Ted Belman
[These are the words of Simon Deng, once a Sudanese slave. He is addressing the Durban Conference in NY in 2011.]
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 aboutDarfur.
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.
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 YISROEL CHAI !
The people of Israel live!
Thank you
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