Never Again: the Jewish community and Darfur

By JONATHAN LASKI

n Jan. 20, 1942, leaders of the Nazi regime convened the Wannsee Conference to plan their solution to the “Jewish problem.” As history has recorded, they were largely successful in their evil undertaking.

But some European Jews did survive and since then, Jewish identity has become synonymous with the term “Never again”– a pledge that the kind of evil felled upon our families, communities and religion will not threaten the existence of another people.

Our widespread apathy toward the genocides of today threatens our credibility. As Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

The genocide currently taking place in Darfur, Sudan – where Arab janjaweed militias equipped and trained by the Sudanese government are killing, torturing and raping civilians, razing their villages and forcing two million people into refugee camps rife with the preconditions of famine and disease – is the issue Jews are failing to address.

What we Canadian Jews have failed to realize is that people facing genocide today are intricately connected to us – they are almost extensions of our own Jewish history from 60 years ago, and as such, we have a special duty to fight for them. In fact, I would argue that the Jewish community has the opportunity to do something about the genocide in Darfur, which is far more important than contributing Nobel laureates or producing doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. By fighting tirelessly for the people of Darfur and stopping the genocide before the bureaucratic global community gets around to it, we can be the first religious, ethnic or social group since our families were victims in the Shoah to put an end to a genocide. This can be done by demanding that representatives from our schools, synagogues and federations speak out in classrooms and from bimahs, and use every resource possible to affirm that although very few stood up to fight for us, we will do better.

There are organizations working to raise awareness on the streets and in the synagogues, and to stir the hallowed halls of Parliament in Ottawa. The Canadian Jewish Congress has made concerted efforts to help and student organizations, such as STAND Canada (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), are taking up arms against acquiescence and apathy on the part of young Canadians.

There are no excuses for indifference – not because the genocide is being orchestrated in a faraway land or because the rogue government is Muslim, the militia groups are Arab and their victims tribal Africans. I would argue that this two-year-long genocide is neither exclusively a Canadian issue nor an international issue, nor is it a black issue or a white one. It is, however, very much a Jewish issue.

In every instance that we invoke the “Never again” pledge, in our Yom Hashoah commemorations and CJN-published journal entries of March of the Living participants, we implicate ourselves further to actually do more than utter these words and mark them for empty cliché. Darfur is very much a Jewish issue, as these post-Holocaust years provide the litmus test for our social conscience and determination on one hand and our indifference and hypocrisy on the other.

In historical terms, we are not very far past the time of the Shoah. In 500 years, historians will record the war years from 1939 to ’45 and today as the same era. Will we be remembered simply as people who worked with ruach to rebuild our own communities from the ashes of the Holocaust, or as more – as a group who fought against the destruction of other cultures and as a community who said “Never again” and actually meant it?

Jonathan Laski is the media relations director of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND Canada).