Another really excellent Washington Post editorial on Darfur -- 'Realism' and Darfur. It ends with this powerful statement: "Perhaps there are other arguments for 'caution' in the face of Darfur's genocide, and we invite President Bush and other leaders to come forward and explain them. According to officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development, up to 30,000 people in Darfur have died violently, 50,000 have died of disease and malnutrition, and the death toll is likely to reach at least 300,000. The reasons for non-intervention had better be as powerful as those astonishing numbers."

Having just visited the Holocaust museum in Washington makes me remember the pathetic lack of response to the plight of European Jews before and during WWII -- the voyage of the St. Louis, for example, with over 900 Jewish refugees, which sailed to Cuba, only to be turned back there, and which was refused entry into the U.S. as well, or the Evian conference, in which virtually no countries offered to take in German Jewish refugees. We have all these bad examples of inaction before us -- why do we have to replicate them today?

I must say that I agree with Andrew Sullivan about Kerry's speech last night. I was dismayed by what he said both about the war in Iraq and the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism -- as Sullivan says, "not good enough." Edwards the night before gave me the feeling that the Democratic Party gets it about the war on terrorism -- but I did not get the same feeling from Kerry. I will vote for him - but with the anxiety that if he is elected, he will in fact not go after the terrorists with the same passion that President Bush expresses. It seems to me that if this election is really about national security, then Kerry did himself and the Democrats a disservice last night by not making the same strong statement as Edwards did the night before.

Jim Moore at Sudan: The Passion of the Present argues that the closed society of Sudan breeds terrorism as well as genocide. He points out that Osama bin Laden was headquartered in Sudan from 1991 to 1994, and argues that bin Laden's businesses and other organizations are still operating there. He says, "Sudan has become a kind of low-tech Swiss-banking center for criminal organizations, including Al Qaeda. For example, in September of 2002 the Washington Post reported that large quantities of gold had been transferred from Pakistan to Sudan by Al Qaeda."

And in case you still don't believe it's genocide in Darfur -- Villagers burned alive in Sudan atrocity

A great editorial in today's Washington Post, asking How Many More Deaths in Darfur? The editorial criticized the European Union for a weak and reluctant response.

The Europeans know that the killings in Darfur probably constitute genocide, as Congress recognized last week, but they shrank from calling it that. They suggested they might increase their support for the African Union's cease-fire monitors in Darfur, but stopped short of calling for a force large enough to protect civilians from the government-backed militia. They declared qualified support for "imminent" sanctions, but assigned responsibility for imposing these to the U.N. Security Council, which is hamstrung by the threat of a Chinese veto. They advertised the aid that they have given, but they failed to note that the U.N. relief appeal is less than 50 percent funded and made no mention of the detailed request for helicopters that the U.N. staff had presented to them the previous week. More than 30,000 people are thought to have died in Darfur already. How many deaths will it take?

When will we start actually helping the people of Darfur, rather than just talking about it?

Sheik Zayed's gift for a chair in Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School has been withdrawn.

Students and Jewish organizations had criticized the Harvard Divinity School for accepting the donation, which was made in 2000, because they objected to the sheik's support for a policy research organization, the Zayed International Center for Coordination and Follow-Up in Abu Dhabi, one of the seven states in the United Arab Emirates.

Speakers at the center had included an Arab scholar who has written that Jews use human blood to make pastries and a French author who claims that Israel masterminded the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as well as American officials like former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Vice President Al Gore. It was closed last summer by the government of the United Arab Emirates, which said that the center had engaged in a discourse that "contradicted the principles of interfaith tolerance" espoused by Sheik Zayed.

Visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

As it happens, I did not go to the "die-in" on Thursday at noon, but instead spent the day at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Museum website has a page devoted to Darfur. They have declared a "genocide emergency" in Darfur and will be opening a special exhibit on Darfur on August 2. Given the large number of visitors who come to the museum every day, I think this will be a very effective educational and political statement.

I was very impressed by the museum. I have been to other museums that tell the story of the Holocaust -- Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in New York City, which has an excellent permanent exhibit on Jewish life in Europe before the Second World War, as well as exhibits on Jewish life since 1945. One of the interesting aspects of the museum was the attempt to go beyond the impact on the Jewish community and show how the Holocaust affected other people -- for example, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses.

There is currently a temporary exhibit called Deadly Medicine, which traces the history of Nazi eugenics, forced sterilization, and the T4 program to kill handicapped people, men, women, and children, including the retarded and mentally ill. This program was the first to use gassing of victims and served as the prototype for the extermination camps. I had read about this history, but walking through the exhibit, seeing the devices used to measure people and place them into separate "races," and then going through a tiled room with photographs of children killed by the T4 program was chilling. I remember reading one quote from a man who had worked in one of the children's homes where they were not sent to be gassed, but instead were starved to death or injected with fatal substances. He called the place a "concentration camp for children." I must say that I find this incomprehensible. I know how people rationalized to themselves that what they were doing was for the sake of "racial hygiene" -- but I don't understand how they could face the children whom they were torturing or killing and go through with their actions. It seems to me that it goes against a deeply-seated human instinct to protect children.

After going to that exhibit, I went to the permanent exhibit, which traces the history of the Holocaust from the Nazi assumption to power to the liberation from the death camps. I could have spent the entire day in the exhibit, if I had had enough time, but instead I was able to watch and read only some of the information. For example, the exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto had a video loop that showed both still pictures and film of the ghetto. I kept looking at people's faces. In the section on the mobile killing units -- the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army in the invasion of the Soviet Union -- there was a video made from film of the shootings. Who would film mass murder? I don't even understand why footage like this exists.

In the section of the exhibit devoted to the death camps, there were several unnerving and deeply chilling artifacts -- for example, a railway car of the same type used to transport prisoners to the death camps. The exhibit was set up to permit one to walk through the car -- I could not. I put my head in from both sides, instead. It was much smaller than I had expected, and if the doors had been closed, there would have been very little light, or even air coming in. There was a pile of shoes taken from prisoners at the Majdanek camp. There was the inside of barracks taken from Auschwitz. I remember reading when the Museum was being designed, that the intention was to find actual artifacts from that time and place. When I heard about this, the idea repelled me. It seemed to me that this meant that the museum visitors would be having some kind of vicarious experience of the Holocaust -- something both impossible and voyeuristic. However, I did not have that feeling in the museum -- instead, it seemed to me that the intention was to give Americans a fragment of the sense they would have if they visited the sites of the concentration camps in Europe: to visit a memory, not to re-enact it, even in imagination.

Jewish bloggers discussing Darfur:

Zackary Sholem Berger

Velveteen Rabbi

Steven I. Weiss

From the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism: Genocide Threat In Darfur, Western Sudan.

For a vacation from our otherwise serious concerns, I recommend this op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times about Harry Potter: Harry Potter, Market Wiz. For an English fisking of this oh-so-French analysis of Harry Potter, see Steve Sachs'Harry Potter and the Running Dogs of Capitalism. And then, after that heavy lifting, I definitely recommend the latest Harry Potter movie, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," which is the best of three thus made.

For those of you who will be in Washington, D.C., this Thursday, there will be a die-in in front of the White House to protest the genocide in Darfur. Information from the flyer:

STOP THE GENOCIDE
A CALL FOR HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION IN SUDAN

1,000 dying each day in Sudan
Rally and 1,000 person “die-in” to symbolize their tragic deaths

WHEN: THURSDAY, JULY 22, 2004, NOON-1:30 PM

WHERE: LAFAYETTE PARK (ACROSS THE STREET
FROM THE WHITE HOUSE)

The demonstration is being organized by a coalition of religious and human rights leaders, including political conservatives and progressives. Some of the leaders include Rev. Walter Fauntroy, Rev. Joe Madison, Rabbi Jack Moline, Rev. Bob Edgar, Rev. Mark Thompson, Rep. Charlie Rangel, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Ben Cohen.

Sponsoring organizations include Res Publica, faithfulamerica.org, Sojourners, the National Council of Churches, TrueMajority.org and The Sudan Campaign, which includes groups such as Phillip Randolph Institute, American Anti-Slavery Group, American Jewish Committee (DC Chapter), Christian Solidarity International, Congress on Modern Pan-African Slavery, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Institute on Religion and Public Policy, National Black Leadership Roundtable, Salvation Army and Southern Sudanese Voice for Freedom.

I will be in Washington later this week and will try to get to this protest.

How to send a letter to the President and other public officials about Darfur, from the AJWS Action Center. AJWS is the American Jewish World Service.

I just had a strange blogging experience. I was checking my referrer logs, and found two Google searches for "Caffit Jerusalem" and "Caffit cafe," and also "Emek Refaim Caffit" -- all within the last few hours. I wondered why this had happened -- I wrote about Caffit in December, 2003, when I was visiting Israel, but not since then. It then occurred to me wonder if something had happened in Caffit, and when I turned to Ha'aretz, I learned that Would-be bomber turned back just before blowing up cafe.

A Hamas man intending to shoot his way into a popular Jerusalem cafe and then detonate a suicide bomb, stood before the popular restaurant last week wearing a gun and a explosive belt, then reconsidered and returned to the West Bank, it was revealed Sunday.

. . .Two days after the aborted Tuesday attempt, IDF troops killed the would-be bomber, Malek Nasser a-Din, in a gun battle at his home in Hebron.

Nasser a-Din reached Jerusalem's German Colony Tuesday afternoon after entering Israel through a breach in the separation fence in the Jerusalem region. He intended to shoot the restaurant's guards, then enter and blow himself up inside. But he reconsidered, and returned to the West Bank.

"The attempted suicide bombing was made possible by the fact that the potential bomber was able to enter the city in a spot where the security fence hasn't been built yet," Zalman Shoval, a foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told Haaretz. "It was for different reasons, including luck, that he decided at the last moment not to blow himself up, but of course, Israel cannot rely on such fortuitous occurrences in the future."

Security forces have detained a number of others involved in planning the attack. Investigations revealed that Nasser a-Din picked up the explosive belt in Abu Dis, a village on Jerusalem's eastern border. He and an accomplice traveled together to the German Colony, where the bomber received the order to attack Caffit. He was seen throwing out an unidentified object on Tuesday afternoon, which initially raised suspicions.

For reasons not yet known, Nasser a-Din decided not to carry out the attack and threw away the explosive belt, which has not been found.

. . . This was not the first suicide bombing to target Caffit. Cafe staff foiled a prior incident when they overpowered another would-be bomber whose bomb failed to explode.

I had read in Ha'aretz last week that there had been a high security alert in German Colony neighborhood in Jerusalem, but they hadn't said why. Very scary.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has taken up the issue of Darfur at Staring Genocide in the Face. As Jerry Fowler said on June 24, 2004, "The time to act in Darfur is now. It’s now. The obligation to prevent genocide is a legal one and a moral one. Too often in the past, as this Museum starkly illustrates, warnings have been received and ignored and the result has been death and suffering on a massive scale. It’s time for us to stop saying “never again,” and start saying, “not this time.”

Once again, I recommend reading Sudan: The Passion of the Present to learn what is happening in Darfur and what we may possibly do to stop the genocide. They point to John Kerry's speech at the NAACP convention, where Kerry "called for the United States, with the United Nations, to lead an 'international humanitarian intervention' in the troubled region of Darfur, in the Sudan, where Arab militias have been killing and displacing villagers, driving some into neighboring Chad. 'This administration must stop equivocating. Those government-sponsored atrocities should be called by their rightful name - genocide,' Kerry said to cheers. 'That is a lesson of Rwanda. That is a lesson of World War II. That is a lesson of time.'"

Congressman Charles Rangel was arrested in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington on July 13 protesting the genocide in Sudan. He writes: "There's no reason the international community can't find the $350 million the UN needs to ship aid to Sudan. Surely, saving a million lives is worth more than the $89 million the U.S. has committed so far. Let's declare the situation the genocide that it is. We have to avert what threatens to become one of history's greatest catastrophes. What's happening is an atrocity, a crime and a sin. There can be no more excuses."

Here is another devastating account of what is happening in Darfur, this time from an activist who traveled to the rebel-held areas of Sudan, where no aid is reaching hundreds of thousands of displaced people. John Prendergast, the author of Sudan's Ravines of Death, also provides evidence of mass graves of young men.

I was not prepared for the far more sinister scene I encountered in a ravine deep in the Darfur desert. Bodies of young men were lined up in ditches, eerily preserved by the 130-degree desert heat. The story the rebels told us seemed plausible: the dead were civilians who had been marched up a hill and executed by the Arab-led government before its troops abandoned the area the previous month. The rebels assert that there were many other such scenes.

The article ends by saying, "There has been a great deal of tough talk since the visits of Mr. Powell, Mr. Annan and others, but the United Nations Security Council so far has failed to act decisively. It is time to move directly against regime officials who are responsible for the killing. Accountability for crimes against humanity is imperative, as is the deployment of sufficient force to ensure disarmament and arrangements to deliver emergency aid. The sands of the Sahara should not be allowed to swallow the evidence of what will probably go down as one of the greatest crimes in our lifetimes."

A quick Google search found this speech, Homosexual Marriage?, that Senator Byrd made in 1996, during the debate over the Defense of Marriage Act. His speech ends with these words: "I say to my colleagues, let us take our stand. The time is now. The subject is relevant. Let us defend the oldest institution, the institution of marriage between male and female, as set forth in the Holy Bible. Else we, too, will be weighed in the balances and found wanting."

But on the other hand, to be fair to Senator Byrd, both John Kerry and John Edwards, who would vote against the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages, say that they are opposed to gay marriage -- but that it should be left to the individual states, not to the federal government. I doubt, however, that they would invoke the authority of the Bible to oppose gay marriage.

Ah, I should have read Sullivan first -- many of those senators who voted for cloture were nonetheless opposed to the amendment. According to his reporting of the Log Cabin Republicans' analysis -- Senators Warner, Gregg, Hagel, and Specter, who all voted for cloture, are against the amendment. I still wonder about Byrd -- I'll have to find out more about his position on this issue.

I was just taking a look at how the Senate voted on the marriage amendment -- for a complete list, see U.S. Senate: Legislation & Records Home > Votes > Roll Call Vote. There were a number of senators who surprised me -- and mostly disappointed me. Senator Specter of Pennsylvania voted to cut off debate (which would then lead to a vote on the amendment itself). I had thought he was more liberal than that. Senator Byrd of West Virginia also voted to cut off debate -- so much for his "liberal" credentials for opposing the war in Iraq. The two other Democrats who voted for cloture were Miller of Georgia and Nelson of Nebraska. On the other hand, there were a number of Republicans who voted against the motion, including John McCain of Arizona, the two senators from Maine, Collins and Snowe. The vote was 48 yes votes and 50 no votes because Edwards and Kerry were off campaigning. They had said they would go back to Washington to vote only if the amendment itself were coming up for a vote.

I'm happy to see that the anti-gay amendment to the constitution has failed in the Senate on a procedural vote to cut off debate. As CNN reports, "Efforts to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage foundered Wednesday afternoon in the Senate when the proposal failed to garner enough votes to stay alive. After final arguments by the leaders of each party, the Republicans mustered 48 votes, 12 short of the 60 they needed to overcome a procedural hurdle and move the proposed amendment to the floor."