Simon Deng Former Sudanese Slave: “Calling Israel a racist state is absolutely absurd and immoral.”
Simon Deng, a former South Sudanese slave taken by a neighbor as a young boy to Islamist Northern Sudan gave this impassioned speech at yesterday’s Durban Watch Conference in New York. He puts the lie to the Zionism is Racism canard of Durban III painting Israel as a pariah state. Rather as he points out it is the Arab Muslim Jihadis who have engaged in racial genocide of millions of Sudanese, whether Muslim or Christian. As he further points out it is Israel that is the ultimate destination of Sudanese refugees, as Egypt has oppressed them.
What follows is Simon Deng’s Speech before the Durban Watch Conference on September 22, 2011.
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Thank you for those kind words:
I want to thank the organizers of this conference, The Perils of Global Intolerance. It is a great honor for me and it is a privilege really to be among today’s distinguished speakers.
I came here as a friend of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. –I came to protest this Durban conference which is based on a set of lies. It is organized by nations who are themselves are guilty of the worst kinds of oppression.
It will not help the victims of racism. It will only isolate and target the Jewish state. It is a tool of the enemies of Israel. The UN has itself become a tool against Israel. For over 50 years, 82 percent of the UN General Assembly emergency meetings have been about condemning one state – Israel. Hitler couldn’t have been made happier.
The Durban Conference is an outrage. All decent people will know that.
But friends, I come here today with a radical idea. I come to tell you that there are peoples who suffer from the UN’s anti-Israelism even more than the Israelis. I belong to one of those people.
Please hear me out.
By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale.
For over fifty years the indigenous black population of Sudan — Christians and Muslims alike — has been the victims of the brutal, racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum.
In South Sudan, my homeland, about 4 million innocent men, women and children were slaughtered from 1955 to 2005. Seven million were ethnically cleansed and they became the largest refugee group since World War II.
The UN is concerned about the so-called Palestinian refugees. They dedicated a separate agency for them, and they are treated with a special privilege.
Meanwhile, my people, ethnically cleansed, murdered and enslaved, are relatively ignored. The UN refuses to tell the world the truth about the real causes of Sudan’s conflicts. Who knows really what is happening in Darfur? It is not a “tribal conflict.”
It is a conflict rooted in Arab colonialism well known in north Africa. In Darfur, a region in the Western Sudan, everybody is Muslim. Everybody is Muslim because the Arabs invaded the North of Africa and converted the indigenous people to Islam. In the eyes of the Islamists in Khartoum, the Darfuris are not Muslim enough. And the Darfuris do not want to be Arabized. They love their own African languages and dress and customs. The Arab response is genocide! But nobody at the UN tells the truth about Darfur.
In the Nuba Mountains, another region of Sudan, genocide is taking place as I speak. The Islamist regime in Khartoum is targeting the black Africans – Muslims and Christians. Nobody at the UN has told the truth about the Nuba Mountains.
Do you hear the UN condemn Arab racism against blacks?
What you find on the pages of the New York Times, or in the record of the UN condemnations is “Israeli crimes” and Palestinian suffering. My people have been driven off the front pages because of the exaggerations about Palestinian suffering. What Israel does is portrayed as a Western sin. But the truth is that the real sin happens when the West abandons us: the victims of Arab/Islamic apartheid.
Chattel slavery was practiced for centuries in Sudan. It was revived as a tool of war in the early 90s. Khartoum declared jihad against my people and this legitimized taking slaves as war booty. Arab militias were sent to destroy Southern villages and were encouraged to take African women and children as slaves. We believe that up to 200,000 were kidnapped, brought to the North and sold into slavery.
I am a living proof of this crime against humanity.
I don’t like talking about my experience as a slave, but I do it because it is important for the world to know that slavery exists even today.
I was only nine years old when an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat. The boat wound up in Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the clock; sleeping on the ground with animals; eating the family’s left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word “no.” All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs. Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group — sixteen years to acknowledge what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr. Charles Jacobs for leading the anti-slavery fight.
But the Sudanese government and the Arab League pressured UNICEF, and UNICEF backtracked, and started to criticize those who worked to liberate Sudanese slaves. In 1998, Dr. Gaspar Biro, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Sudan who reported on slavery, resigned in protest of the UN’s actions.
My friends, today, tens of thousands of black South Sudanese still serve their masters in the North and the UN is silent about that. It would offend the OIC and the Arab League.
As a former slave and a victim of the worst sort of racism, allow me to explain why I think calling Israel a racist state is absolutely absurd and immoral.
I have been to Israel five times visiting the Sudanese refugees. Let me tell you how they ended up there. These are Sudanese who fled Arab racism, hoping to find shelter in Egypt. They were wrong. When Egyptian security forces slaughtered twenty six black refugees in Cairo who were protesting Egyptian racism, the Sudanese realized that the Arab racism is the same in Khartoum or Cairo. They needed shelter and they found it in Israel. Dodging the bullets of the Egyptian border patrols and walking for very long distances, the refugees’ only hope was to reach Israel’s side of the fence, where they knew they would be safe.
Black Muslims from Darfur chose Israel above all the other Arab-Muslim states of the area. Do you know what this means!!!?? And the Arabs say Israel is racist!!!?
In Israel, black Sudanese, Christian and Muslim were welcomed and treated like human beings. Just go and ask them, like I have done. They told me that compared to the situation in Egypt, Israel is “heaven.”
Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism – the answer is absolutely not. Israel is a state of people who are the colors of the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black. I met with Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Beautiful black Jews.
So, yes … I came here today to tell you that the people who suffer most from the UN anti-Israel policy are not the Israelis but all those people who the UN ignores in order to tell its big lie against Israel: we, the victims of Arab/Muslim abuse: women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, homosexuals, in the Arab/Muslim world. These are the biggest victims of UN Israel hatred.
Look at the situation of the Copts in Egypt, the Christians in Iraq, and Nigeria, and Iran, the Hindus and Bahais who suffer from Islamic oppression. The Sikhs. We – a rainbow coalition of victims and targets of Jihadis — all suffer. We are ignored, we are abandoned. So that the big lie against the Jews can go forward.
In 2005, I visited one of the refugee camps in South Sudan. I met a twelve year old girl who told me about her dream. In a dream she wanted to go to school to become a doctor. And then, she wanted to visit Israel. I was shocked. How could this refugee girl who spent most of her life in the North know about Israel? When I asked why she wanted to visit Israel, she said: “This is our people.” I was never able to find an answer to my question.
On January 9 of 2011 South Sudan became an independent state. For South Sudanese, that means continuation of oppression, brutalization, demonization, Islamization, Arabization and enslavement.
In a similar manner, the Arabs continue denying Jews their right for sovereignty in their homeland and the Durban III conference continues denying Israel’s legitimacy.
As a friend of Israel, I bring you the news that my President, the President of the Republic of South Sudan, Salva Kiir — publicly stated that the South Sudan embassy in Israel will be built— not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
I also want to assure you that my own new nation, and all of its peoples, will oppose racist forums like the Durban III. We will oppose it by simply telling the truth. Our truth.
My Jewish friends taught me something I now want to say with you.
AM YISROEL CHAI!
The people of Israel lives!
Thank you
That confused me as well.
In regard to Rwanda, 800,000 Tutsis, mostly Protestant Christians, were murdered by the Catholic Hutus. The UN and the US were complicit as Protestant Christians were herded into churches and then killed as were those Hutus who refused to join in the genocide. See, Genocide of the Tutsis – the Role of the Roman Catholic Church. It has been suggested that Kofi Annan be tried as a mass murderer because of his lack of action. The Roman Catholic Church pushes Ecumenism and after the Catholics kill the Protestants, the Muslims take over. See the Muslims gloat here about how their numbers have doubled since the massacre. Probably not so much new converts but the missing murdered Christian Tutsis.
A great speech. Heartrending and true. But I am confused by one statement:
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I thought the creation of South Sudan as a separate state was a good thing--at least for the south. Does Deng mean that the South Sudanese enslaved in the North will continue to suffer?
The South Sudanese Embassy will be in Jerusalem: United States, you've had your comeuppance! Now, US, get your act together and move the embassy to Jerusalem, too!
A remote family member has been recently disgnosed as having cancer originating from one his toes.
He was also informed that the terrible sickness had spread from there.
Almost immediately he was operated and his toe removed.
Shortly after the Doctors started to attend to the spread.
While it is a rather shocking example, the conept may also be applied to the origin and spread of islam.
It will not be either checked or cured in any other way.
Deng is certainly correct, and justified in the things he says. Israel has been treated unfairly by the UN; and the South Sudanese and Darfurians have been oppressed beyond measure by a brutal Islamic regime.
You won’t find the term “racism” in the Bible. It isn’t listed as a separate sin, but has — so far as I can tell — been invented in the 20th Century. When a substantial number of Southern Americans were held in perpetual bondage by white masters, they were criticized for their practice of slavery, regardless of race. In particular, Northern Americans were incensed at the thought of Christians treating fellow Christians as less than fully human.
Where did our African slaves come from? They were sold to European and American traders by their fellow Africans. No racism there, huh? Just business. None of this is to detract from Deng’s very correct remarks. If anything, it ought to point to the hypocracy of basing a conference on racism on this very continent that has such a long history of black people horribly mistreating one another. The Darfurians and South Sudanese suffered horribly at the hands of their (black) Arab countrymen. So did the black Tutsis in Rwanda, at the hands of their black Hutu countrymen. Even more recently, Pygmies have been hunted down and eaten like wild animals by Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers in the D. R. Congo.
As Deng says, the response to these episodes by the world is disproportionately small because the UN, which might be thought of as a champion of peoples’ right to life, are engaged primarily in political collective racism against Israel. On the other hand, these examples put a lie to the whole concept of “racism”. The Sudanese genocide wasn’t really “racist”, nor was that in Rwanda, nor the cannibalism of Pygmies in the Congo — nor, for that matter, the killing fields of Cambodia, the massacre of the Armenians nor even the Shoah. True “race” had very little to do with these incidents: They were all matters of local hatred going overboard, instigated by politicians for personal gain.
Compared to all that carnage, the historical inequality between various peoples in America — which has been held up as the very archetype of “racism” — looks like a minor family disagreement. Deng was right about the injustices done by the UN; but the whole world is in Dreamland concerning the supposed sin of “racism”. For all practical purposes, there is no such thing.