A LOOK INTO HELL
By Shmuel Rosner
Ha’aretz, Israel
March 30 2006
WASHINGTON – A few years ago, Samantha Power was awarded the
prestigious Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for her book,
“A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.”
The book is a depressing and worrying one, which reviews the response
of the U.S. establishment to incidents of genocide – from the Turks’
slaughter of the Armenians at the start of the previous century
through the massacre in Kosovo. It has been frequently argued,
Power writes, that U.S. failure to take action against such events
stems from a lack of real-time information. “In fact,” however,
Power writes, “U.S. policymakers knew a great deal about the crimes
being perpetrated… But time and again, decent men and women chose
to look away.”
But such is not the case with Rabbi David Saperstein, director of
the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in the United States,
who, along with members of his movement, rabbis and numerous Jewish
communities in North America, has chosen to look things straight in
the eye. It is a story with which the Israeli public is not familiar.
But for the past several months, it has been at the center of the
American-Jewish agenda. A few days ago, some 150 rabbis from all
streams of Judaism met in New York for a protest to stop the massacre
in Darfur. Thousands will travel to Washington at the end of April
to participate in a protest rally under the same slogan.
Inhabitants of the Darfur region in western Sudan are being cruelly
slaughtered by government-sponsored forces in the country as part of
a lengthy and bloody conflict in a neglected land. The perpetrators
are Muslims; the victims are Christians. The numbers speak of several
hundreds of thousands. Efforts by the international community to
calm the situation have failed to yield any real results. American
organizations are trying to push the administration into taking more
determined action, and the Jewish community is doing its bit. “For
obvious reasons, it is a lesson learned from the Holocaust,”
Saperstein says.
“The horrors we have witnessed and continue to see in Darfur are well
known to us,” said Rabbi Joel Meyers, executive vice-president of the
Rabbinical Assembly (Conservative Movement) at the New York protest.
He said it was so difficult once again to see the nations of the world
“saying the right words but doing little to stop the destruction.”
Synagogues in the United States and Canada have posted large protest
banners in an expression of the Jewish lobby in all its glory –
concerned not only with Israel and the Jewish nation. Tikkun olam
(repairing the world) is the phrase on many lips. And it is worthy
of mention, particularly at a time in which the Jewish public is the
brunt of an ugly attack by those who wish it ill.
Politics are also a part of it, of course. Intervention on the part
of Darfur is a noble deed, to which numerous communities are a party
– African-American communities that demonstrate ongoing interest in
African affairs, Evangelical Christian communities that are concerned
about the fate of Christians whose faith is tantamount to a death
sentence. Among these communities and the Jewish community there is
close cooperation, even if they don’t always agree on other issues.
And religious movements aren’t the only ones coming together in this
regard; so are various streams of political thought that are at odds
with each other when it comes to numerous other issues. Elements at
both ends of the political spectrum – far-left liberals and far-right
neo-Conservatives – are urging action, while the “realists” and
“separatists” do not wish to add a superfluous battlefield to the
already-heavy burden on the shoulders of the superpower.
Power’s book includes a special, extensive and fascinating chapter
on the work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who emigrated to the
United States and dedicated his life to the struggle against crimes of
genocide and to pushing the international community into formulating
legislation against such actions. He was the one to invent the word
“genocide” – a combination of the Greek, geno, meaning “race” or
“tribe,” and cide, an abbreviation of a Latin term meaning “killing.”
A speech made by then-British prime minister Winston Churchill during
World War II, in which he spoke about “a crime without a name,”
convinced Lemkin of the need for such a word, and much was his pride
when it stuck. In late 1948, Lemkin chalked up his biggest success:
The UN General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, the first
international human rights treaty, which he drafted. Lemkin saw it
as “an epitaph on [my] mother’s grave.” Lemkin’s mother, along with
another 49 members of his family, were murdered by the Nazis.