I was shocked.How could this refugee girl who spent most of
her life in the North know about Israel? When I asked why she wanted to visit
Israel, she said: “This is our people.” I was never able to find
an answer to my question. On January 9 of 2011 South Sudan became an independent
state. For South Sudanese, that means continuation of oppression, brutalization,
demonization, Islamization, Arabization and enslavement. In a similar manner,
the Arabs continue denying Jews their right for sovereignty in their homeland
and the Durban III conference continues denying Israel's legitimacy.
As a friend of Israel, I bring you the news that my President, the President
of the Republic of South Sudan, Salva Kiir — publicly stated that the
South Sudan Embassy in Israel will be built— not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem,
the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
I also want to assure you that my own new nation, and all of its peoples, will
oppose racist forums like the Durban III. We will oppose it by simply continuing
to tell the truth! Our truth!
My Jewish friends taught me something that I now want to say with you.
AM YISRAEL CHAI ! The people of Israel lives!
Thank you
May 23, 2011, lyar 19, 5771
Dear friends!
These days are not easy to Israel. We believe that with-out America's help, we wouldn't be able to survive. Again we repeat mistakenly that we are insulated from the world. Yet, still we have to promote a political process. It's an empty words considering the reality.
In order to understand better our situation, we should look along "few" thousand years that the land of Israel belonged to us! Not because of America or Europe but as a divine promise!
For thousand of years we were exiled. The end of the longest exile is nowadays.
Of course, by looking shortsighted, there is a lot to worry about: the world against us and the worst: we are against ourselves. Everybody speaks about process! And I am asking: process with whom? And I keep asking: When we will understand this lie?
When we are going to erupt and open our eyes to see straight the truth. And what is it the truth?
The Arabic countries and specially the Palestinian, are not interested in any process and they repeat it again and again. If they were interested in peace, they already received back Jericho, Baithlechem, Ramalla, Jenin Katiff block and freeze the building in the settlements blocks? What about so many gestures of a good will they has got from us? They refuse to listen to and want to destroy us. Not only to go back for the 1967 borders, they want for themselves all the country!
We are afraid from politicians that chattering again and again about the necessity of the process, other wise, we are going to be left insulated. Here are the facts: "With the Gentiles we shall dwell alone does not take into account provisions of".
In order to get any legitimating from the world, we should feel our righteous. We should feel with our hearts that Israel is the eternal land of Israel. We have to stop our self- hatred, separation, confusion, propaganda by Jewish brothers going in the world and reviling Israel. The world watches us in our confusion and separation and does swept by the will in our destruction.
I am sure that at the moment if the light will be strong in our inner- selves, and the blinding self hatred will stop, we will see that all is very clear and with direct gaze that: Israel is not for sail! We have to be strengthening in our inner-selves and offer peace for whom who wants from the state of cardinal place.
We wouldn't win any peaceful state if the materialism is the symbol of our life. The consumerism, corruption and the moral crimes, injustice towards holocaust survivors and other weak sectors, Cultural arrogance and condescension. Those are the reasons for the alarms calling and remind us to wake up and get back to the shining G-d human in our inner-selves.
The truth isn't so easy! But, to bury our heads in the sand is more dangerous.
Our enemies did want -on the past, a process of peace: Egypt and Jordan, found an open ear between the statesmen's of Israel.
I repeat! we don't have partners for peace, and you can see the continuous incitement and their body language: we want to see you in the sea!
We should stop the self hatred pervasive in our midst, penetrating light, kindness, unity, strengthen our humanity and that the way we can reach a real peace. not only peace on paper but peace with human nature between person to person, soul to soul. This isn't achieved by weakness or flattery.
If we want life, we will strengthen faith, open the eternal Bible and realize that for thousand of years the Israel nation and the G-d of Israel are eternal couple.
If we will observe long glance on the past, present and future, we can say: "Eternity of Israel will never lie !" Let's see how many miracles which isn't connected with Obama the Israeli nation has experienced from the day Israel has been established.
If we would look with humble and open eye we will realize that a divine hand directed and protected and caused unbelievable victories against the common sense, few against many, against all the probability.
Let's remember many thousand's Arabic's that burgling in a huge march, unarmed but with the intensity of their faith and spirit. Against it , we will act with the only weapon that can win: our faith and spirit. Believing heart and courage helped us to establish Israel in the conducted power after so long being in exile.
If we will remember that there is a real G-d whom loves its people. With this power nothing can break us on believing in our justified existence.
My regards!
Daniel
My email:
daniel.braun@lchaimtolife.org