Nat Hentoff writes in the Village Voice about Mordechai Liebling, a rabbi who met with the head of Sudan's ruling junta and the country's elite while on a mission to end the genocide in Darfur:
I have wondered what it would be like to be in the presence of Sudanese president General Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the apprentice Hitler of our time, who is responsible for the genocide in Darfur, which is very likely to surpass the Rwanda genocide in the number of slaughtered corpses. Rwanda's atrocities lasted less than a year, but Darfur's started in 2003, and in addition to the killings, more than 2 million black Africans have been displaced from their razed homes and villages.
Recently, however, I talked to an American rabbi who actually has been in the same room with the mass murderer Bashir, members of his cabinet, and other officials.
The rabbi is Mordechai Liebling, vice president for programs at the Jewish Fund for Justice. In June of last year, he was invited by the Muslim American Freedom Foundation to be part of an interfaith, interracial delegation of religious leaders to Sudan.
Rabbi Liebling was briefly in a quandary. Since his first wife died four years ago, he has been raising four young children. And as he wrote in the March–April Jewish Currents, Bashir's government had "arrested the two senior members of Doctors Without Borders for releasing a report on rape . . . and journalists were being detained and accused of being spies. . . . I imagined myself being arrested as a Zionist spy."
"But how could I not go?" he said in the article, "A Rabbi Investigates in Sudan." He was to be the only rabbi in the delegation. Moreover, he added, "My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I grew up in a home crowded with murdered grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins."
The delegation had access to the top rank of Sudanese officials and even had a motorcycle escort on their rounds. Not surprisingly, however, as the rabbi noted, "President Bashir and senior Sudanese officials repeatedly lied, with great sincerity, right to our faces about the past, and about their intentions."
Over the years, I've interviewed all kinds of people, including some I would not want to meet on the street at two in the morning. Once, covering a gang of very wayward youths, I overheard a plan to dispose of me permanently, but the leader called it off. Yet I've never met an actual organizer of genocide.
"What was General Bashir like?" I was compelled to ask Rabbi Liebling.
"The general," he began, "is a master politician. He exudes warmth, congeniality, and seeming sincerity. And he denies any involvement in the murders and rapes by the janjaweed." These Arab militias armed and financed by the Bashir government, along with Sudanese army officers and soldiers, are on the front line in the killing fields of Darfur.
The rabbi also met, as he described in Jewish Currents, "the cultural and political elite of the country, among them scores of elderly Sudanese with Ph.D.'s from European and American universities. They were charming, erudite, lovely people who did not admit to us any government wrongdoing. . . . I think I now understand how privilege and denial function together—as happened in Germany. It made me reflect on my own levels of denial as a privileged person in our global society."
When the rabbi and I spoke, he added: "These genteel, cultivated people showed me no consciousness of the rapes and murders by the janjaweed. They would not engage in any discussion of the slow genocide that keeps going on. It was a classic example of cognitive dissonance, of denial, and that is how it also happened in Germany."
Hentoff also notes the involvement of rabbis from across the Judaic spectrum in the fight to end the genocide in Darfur:
Mordechai Liebling is far from the only rabbi intently involved in ending the Darfur genocide. He will join an extraordinary range of religious and secular organizations and prominent individuals in a huge demonstration for that purpose in Washington on April 30. George W. Bush will be invited to speak. Let's see if he comes.…
Meanwhile, as reported in the March 17 Jewish Week—and hardly anywhere else—on March 14, a rally by 150 rabbis at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, near the United Nations, "drew rabbis from across the New York area and from all four branches of Judaism."…
Said Rabbi Saperstein: "I think the message from the rabbis is that in the end, if thousands more die in Darfur, we're all going to be held accountable. [Already] we all have to live with the responsibility of what happened in Rwanda."
Haredim are disproportionately Holocaust survivors or their descendants. Yet how many haredi rabbis attended that demonstration? How many have tried to help end the genocide in Darfur (or earlier in Rawanda)? Disproportionately few (if any).
Perhaps haredi ideology can be summed up this way: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself? That's the way God wants it.
Why should non-Jews care about helping Jews if the most visible Jews do not care about helping them?