It’s Passover, the holiday of the Jews and everyone else celebrating the exodus from Egypt and freedom from slavery. But right now, international aid agencies, Arab news services, and Israeli human rights groups are reporting slavery, torture, extortion, rape, and murder of the African refugees in Egypt’s Sinai seeking refuge in Israel-just as in the Biblical story of the Exodus. And, just some 200 kilometers north of Jerusalem, in Syria, Bashir Assad’s regime has killed perhaps more than 10.000 of its own citizens and he and his associates stand accused of crmes aganst humanity for the atrocities they and their accomplices have committed. The Sinai refugees are fleeing genocidal campaigns in Darfur and Kordofan reportedly perpetrated by Sudan armed forces and irregulars under the control of President Bashir who has been indicted for genocide in Darfur by the International Criminal Court.
Four Israeli groups, Combat Genocide. Workers’ Hot Line, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Jerusalam Center for Genocide Prevention and many international aid agencies have interviewed latter day escapees from bondage in Sinai who have found refuge in Israel. Our contacts in the Golan Heights and elsewhere have provided their own horror stories on what is happening in Syria.
And guess how certain South Africans have responded to these crises? CII, a web based news service in South Africa reported that a march took place in Durban on Friday, 30 March 2012. It was organised by the South African Relief Association (SARA) together with other supportive groups as part of the world wide Global March to Jerusalem,
Sheikh Waleed al-Saadi, one of the organizers is quoted as saying:
“The people of Palestine, our brothers and sisters, are being killed everyday, their homes are being demolished and they are being displaced by settlers from all over the world. Al Quds [Jerusalem] belongs to us [Palestinians] and it’s going to be the capital of Palestine.”
Cii News Sevice reported that that al-Saadi said that “soon Jerusalem will be freed from the Zionist occupation that is currently strangling the rights of its Palestinian citizens…We are going to march to Jerusalem one day soon, God willing, to open Jerusalem as did Omar [the second Khaliph] and as Salahuddin al Ayyudi had done.”
Experts on genocide estimate that Bashir’s Sudanese government has killed some 300 to 400,000 Darfurians, raped tens of thousands of women, produced more than a million refugees, and plundered and destroyed. Basher’s forces are producing a Darfur-like scenario occurring in South Kordofan where, according to Eric Reeves and other genocide scholars, tens of thousands of black Africans fleeing a failed genocidal Islamist regime have been murdered, and even more have fled.