The Free Lance-Star, VA
April 29 2006
Faith groups rally in D.C. to ‘Save Darfur’
A displaced Sudanese mother and child wait in a dispensary run by the
French organization Action Against Hunger in South Darfur. Religious
leaders will rally on the Mall tomorrow for the refugees.
Faith groups unite for action in Darfur
By NATASHA ALTAMIRANO
Religious leaders of different faiths will stand together in the
nation’s capital tomorrow for a basic tenet that crosses theological
and political lines: human rights.
Representatives from dozens of Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups
will unite for “Save Darfur: Rally to Stop Genocide” on the National
Mall.
“God does not challenge us to speak out just for Christians–he
challenges us to speak out for the human rights of all people,” said
the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs for
the Washington-based National Association of Evangelicals.
“If there’s one thing that we can all stand together and say as faith
leaders and as citizens, it ought to be this.”
Cizik, who lives in southern Stafford County, is on the executive
committee of the Save Darfur Coalition, which organized the rally.
The Sudanese government has killed more than 300,000 people in the
Darfur region in western Sudan. An estimated 3.5 million refugees
depend on foreign aid for survival, according to the coalition.
“The world stood silent in the face of Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian
and Rwandan genocide,” said Cizik, who will lead the rally’s opening
prayer. “Nothing on the global agenda is more urgent than rescuing
Darfur’s people from a campaign of extermination.”
Inaction on previous genocide is a major reason Darfur has become
such an important issue to the Jewish community, said said Julie
Weingrad, assistant director of the Jewish Community Relations
Council of Greater Washington.
The council has $45,000 for humanitarian aid in Darfur, Weingrad
said.
“A lot of people look back to the genocide in Rwanda and think, ‘I
wish I had done more, so I’m going to do more now,'” she said.
Experiencing the reality of genocide through the Holocaust is another
reason Jews have played an active role in the Save Darfur campaign.
“It’s something that’s affected someone in almost every Jewish
person’s family,” Weingrad said.
Like all people of strong faith, the Jewish community feels an
obligation to social justice.
“There’s a very strong sense that, as Jews, we need to participate in
‘tikkun olam’–it literally means ‘repairing the world,'” Weingrad
said.
The rally culminates a 22-city tour to raise public awareness of the
situation in Darfur and to pressure Bush administration officials and
congressional leaders to intervene.
The event also marks the end of the “Million Voices for Darfur”
campaign to generate 1 million postcards urging President Bush to
take action in Darfur.
More than 500,000 electronic and hard-copy postcards have been
signed. They will be delivered to government officials tomorrow.
Other religious leaders scheduled to speak include the Rev. Richard
Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and
Religious Liberties Commission; Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director
of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; and Cardinal Theodore
McCarrick, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
Washington.
Imam A. Rashied Omar with the Kroc Institute for International
Studies at Notre Dame University, former Sudanese NBA basketball
player Manute Bol and refugees from Darfur also will be there.
They’ll be joined by Academy Award-winning actor George Clooney; Sen.
Barack Obama, D-Ill.; and House of Representatives Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., among other political leaders.
For details, visit savedarfur.org/rally.