In the skin of our conscience lay a precise sequence of inscribed numbers.  A series so degrading, so immorally astounding, that it reels us through our lives hooked to our historical persecution.  Yet we continue to physically evade our promise of Never Again.  The atrocities currently occurring in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burma mirror the barbarity of the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and The Holocaust.  The conscious presence of our dehumanization during the Shoah needs to direct our moral compass towards individual action to honor our murdered brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters during Hitler’s genocidal regime.
My tattooed conscience intricately weaves an emotional trek through Terezin outside of Prague, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.  These soul altering experiences have exposed my senses to inexplicable pain.  My eyes have seen no greater anguish than the vibrant, Caribbean blue stains of Zyklon-B left on the cold, cement walls of Majdanek’s gas chambers.  My lungs have inhaled no greater sorrow than the thick, humid stench of earth, life and machine that dissipates from the claustrophobic box car so many of our ancestors rode to their death.  My ears have absorbed no greater hate than the silent, motionless ambiance of a brilliant sunset at Majdanek.

Yet we comfortably continue our journeys through life as if these very senses are not continually reincarnated in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burma: 300,000 dead in Darfur and 5.4 million dead in the Congo: 3,200 incinerated villages in Burma and 4,000 cremated villages in Darfur: tens of thousands of innocent women raped as a weapon of war.

George Bernard Shaw wrote indifference is the essence of inhumanity.  Elie Wiesel said indifference is the epitome of evil.  Our indifference must cease now.  We must educate ourselves, advocate for voiceless victims and end these heinous stains on humanity.  The bible commands “Thou shall not stand idly by the shedding of the blood of thy fellow man.”  It is time to take action: sign genocide prevention pledges, invite speakers to schools, organize fundraisers, write your elected officials or local paper. It is our responsibility, as one humanity, to fight relentlessly to eradicate genocide in our lifetime.

More information: SaveDarfur, Enough Project, Campaign for Burma, Elie Wiesel on Sudan, Genocide Intervention Network

Personal pictures from Poland:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007690&id=1457550214&l=8c250dac75

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007691&id=1457550214&l=1373209bea

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007692&id=1457550214&l=69f0cef4f2

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007693&id=1457550214&l=3e76f27899

Save Darfur’s Faith Video (About 20 minutes):

NBA Star Tracy McGrady’s Darfur Dream Team – Empowerment through Education (About 4 minutes)

In April 2008 I personally visited Sderot and Ashkelon, Israeli communities near enough to have been hit by rockets fired from within Gaza. While there, I condemned these indiscriminate attacks on civilians as acts of terrorism, and I consider their condemnation by Judge Goldstone to be justified.

A year later, after the Israeli attack on Gaza, I was able to examine the damage done to the small and heavily populated area, surrounded by an impenetrable wall, with its gates tightly controlled. Knowing of the ability of Israeli forces, often using U.S. weapons, to strike targets with pinpoint accuracy, it was difficult to understand or explain the destruction of hospitals, schools, prisons, United Nations facilities, small factories and repair shops, agricultural processing plants and almost 40,000 homes.

What President Carter fails to mention in his endorsement of the Goldstone Report, is that Hamas harbors its terrorists in and around these very areas.  How does the report ignore video of terrorists firing rockets from civilian areas, including schools?  How does it fail to mention, as Alan Dershowitz notes, that Israel “reopened a checkpoint to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza?”  (It had closed the point of entry after the checkpoint had been targeted by Gazan rockets.  On several prior occasions, Hamas rockets had targeted Israel points of entry through which aid had been provided.)”  Moreover, Carter’s shallow 2008 visit of Askelon and Sderot was simply a publicity stunt on his way to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.  Maybe a visit with the victims of Hamas rockets would have persuaded him against asking the EU to recognize the legitimacy of Hamas on that very trip.  No such luck.  Carter, and other such Israel enemies, need to recognize Israel’s endless attempts to help the people of Gaza and reduce fatalities.  i.e. the distribution of 2,000,000 leaflets and calling over 100,000 Palestinians both warning of targeted areas as well as allowing humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip during the offensive.  Watch Col. Richard Kemp’s testimony in the UN Human Rights Council: The International community needs to recognize Hamas as the problem, whose perpetual rocket fire and misappropriation of aid has created even worse living conditions in the densely populated strip.  For Jimmy Carter and the UN to place equal blame on a country defending its citizens as on a terrorist organization targeting civilians is not only ludicrous and unfounded, it stands in the way of true peace.

More information: JPost, Dershowitz,

Reading Levi in Tehran

By Liel Leibovitz (Tablet)

Like the majority of those who grow up in Muslim countries, Boualem Sansal didn’t think about the Holocaust much. It just wasn’t an issue in his native Algeria, and when it came up, it was presented more as a subject for debate than as a monumental historical event. “We’ve been brought up not to really believe it happened,” he said in a recent interview.

All this changed when he met the German. He doesn’t remember the man’s name, but still recalls the shock he felt when he learned his tall, genial neighbor was an escaped SS officer, wanted for crimes against humanity and living out his years working as a security consultant for various Arab governments. Sansal wanted to know more, to learn about the ghettos and the trains and the death camps, things he was increasingly convinced were not rumors at all. But in Algeria, there was no one he could ask.

As luck would have it, Sansal had an older brother studying in Paris, who, after some pleading, agreed to send over some books. Sansal read them all eagerly, but only one changed his life: Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, the book commonly known in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz. He declared himself a disciple of Levi’s, and devoted much of his life to thinking and writing about the same questions that troubled his mentor, most notably the question of memory.

Now, Arab and Muslim readers wishing to follow Sansal’s lead no longer have to depend on contraband copies in foreign languages: thanks to a new initiative called Project Aladdin, Levi’s memoir, along with Anne Frank’s diary and two other Holocaust-themed works, are available in Arabic as a free download, alongside editions in Turkish and Farsi.

The project, according to its founder, Abraham Radkin, was conceived in response to a steep rise in the volume of anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying literature distributed in the Arab and Muslim world—and the rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With hundreds of hateful tracts published each year, Radkin thought, the most effective response would be to provide reliable, informative, and evocative alternatives. The executive director of the British nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, Radkin had the necessary connections to attract high-level patrons to his project, putting together an advisory board that includes the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade; Princess Haya al-Khalifa of Bahrain; Prince Hassan bin-Talal of Jordan; former French president Jacques Chirac; and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. With some help from the United Nations and other international organization, the project was ready to launch.

Its first hurdle was deciding which books to publish. “We were looking,” Radkin said in a recent interview, “to publish four books that gave a general public basically unaware of the historical facts an idea of the scale of the horror, that gave personal testimony, and that provided accurate descriptions of what happened to people.”

Anne Frank was a natural choice, as was Shlomo Venezia’s Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz, a survivor’s account of the camp’s intricate machinery of death. Phillipe Burrin’s Hitler and the Jews: The Path to Genocide was added as a general, approachable primer on the basic historical facts of the Holocaust. This left room for one additional title; after much argument—some board members thought the book would prove too dense for a population with little education about the Holocaust—Radkin decided to publish Levi as well, the first time the author had been translated into Arabic or Farsi. In March 2009, all four titles were offered for free online.

While the project is still in its infancy, a few thousand copies of each book have already been downloaded, and the project’s staff received hundreds of encouraging emails from readers throughout the Arab world. Local publishers in Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and France will soon offer the translations in paperback, and publishers in other countries are slated to join in the coming months. Other initiatives, from student exchange programs to outreach efforts, are also in the works.

“I think the project has the potential to bring about real change on the ground,” Radkin said. “I have great faith in the importance of education and cultural interaction with people who are kept in the dark by those forces who benefit from ignorance.”

Those very forces, Sansal agreed, are not to be underestimated. “The situation in the Arab world is absolutely catastrophic,” he said, calling the abuse of women in particular “another Shoah.” It’s a theme that Sansal pushes to its extremes: his recent book, The German Mujahid, tells the story of two Algerian brothers who discover that their German father was a fugitive war criminal, and makes bold parallels between Nazism and fundamentalist Islam.

Speaking in a recent conference on Primo Levi, where he was seated next to Radkin and other intellectuals, Sansal expressed his pleasure with the new translations. Just like Levi had once delivered Sansal from ignorance, the Algerian writer said he hoped and believed If This Is a Man would now open the eyes of a new generation of Arab and Farsi readers. “Levi provides a clear vision,” he said. “It’s a vision of remembrance and responsibility.”

Levi’s is also a vision likely to appeal to Muslim audiences, said Natalia Indrimi, the director of the New York-based Primo Levi Center, which organized the recent conference, because of its ability to portray the Holocaust in terms that are universally understandable.

“Levi speaks and writes as a man,” she said. “I trust very much that he’ll speak to people as people. If This Is a Man does not make suffering or the mechanism of genocide a Jewish property. It desegregates the Shoah. It teaches us how to come close to the other without putting labels on ourselves or on the other.”

JERUSALEM — Israeli navy commandos seized a cargo ship early Wednesday in the Mediterranean Sea that Israeli officials said was carrying rockets and ammunition bound for militants from Hezbollah.

Israel intercepted the ship, which was sailing under an Antiguan flag, near Cyprus, 100 miles west of the Israeli coast, and took it the Ashdod harbor in southern Israel.

“As of now, what we know is that this was a smuggling attempt to arm Hezbollah with terrorist means against civilians,” Shaul Mofaz, a member of the Knesset and a former defense minister, told Israel Radio. “The intent was to send arms, mainly missiles and launchers, meant to strike civilian targets.”

News reports quoted the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, and other officials saying the ship had been carrying the arms from Iran to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, but officials released no evidence to back up those claims.

The capture of the arms comes hours before the United Nations General Assembly begins deliberations on the Goldstone report on the fighting in the Gaza Strip in January.

Col. Avital Leibovich of the Israel Defense Forces said the ship had been captured as part of the navy’s routine work to prevent arms smuggling.

Israel Radio reported that the navy had not used force in boarding the ship, the Franco St. Johns. Defense Minister Ehud Barak hailed the capture as “an additional success in the unending struggle against the attempts at arms smuggling and armament whose goal is to strengthen terror elements threatening the security of Israel.”

According to Israel Radio, Mr. Barak told the security cabinet Wednesday morning that the ship had been under surveillance since leaving its home port, which he did not identify. He said that the ship had also tried to evade capture.

The broadcaster said the elite Shayetet 13 naval commandos were the unit responsible for seizing the ship.

In January 2002, Israel captured the Karine A, a cargo ship laden with antitank rockets and light arms, which Israel said had been intended for the Palestinian Authority.

On Tuesday, Israel’s military intelligence chief said that Hamas in Gaza had recently test-fired a rocket that flew 37 miles into the sea. That range would put the Tel Aviv area under missile threat.

More material: Al Jazeera, JPost, WSJ