The Obama Administration is just beginning to reckon with this courageous man. Although Chen was pressured out of the Embassy, at suggestions that his wife would be beaten to death, and his extended family would suffer, his trust in the Americans had already created a diplomatic nightmare for the Obama Administration. They have been reticent in their remarks on Chen Guangcheng.

On the other hand, members of Congress have been vocal in their support for Chen. In the past three weeks, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights Chair Christopher Smith (R-NJ) has held two hearings on Chen. Remarkably, Chen has phoned in and made statements at both the Congressional-Executive Commission on China hearing on May 3 and the Subcommittee hearing on May 15.

At the May 3 hearing, U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) declared, “The most generous read of the administration’s handling of this case is that it was naïve in accepting assurances from a government that has a well-known and documented history of brutally repressing its own people under this government.” Witness Michael Horowitz, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow, remarked that one of the “great things we could do for the pursuit of American interests” would be to “replace the State Department with the AFLCIO.” “This is an issue of bargaining,” said Horowitz. “Anybody at the Teamsters Union would have flunked every one of these people who were bargaining for the life and freedom of such a world hero.”

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers’ President Reggie Littlejohn stressed the underlying issue that set the Chinese Communist government against Chen and that has been left out of much of the discussion in the mainstream media: “he was the one person in China who dared to stand up against the One Child policy.” Not many in the media or the Administration were eager to reveal that Chen’s crime was exposing the brutal practices of forced abortion and sterilization of Chinese women, and the “gendercide” practiced against baby girls. Surely, part of the Obama Administration’s uneasiness over Chen stems from the awkwardness of defending an anti-abortion activist. Vice President Joe Biden has even defended the One Child policy.

Chen is called a “barefoot lawyer,” because he provides free legal services but has no law degree. The blind were previously denied college admission in China, so Chen, who has been blind since childhood, was only permitted to audit classes. He started giving legal advice to disabled people in his home province of Shangdong, Dongshigu Village, in 1996. But in 2005, his activism shook the entire country and beyond. Chen went from village to village in Shandong Province collecting testimonies of tens of thousands of women who had been rounded up and forced to be sterilized or have abortions, even in the eighth month of pregnancy. Neither Chen’s blindness nor his lack of a degree prevented him from exposing some 130,000 forced abortions that took place in one year in that one province and filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of the victimized families.

Chen presented his findings in a class-action lawsuit against the Lin Yi City bureau of the Family Planning Commission. He also exposed this hidden horror to major international media when he traveled to Beijing in June 2005 to file a lawsuit there.  A year later, Chen was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2006. In her tribute, journalist Hannah Beech said, “He may have lost his sight as a child, but Chen Guangcheng’s legal vision has helped illuminate the plight of thousands of Chinese villagers.”

In September 2005, Chen was placed under house arrest by Lin Yi City officials. Beech related, “three hours after meeting with Time in Beijing to discuss the issue, Chen was shoved into an unmarked vehicle by public-security agents from his hometown. They bundled him back to his village, where he was held under house arrest for months.” In March 2006, he was removed from home and taken to detention. At his trial in August 2006 he was sentenced to four years and three months’ detention on trumped-up charges of “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic.” Chen’s attorneys, some of the most well-known Christian human rights attorneys in China, were also subjected to abuse of various forms for their defense of Chen Guangcheng.

On the morning of April 29, Boko Haram struck Catholic and Protestant worship services simultaneously at Bayero University in Kano. Twenty-two so farhave been confirmed dead, and twenty-three wounded. In the evening they attacked a church service in Jere, near Maiduguri, Borno State, killing another five people.

U.S. Congressmen Peter King (R-NY), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Patrick Meehan (R-PA) recently wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging that she designate the group as a terrorist organization. Meehan’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence released an extensive, bi-partisan report on Boko Haram as an “emerging threat to the U.S. Homeland.” But the State Department continues to downplay Boko Haram’s Islamist nature, preferring to see the terrorist murderers – of whom even the Nigerian police are afraid – as victims of poverty and marginalization.

One survivor of the April 29 attack on the Catholic Mass was a geography professor, Emmanuel Olofin. Olofin reported that Mass had just gotten underway in the university indoor sports complex at 8:10 AM when the worshippers heard the sound of “gunshots and pellets falling on the roof of the building.” According to reports, the attackers arrived in a car and two motorcycles. They threw explosives into the building and sent people into a panic. They fled from the building, straight into the attackers’ line of fire.

Professor Olofin, age 71, leaped over an eight-foot fence instead of using the actual exit in the gate. “I believe that most of the people that died were those who took the pedestrian exit because it seemed as if the attackers used the pedestrian gate to gain entrance,” said Olofin, who found refuge under a tree. Among the dead were two of Olofin’s university colleagues, Professors Jerome Ayodele, Department of Chemistry, and Andrew Leo Ogbonyomi, Library Science.

At the same time the attack on the Catholics was taking place, other members of the sect attacked the Chapel of Victory Protestant church service, meeting outdoors near the Faculty of Medicine. Professor Julius Falola, who was preaching when the Islamists arrived, recounted a horrific scene similar to that described by Professor Olofin. Explosions and gunshots were followed by fleeing church members who provided easy targets for Boko Haram killers.Falola said that some of the Christians “jumped over the fence while others ran deeper into the campus.” Falola hid in the university clinic. Falola and Olofin, as well as other witnesses, said that the police did not arrive until 10 AM. “The shooting went on for 45 minutes,” said Falola.

Boko Haram topped off their killing spree later that night, by opening fire on the Church of Christ in Nigeria parish in Jere. Because of a state of emergency in the town, worshippers had foregone meeting in the morning in favor of what they assumed would be an unnoticed and therefore less dangerous evening worship. Halfway through the service, witnesses reported that the Islamists came “in their trademark car, Volkswagen Golf, dressed in flowing gowns.” After “their routine shout of ‘Allah akbar,’ they . . .  headed straight for the altar” where they shot and killed the pastor, Reverend Albert Naga. Four others died from the attack, as well.

In response to Sunday’s targeted killing of Christians by Boko Haram, Secretary Clinton put out a paragraph on May 1, saying that the United States “strongly condemns the recent attacks on innocent civilians in Nigeria, including yesterday’s disgraceful assault during church services at Bayero University in Kano.” Clinton said that they are “concerned about attacks on churches, news media, and government installations that increasingly target innocent civilians across Northern Nigeria.” She condemned “attempts by those in Nigeria who seek to inflame Christian-Muslim tensions, and support those who recognize Nigeria’s ethnic and religious diversity as one of the country’s greatest strengths.” She concluded by saying that “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those who were killed and injured.”

Bullen was the Bishop of Lui, in South Sudan’s Equatoria region. His devastated diocese was as stark as the moon’s surface. His cathedral and hospital had been bombed by the Sudanese government of Omar al Bashir at least seven times. And his brother – just one of millions of victims of Khartoum’s jihad – had been tied up and dragged behind a jeep until he was dead. Seeing the bishop’s puzzlement at the near-hysteria in the hallways, I explained that it was due to an American movie star, an activist who would be speaking about China’s occupation of Tibet at a hearing on Capitol Hill. “If only some movie star cared that much about Sudan!” Bishop Bullen smiled wistfully.

If Bishop Bullen were still alive he would be very pleased to know about George Clooney. An actor who does truly care about Sudan, Clooney first brought his star power to the issue of western Sudan’s Darfur region around 2006, but he has broadened the scope of his advocacy to include all of Sudan’s marginalized people. In December 2010, Clooney went to South Sudan during the preparations for the referendum on secession from the north. There was fear of attacks by Khartoum’s National Congress Party regime, and Clooney, who endured malaria and stomach ailments during his visit, said that by shining daylight on the situation he was making it “harder to kill people.” The referendum did go through extremely peacefully, with 99.9% of the people voting for freedom.

Earlier this month Clooney used his powerful command of the media to attest to Sudan’s current genocidal conditions, taking on the regime of the ICC-indicted war criminal Omar al Bashir, the U.S. State Department, and the international media to press the need for immediate aid and protection for the people of the Nuba Mountains, where time to save lives is running out. The Nuba – the indigenous African ethnic groups (about 40 tribes) of the Nuba Mountain region in South Kordofan – face starvation this month. They have been unable to plant their crops because of constant aerial bombardment by the Sudan Armed Forces since June 2011. Instead, they have been hiding from the bombs in stark, snake-and-scorpion-filled caves, existing on terror and a sub-subsistence diet. Now the little food that they have is running out, and the Khartoum regime has blocked access to all humanitarian aid.

On March 14, 2012, Clooney and John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, testified before the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing entitled, “Sudan and South Sudan: Independence and Insecurity.” Clooney, whose powerful testimony followed that of the State Department’s Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, Princeton Lyman, and U.S. Agency for International Development official, Nancy Lindborg, screened for the Senate committee a video he had just made during a trip to the Nuba Mountains the week before.

In the video Clooney meets the terrorized Nuba citizens of burned-out villages, hiding in caves from Sudan’s Antonov bombers just as they were forced to do less than a decade ago during the north/south war. He visits the wounded in a makeshift clinic, including a nine-year-old boy who had lost both hands during a bombing raid the day before. He stands beside both an unexploded bomb, buried up to its unspeakable neck in the dirt, and a man killed by an exploded one, lying unburied in the dirt.

The actor/activist says to a Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N) soldier: “This is simply trying to clear people out – ethnically – because of the color of their skin.” The soldier, who is fighting together with fellow Nuba to protect his people from Khartoum’s extermination campaign, agrees, and adds, “They want to destroy the blacks and put the Arabs in.” When Clooney asks the soldier how long his people have been there, the soldier smiles and replies, “since Creation.” The testimony bolstered a bipartisan group, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Roger Wicker (R-MS), who had introduced a resolution demanding humanitarian access to the region.

The Obama Administration and other world leaders were willing to move heaven and earth to bring down Egyptian and Libyan tyrants. So far, none is willing not even to bring down Sudan’s ICC-indicted war criminal president Omar al-Bashir, but just to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths by pushing Khartoum for humanitarian access to those who are starving. Instead the Obama Administration, the United Nations, and other world leaders continue to deliberate and to allow Khartoum to control the deliberations by asking them what they will and will not accept. Khartoum, not surprisingly, has banned humanitarian access saying that food aid would be used to “feed the rebels.” In truth, why would world leaders expect the regime that again is creating the starvation and genocide to allow preventative measures?

Journalist Nick Kristof, who recently expanded his knowledge of Sudan from Darfur to other areas of genocide, admirably defied Khartoum by visiting the Nuba Mountains without a visa. Writing from the region, Kristof declared, “Like many others, I’ve denounced President Bashar al-Assad of Syria for his murderous repression, but the more than 7,000 estimated by human rights groups to have been killed under Assad is within the margin of error of estimates of the numbers of people killed by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan.”

Almost 30,000 of the targeted Nuba fled from their homes and are now in Yida Refugee Camp, over the border in the Republic of South Sudan. The Sudan government has not hesitated to cross international boundaries and bomb the refugee camp, and other areas inside the nation of South Sudan. This week, one of the Sudan advocacy heroes in Congress, U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), visited the Nuba refugees at Yida. As he greeted the people lined up to meet him, several young men held up a sign demanding, “Where are you Obama, the world president? Where are you, Banki Moon, UN boss? For how long do you want us to suffer?”

Mr. Wolf wonders the same thing. He recently wrote to President Obama describing Nuba Mountain atrocities. Wolf pointed out that this is “the very same government that the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) thought was deserving of legal representation in Washington, DC.” The congressman urged Obama to revoke the license of Khartoum’s attorney/lobbyist, Bart Fisher, and says that the license to represent the genocidal government should never have been awarded in the first place.

Meanwhile, at even greater risk than those at Yida are the hundreds of thousands who remain in the Nuba Mountains, hiding in caves, eating leaves and berries, and struggling to survive. While the Khartoum regime ground forces fight the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N), the resistance movement defending the people, Antonovs and MiG fighter jets continue to drop devasting anti-personnel bombs on civilians.

On February 1, 2012 the Sudanese air force dropped 8 bombs on Heiban Bible College, built by American relief group, Samaritan’s Purse. Miraculously, seeing this was a crowded first day of school, no one was killed or even injured. Two buildings were destroyed, though, that had risen on war-devastated land just four years ago. Victims of an even more recent bombing, reported by Kristof on February 22, were not as fortunate. Says Kristof, “Four women had been injured, the worst with a shrapnel wound that sliced open her chest and exposed her lungs.”

What’s the going rate for souls these days? How about $20,000 a month? Such was the deal offered by the National Islamic Front (also known as the National Congress Party) government of Sudan to Washington, DC attorney Bart S. Fisher for help getting Sudan removed from the U.S.’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

Act for Sudan, a new alliance of activists against genocide in Sudan,¹ alerted U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) to the Islamist government in Khartoum’s hiring of Fisher. When Khartoum had tried the same thing in 2009, Mr. Wolf wrote a scathing letter to President Obama asking him to direct the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to deny any waiver requests by U.S. companies seeking to represent the government of Sudan. An OFAC waiver is necessary because in 1997 then President Clinton issued an Executive Order imposing a trade embargo against the entire territory of Sudan and total asset freeze against the Khartoum government. Clinton cited Sudan for “continued support for international terrorism, ongoing efforts to destabilize neighboring governments and the prevalence of human rights violations, including slavery and denial of religious freedom.” Not much has changed.²

On Tuesday, December 13, Wolf, who had written once again to President Obama, went to the House floor to condemn Khartoum’s arrangement with Bart Fisher, saying:

Mr. Speaker, I was appalled and outraged to learn yesterday that the genocidal government of Khartoum has hired a lobbyist to represent its interests here in Washington. . . Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan Bashir is an internationally indicted war criminal.  Bashir is accused by the International Criminal Court of five counts of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture and extermination, and two counts of war crimes.

But Khartoum’s crimes are not simply a thing of the past. . . .

My office has received regular reliable reports from individuals on the ground . . . We’ve learned of ongoing aerial bombardments in Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan states.  We’ve heard nightmarish accounts of extrajudicial killings, illegal detention, disappearances, and indiscriminate attacks against civilians.  Furthermore, evidence gathered through satellite imagery by the Satellite Sentinel Project shows at least eight mass graves found in and around Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan.

Literally thousands have fled the violence.  Which begs the question: who is their lobbyist? They are in desperate straits having left behind their entire lives.  Who is their lobbyist? They are facing malnourishment and prolonged displacement.  Who is their lobbyist?

Further protest of Fisher’s arrangements with Khartoum came on Friday, December 16, when members of Act for Sudan were joined by other Sudan advocates to demonstrate outside of the law offices of Bart Fisher. Act for Sudan reported, “Carrying protest signs and chanting, ‘Mr. Fisher, step aside, you’re representing genocide,’ the activists called on the attorney to stop helping Sudan avoid consequences for ongoing government-sponsored genocide and mass atrocities.” Protestors were buoyed by the participation of Congressman Wolf, who warned President Obama, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the head of OFAC that “history will be their judge if they fail to act.” Jeff Walton, IRD’s representative at the protest, said that the timing could not have been better as lunchtime crowds were very interested in what the protestors had to say.

Sudan is a kind of diabolical Groundhog Day. In the film by that name, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) re-lives the same day over and over again until he learns the lessons needed to change his life and save the lives of others. In Sudan today, people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State are re-living the horrific nightmare from which they thought they had finally awakened after the signing of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. But in this case, it is the United States government that has failed to learn the lessons needed to change conditions and save the lives of others.

Along with the citizens of what is now the new nation of the Republic of South Sudan, the people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State were for decades mercilessly persecuted and slaughtered by their own government. Starvation and enslavement were used as weapons of war along with ground combat and aerial bombardment. The hallmark of Khartoum’s multiple declarations of jihad against its own people is the deliberate targeting of civilians and particularly of Christians. In the case of Blue Nile State, one Sudanese military commander, Taib Musba, was responsible for the killing of 15,000 Uduk Christians in the mid 1980’s. Some he killed personally by driving three-inch-long nails into the tops of their heads. Others were crushed by a 50 ton Soviet-made tank.

Deliberate targeting of civilians is also the hallmark of Khartoum’s current offensive against the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State. Since June 5, 2011, the Islamist regime’s forces, aided by militias, have been conducting an ethnically-based extermination campaign in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan State while attempting to crush the resistance movement of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM/N). And in September they began attacking Blue Nile State, as well.

In June Islamist militias first conducted a door to door search looking for Nuba with orders from ICC-indicted war criminal President Omer al-Bashir to “sweep out the trash,” and whenever they find a Nuba to “clean it up.” The horrific “cleaning” has been verified by the Satellite Sentinel Project. This invaluable effort, started by actor George Clooney, has provided evidence of mass graves believed to be of some 7000 people that were rounded up at the UN compound in the capital city of Kadugli by Sudanese government collaborators and massacred. Since June, regular aerial bombardment has killed many and sent hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in caves and beyond in South Sudan.

To add to the nightmare, Khartoum began attacking Blue Nile State in September. Unknown numbers of men, women, and children have been killed and tens of thousands have been displaced, even as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA/N), the resistance movement’s forces, fight to protect the people and maintain territory. The people of Blue Nile and the Nuba now face starvation in government-orchestrated famine. Khartoum has banned all humanitarian assistance from the regions. Now Sudan’s rainy season has ended and Khartoum is resuming land attacks, moving mechanized infantry columns into place, in addition to aerial bombardment.

On November 3, Khartoum announced the capture of Kurmuk, the capital of Southern Blue Nile State, by Government of Sudan (GOS) forces. These forces include both the regular Sudanese army and Mujahedeen and Janjaweed transferred from slaughtering civilians in Darfur civilians to slaughtering civilians in Blue Nile State. According to Blue Nile Association North America, “before entering Kurmuk the GOS forces used aerial bombardment, heavy artillery and helicopter gunships targeting the city of Kurmuk and the surrounding areas, destroying water storage tanks, churches, schools and civilians’ homes.” Tens of thousands of indigenous people were displaced, injured, and killed. Khartoum may also have employed chemical weapons. Many of the injured SPLA/N soldiers “had strange bleeding from their ears and noses.”

Reports on the ground confirmed that all of the villages and towns in the 100 or so miles between Damazin city and Kurmuk as far as the Ethiopian border were completely looted, burned and destroyed by the invading forces. The Blue Nile Association stated that ICC-indicted war criminal president Omer al-Bashir had declared following the secession of South Sudan that there was “no room for any talk about diversity.” He announced that Sudan was now a “pure Arab Islamic State.” “It seems that after this campaign and the campaign in South Kordofan President Basher [sic] is following his words to eradicate and cleanse the indigenous people in Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains of South Kurdufan,” the Blue Nile Association declared.

Thousands of Egyptian Americans representing oppressed and persecuted Coptic Christians streamed down Washington, DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue Wednesday, October 19, 2011. Their demonstration had begun in front of the White House. It ended with a rally at the U.S. Capitol.

Copts, who traveled by the busloads from such places as Chicago, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, came to Washington to protest the brutal treatment of Egypt’s Christians and demand that the Obama administration pressure Cairo to protect the rights of non-Muslims. They also wished to call attention to congressional legislation that supports Copts and other vulnerable people groups. The demonstration was a response to an Egyptian army-led massacre of Christians on Sunday, October 9, in Cairo.

On October 9, Egyptian Christians had staged a peaceful demonstration and a march through downtown Cairo to protest the burning of a church and several Christian-owned homes and businesses in Upper Egypt on September 30. The Christian protestors were attacked by an Islamist mob near an underpass cutting through downtown Cairo. They were pelted with rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and otherwise molested. Then when the Christians reached their destination, Maspero Square, Egyptian military forces were already aligned against them to quell the demonstration.

Seeming to have forgotten Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi’s recent testimony that the army would “never . . . open fire at citizens,” the army did indeed open fire on the protestors, killing twenty-one. Later, when the army was leaving the bloodbath it had created, one soldier bragged that he had shot a Copt in the chest and killed him. The Muslim crowd cheered, shouting, “This is the real Egyptian army!”

Six other Christians at the demonstration were crushed under armored personnel carriers when those vehicles deliberately plowed into crowds of protestors. A Compass Direct News Service report called the attack “the worst act of violence against Egyptian Christians in modern history.” In addition to the twenty-six people that were killed, hundreds of others were wounded by the army’s attack. The army attack left Egypt’s Christians shocked and devastated.

At Wednesday’s demonstration in Washington, the American Copts pointed out that U.S. tax payer dollars fund the tanks that killed the Egyptian Christians. Many people, including members of Congress, ask why the U.S. continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars annually in financial aid to a country with such an abysmal human rights record. Over $70 billion has been given in aid since the Camp David accords, notes columnist Mike McManus. Some of the Coptic protestors in Washington held signs declaring, “Your Tax Dollars Kill Christians in Egypt.”

Other demonstrators carried a variety of other messages. Some of the protestors held large photographs depicting the horrific events at Maspero Square. Others carried Bible verses speaking of the persecution of the Church, or messages to the world such as “1400 years of Islamic oppression: We still stand defiant!”

Many of the people carried large wooden crosses or American flags. And a few carried black wooden coffins that they placed on the sidewalk in front of the White House. Together they raised their voices in such chants for justice as, “Why, why, must we die?” “Obama, Obama, where are you?” “Coptic blood is not cheap!” and “USA, wake up!”

As the protestors had declared, Copts and other Egyptian Christians, along with Egypt’s tiny Baha’i community and tinier Jewish community, have, to varying degrees, been victims of discrimination and persecution for 14 centuries. The Copts are descendants of ancient Egyptians converted to Christianity by Saint Mark, who founded the Church of Alexandria in 43 AD. But since the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640 AD, Egyptian Christians have lived as dhimmi, second-class citizens, under Islam.

U.S. Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-VA) took the mainstream media to task for poor coverage of what he called “a really big story” on Thursday, September 22, at a hearing before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC) on human rights violations in Sudan. Wolf oversaw a morning of powerful testimonies about the National Congress Party (NCP) regime’s continuing atrocities in the Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan, Darfur and other contested regions. He reiterated the need to support Sudan’s marginalized people in their efforts to bring change and noted the lack of media attention to the aerial bombardment, extrajudicial killings, government-orchestrated starvation, and arbitrary arrests that have been taking place since the NCP launched its attack on the Nuba Mountains, June 5, 2011.

Witnesses at the hearing were in agreement that Sudan’s problem is the Islamist regime in Khartoum. The first panel was devoted to Sudan’s refugee crisis. Jana Mason, senior advisor, U.S. Government and External Relations for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, focused on Darfurian refugees who may have no home to return to, even if peace comes to Darfur. She said land ownership “was complicated.” But some describe the complication as Khartoum colonizing parts of Darfur with nomadic people groups from elsewhere in Sudan and the Arab world while continuing to perpetrate genocide on African inhabitants of Darfur.

Tom Andrews, former member of Congress and president of United to End Genocide, was the first witness on the second panel. Andrews, who has just recently returned from Sudan, called President Omar al-Bashir a “genocidal monster” and told of speaking to Darfurians who had sought refuge with the Nuba from Khartoum’s Janjaweed. These refugees now experienced new horror as Janjaweed galloped through Kauda, Kadugli and elsewhere in the Nuba Mountains with orders from al-Bashir to “sweep out the trash” and kill the Nuba “when you find them.” Andrews also spoke to Nuba priests who had fled to South Sudan, reporting house to house searches for Christians and supporters of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) taking place. Christians are a special target of Khartoum in the Nuba Mountains and throughout Sudan.

Jehanne Henry, senior researcher on Sudan for Human Rights Watch, revealed that while U.S. response to the massacre taking place in Sudan was inadequate, it was more than that of the African Union and the U.N. Security Council. Neither of these agencies had yet even condemned Khartoum bombings. She also stated that there were reports of bombings and other atrocities taking place in Blue Nile State, another contested region, as well. Satellite photos from the Satellite Sentinel Project confirm these reports.

Omer Ismail, senior policy advisor for Enough Project, reported that the Satellite Sentinel Project had discovered “at least” eight mass graves in the Nuba Mountains. He urged Congress to look at the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile and elsewhere in the larger context and “address the source, not the symptoms.” “The U.S. must listen and respond to the voices for change in Sudan,” he urged, noting that the same international community that became so heavily involved in Egypt and Libya because of government oppression “should have been there” for Sudan from the time of the genocide in South Sudan.

Kauda is a town in central Sudan’s Nuba Mountains roughly 50 miles northeast of the state capital, Kadugli. Along with the rest of the Nuba Mountains/Southern Kordofan region, Kauda is under attack by the National Congress Party (NCP) Islamist government of Sudan that seeks to eradicate the black, African Nuba ethnic groups. Every day Kauda’s rich hills and fertile valleys suffer new scars as bombs drop from the sky, terrorizing and killing men, women, and children.

Khartoum’s extermination campaign began June 5, 2011, after its candidate for Nuba Mountains governor, ICC-indicted war criminal Ahmed Haroun, stole the election from the popular Commander Abdelaziz Adam Alhilu. Haroun is the architect of the genocide in Darfur. Alhilu is a hero of Sudan’s civil war and current head of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-North), the force defending the Nuba from Khartoum’s troops. When the people protested the rigging of the election, Sudan President Omar al Bashir warned that if the Nuba did not accept Haroun, his soldiers would “chase them up into the mountains” where they would starve. He also told Sudan’s armed forces and Islamic militias to “just sweep away the rubbish” in the Nuba Mountains.

On June 14 the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) bombed the airstrip at Kauda, and since then they have carried out dozens more air strikes there and in surrounding villages and towns. Kauda County Police Chief, Mohammed Ibrahim, told Sudan Radio Service on July 1 that an SAF airplane had bombed the Kauda Hospital the day before, killing civilians. A pregnant woman who had just gone into labor was decapitated in the bombing.

Then on August 22, just before declaring a ceasefire that was immediately and pathetically lauded by the U.S. State Department, Khartoum targeted again civilians in Kauda. According to sources on the ground, a single Antonov plane dropped four bombs “in and around” Al Masha Secondary School. Thankfully, no one was killed. Only two people were seriously injured. But the last time Khartoum bombed a Kauda school, the tragedy was overwhelming.

Kauda still bears the scars of a wound it received at nine a.m. February 8, 2000. As children at Holy Cross Primary School settled into their studies in “classrooms” under two large shade trees, the Sudanese government turned its war on the little Catholic bush school and bombed the school. Twenty students and one teacher died. Dozens were severely injured, many requiring amputation. The Sudanese air force dropped five “barrel” bombs, studded with nails, on what the low-flying aircraft obviously knew was a civilian target.

In his beautiful but painful book, War and Faith in Sudan, journalist Gabriel Meyer recounts the events of the horrific morning:

The first two bombs failed to hit their target, landing in a hollow a quarter mile from the school and at its perimeter. The third bomb, however, landed in the schoolyard between the two trees, leaving a blackened crater in its wake. Shrapnel moving at speeds of up to two hundred miles an hour sliced through the air.

The students who flattened themselves on the ground, as they had been trained to do, had a chance. Those who tried to run away from the blasts did not.

Seeing where the third bomb had struck, and with terrorized children breaking into a run all around her, teacher Roda Ismail tried to force them to lie down, and shifted her students to the back side of the southern tree to shield them from the shrapnel whining across the yard.

As undefined “rebels” unleash their power in Libya, thanks to U.S. and NATO intervention, the besieged Nuba people of central Sudan remain without any similar support. The architects of the “Arab Spring,” which may prove to be seven times more wicked than the regimes it supplants in Egypt and Libya, have been supported by both the bully pulpit of President Obama and the firepower of the West. But there seems to be no similar responsibility to protect Sudan’s black African Nuba people from their genocidal government, or from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops that reportedly have now joined in the attack on this marginalized people group.

Neither the U.S. nor NATO has offered the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-Northern Sector (SPLA-North) the support which they offered Egypt and Libya’s protestors. The SPLA-North is Nuba people’s only defense against Khartoum’s National Congress Party (NCP) Islamist regime that has been waging war on civilians since June 5, 2011. Instead, the White House told the SPLA-North on June 22, that, along with the NCP, they must “end the current violence and allow immediate humanitarian access to desperate people who have been driven from their homes and are now cut off from outside help.”

The problem with moral equivalency is that those who are deemed morally equivalent don’t behave as if they are. It’s useless, not to say absurd, to tell the SPLA-North to end the violence and allow humanitarian access, when the violence originates in Khartoum. Khartoum’s daily sorties bomb the Nuba Mountains, its armed forces (SAF) and Arab Janjaweed militia called the Popular Defense Force (PDF) slaughter people in their homes, and it deliberately blocks aid to complete the starvation of the Nuba that it began in the 1990’s during the North/South war.

The Obama Administration insists that there is “not enough information” about Southern Kordofan (the Arab name for the region) to consider action. But although Khartoum has tried to shut off access to the region, it cannot succeed the way it did in last war, in which some 50 percent of all the Nuba died of war-related causes. In the current campaign of extermination, activists are on the case and passions are running high. There is a great deal of information available from the experience of eye-witnesses, comprehensive media reports, and testimony from an August 4, 2011 congressional hearing.

All information confirms the desperate situation in the region of central Sudan that falls just outside the borders of the new Promised Land of the Republic of South Sudan. Although Nuba fought alongside Southerners in the North/South war, now while their Southern brothers and sisters celebrate freedom from Islamization and Arabization in Africa’s 54^th nation, the Nuba are the targets of an extermination campaign that has already left hundreds of thousands displaced and untold thousands killed (although the identification by the Satellite Sentinel Project of mass graves is beginning to tell the tale of the number of the slaughtered).

Under the leadership of Commander Abdelaziz Adam Alhilu the SPLA-North has been surprisingly successful, since the Sudanese government has air power and the SPLA-North has none. The SPLA-North, sometimes assisted by other marginalized people group forces such as the Darfurians, has caused the NCP humiliating military ground defeats. In such battles, SAF troops have fled the area, abandoning tanks, land cruisers, and weapons to the SPLA.  In other cases, SAF troops have actually defected to the SPLA. Khartoum has publicly threatened that if the SPLA does not return the tanks, vehicles, and weapons they will use chemical weapons on the people of the Nuba Mountains.

The rally for freedom in China sponsored every July by adherents of Falun Gong is by far the most orderly and well-organized political demonstration that takes place in Washington, DC. This year’s rally of July 14 was no exception. Practitioners of the spiritual discipline combining meditation, graceful exercises, and breathing techniques with cultivation of virtue sat cross-legged on the ground in dozens and dozens of rows facing the U.S. Capitol. But few realize how, behind the scenes, Falun Gong is more successfully rocking repressive regimes around the world than could the most riotous of demonstrators.

Unlike many Washington protestors and demonstrators, Falun Gong members attending the rally for freedom were almost totally silent. There were no shouts of “No justice, no peace!” No chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho. Hu Jintao has got to go.” But for their applause for the rally speakers, Falun Gong followers sat quietly in the hot sun. Members of Congress and representatives of human rights and religious freedom organizations that come every year to the rally brought greetings, condemned the actions of the Chinese government, and pledged their support to Falun Gong, persecuted Christians, and all those who are oppressed by the Communist regime.

In addition to sheer numbers, (seated adherents stretched all the way to the edge of the Capitol West Lawn) visual images spoke for the practitioners. Most of the hundreds of participants held posters declaring “Stop the Persecution of Falun Gong” or “Abolish the Chinese Communist Party.” Other participants’ peaceful expressions belied the horrific photos they displayed of the battered faces of friends and family members, practitioners who have been arrested, beaten, and put in China’s vast gulag, or brutally tortured to death. Flanking the seated participants on all sides stood other demonstrators supporting large, colorful banners that proclaimed both the goodness of Falun Gong, or “Falun Dafa,” as it is also known, and the evil of the CCP and Communism. It was a refreshing change in a climate where Chairman Mao and Che Guevara are fashion statements and in which we are informed by our betters at Newsweek that “we are all socialists now.”

July 2011 marked twelve years of the CCP’s brutal persecution of Falun Gong. First founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992, Falun Gong’s practitioners numbered over 70 million by the mid-1990’s, to the great alarm of the Communist regime. Falun Gong was outlawed on July 20, 1999 as “neither a religion nor a spiritual movement” but “an evil cult against humanity, science and society.” Communist Party Chairman Jiang Zemin created a government office to “eradicate” Falun Gong, and leading practitioners immediately were arrested. By 2008 the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report on China noted that “some foreign observers estimated that Falun Gong adherents constituted at least half of the 250,000 officially recorded inmates in re-education through labor (RTL) camps, while Falun Gong sources overseas placed the number even higher.”

The numbers of Falun Gong practitioners that have been tortured and killed grew throughout the nineties, and continued into the twenty-first century. In 2003, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Asma Jahangir, reported that she continued “to be alarmed by deaths in custody in China.” She concluded that “the cruelty and brutality of these alleged acts of torture” against followers of the Falun Gong movement “defy description.” In just the first four months of 2011, sources reported the deaths of 26 Falun Gong practitioners from various age groups and regions of China.

Even as persecution continues, Falun Gong is having a tremendous impact on the struggle for freedom not only in China, but around the world. Human rights activist Michael Horowitz says that Falun Gong followers are “changing the course of history.” First, in 2004, Falun Gong’s international newspaper The Epoch Times published an exposé of the deception and violence of the CCP. The Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party feature such topics as “On How the Chinese Communist Party Destroyed Traditional Culture” and “On the Chinese Communist Party’s History of Killing.” One topic even turns the tables on the CCP and explains “On How the Chinese Communist Party is An Evil Cult.”

Reaction to the Nine Commentaries has been astounding. In the seven years since their publication, over 98 million people have left the Party. To assist in this process, the Falun Gong initiated the “Tuidang Movement.” Tuidang, which translates as “withdraw from the Communist Party,” signifies withdrawing or renouncing membership in the CCP or its affiliated youth organizations, the Young Pioneers and the Communist Youth League. The Tuidang Movement was recognized in U.S. Senate Resolution 232, just introduced on July 13, 2011. Yi Rong, the chairwoman of Falun Gong’s aptly named “Quitting the CCP Service Center,” was one of the speakers at this year’s rally. She revealed that Tuidang volunteers both inside China and around the world process over 60,000 quitting statements each day.

But opening the eyes of former Communist Party members through the Nine Commentaries is not the only way in which Falun Gong practitioners are changing the world and fighting for freedom. In 2000, Chinese-American Falun Gong followers launched the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, (GIF). This is a series of free downloadable programs with names such as “Freegate” and “Ultrasurf” that allow Internet users to bypass the servers that are censored by their government and access the Internet via GIF’s servers that are spread across the world.

“We thank God at this time, the birth of a new nation, South Sudan, is real,” proclaimed Paul Deng Chol, an Anglican priest in Juba, South Sudan.

This was one of many statements of gratitude expressed by South Sudanese citizens as they waited to celebrate their Independence Day on Saturday, July 9, 2011. The new nation is the 54^th country in Africa, and the Republic of South Sudan, as it is officially called, is the world’s 196^th country.

July 9, 2011 was actually the second time the people of South Sudan have observed an independence day. As pointed out by the Africa Messenger, “On January 1, 1956, the nation of Sudan officially became independent of British rule, and the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum immediately began a campaign of persecution in the south of Sudan, including the expulsion of most foreign missionaries.” Independence from Great Britain brought nothing but suffering and deprivation to black African South Sudanese. This time around, the people of South Sudan had far more to celebrate.

In January of this year the citizens of South Sudan participated in a referendum on secession, a provision of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the more-than-twenty year civil war between the North and the South. Southern Sudanese voted overwhelmingly (over 98%) to separate from northern Sudan during the referendum. Until the signing of the CPA, Christian-dominated South Sudan was under siege by the Islamic northern regime that was attempting to impose Islamic law and Arab culture on the African Christians and moderate Muslims of the South and other marginalized regions.

Dr. Grant LeMarquand, Professor of Mission and Biblical Studies and expert in Sudanese Christian history notes that, “Sudan has a painful history of civil conflict.”

Even as Sudan was being given its independence from Great Britain, northern efforts to Islamize southern Sudan led to a civil war between the Arab northerners and non-Arab southerners that lasted from 1956 to 1972. A ten-year period of peace followed the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement. But the agreement was abrogated by Khartoum just as South Sudan was set to become autonomous, and so the more recent and even bloodier phase of the civil war began in which over 2.5 million people died and about 5 million were displaced as refugees inside and outside the country.

Sudan’s methods of war were distinctive in their targeting of civilians – men, women, and children. They included arrests, torture, and executions, government-orchestrated starvation, aerial bombardment of civilian targets, and the abduction and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of women and children. It was a terrible time for the people of South Sudan.

On Saturday, July 9, however, the people of South Sudan eagerly put the final touches on the long awaited Independence Day celebration. On this day, South Sudan was free from the Islamic Shariah- oriented regime based in Khartoum. July 9^th will be one of the most significant days in history of South Sudan.

According to the Minister of Roads and Transport for the government of South Sudan, Mr. Anthony Makana, about two thousand dignitaries, including heads of states, had been invited to attend the ‘Big Day,’ or ‘The Declaration Day’, as many referred to it here in Juba, the capital of the new Republic of South Sudan. Workers were busy day and night, putting together the final touches on the single runway at Juba International Airport.

In interviews with the BBC, Makana disclosed, “Juba International Airport will be receiving about 70 to 80 planes” during the week of celebration. “The airport has never received planes at night since South Sudan was created,” he said. But the Government of South Sudan assured the world that the airport was well lit and adequately equipped to meet international standards that ensure safety and security. Sources close to the Government of South Sudan have also confirmed that notices had been circulated to the public that the airport will not operate for the usual commercial flights from the 6th through 12th of July, 2011. This was to accommodate the landing and takeoff of both chartered and presidential jets, which will be ushering invited dignitaries from around the world in and out of Juba.

Juba and other towns across South Sudan were ready and waiting to receive visitors. A thorough cleaning of the less than 10 miles of paved roads in the city of Juba and beautification of the streets took place. Posters adorned the streets expressing the people’s thoughts and emotions about the long-anticipated day. “This is our new country,” “Celebrating the birth of a new nation,” and “Thank you, Dr. John Garang de Mabior” ranked high among the declarations.

Garang, the head of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/SPLA), became the first president of the regional government of South Sudan and the first vice president of Sudan following the signing of the CPA. He was killed six months later in a helicopter crash, returning from Uganda to Sudan. It speaks enormously to the courage and resilience of the people of South Sudan that they continued on in the face of this crushing blow, but they will never forget his leadership.

Another giant board with a portrait of SPLA soldiers was positioned close by the premises of the University of Juba. This billboard read, “We fought, suffered, survived, and won the freedom together from the oppressor.” Just like patriotic Americans thank the troops who ensure their continued freedom, the people of South Sudan are grateful to the troops of the SPLA who endured so much for the sake of finally securing their freedom.

Shops, kiosks, houses, and government residents were painted and decorated. Some shops along the roads around Dr. Garang Memorial Museum had been demolished to provide the place where the president of South Sudan, H.E Salva Kiir Mayardit was to address the nation. Rehearsals involving several choirs had just ended last week for the performance of the new South Sudan National Anthem. One school teacher from Juba Girls’ School had mentioned that several choirs, including those from the churches, schools, and other institutions, were to perform on the big day.

“Once again we are facing the nightmare of genocide of our people in a final attempt to erase our culture and society from the face of the earth. It is not a war between armies that is being fought in our land, but the utter destruction of our way of life and our history, as demonstrated by the genocide of our neighbors and relatives in Darfur. This is a war of domination and eradication, at its core it is a war of terror by the government of Sudan against their people.”

These are the words of the Rt. Rev. Andudu Adam Elnail, Bishop of Kadugli and the Nuba Mountains, in a June 18 plea for churches around the world to pray and fast for the people of central Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. The Nuba are trying to survive renewed attacks by the National Congress Party (NCP), which began on June 5 and continue unabated.

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are bombing the region daily with Antonovs and MiGs. For example, on June 20, the little town of Al Hamra, with a population of less than 3,000, was hammered for a full day by five Antovs and MiGs from the NCP stronghold of Khartoum. This action cleared the way for the Arab militia called the Popular Defense Forces (PDF) – just another version of the infamous Janjaweed, the killers of Darfur – to carry out massacres against the Moro tribe of the Nuba people (95% Christian), who constitute the backbone of the troops in the northern Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA-North).

Another glimpse into the extent of the extermination taking place in the Nuba Mountains came in a June 23 Associated Press story. “Sudanese intelligence agents posed as Red Crescent workers and ordered refugees to leave a UN-protected camp in a region where Sudan’s Arab military has been targeting a black ethnic minority,” said an internal UN report obtained by the AP.

Sudanese National Security Service agents put on Red Crescent aprons at the refugee camp in Kadugli and told refugees to go to a stadium where they would receive humanitarian aid and hear an address by the new governor, the ICC-indicted, falsely-elected, war criminal Ahmed Haroun. The refugees were threatened with forced removal from the camp if they did not go to the stadium.

The UN report, marked “For Internal Use Only,” was dated June 22. It did not say what happened to the refugees who went to the stadium or how many were forced to go. But another AP story, five days later, reported that “the United Nations said Tuesday it was concerned about the fate of 7,000 Sudanese civilians last seen being forced by authorities to leave the protection of a UN compound in the tense border region between the North and South” (emphasis added). Sudan expert Eric Reeves says of the incident, “Despite this public report there was no direct response from any international actor of consequence, including the UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Valerie Amos.  Small wonder that Khartoum believes it may do what it wants with impunity.”

On Monday, June 27, dozens of Nuba and their supporters demonstrated in front of the United Nations in New York. At the end of the day, they delivered a statement to the UN Security Council entitled “The Genocide Continues in Nuba Mountains and the International Community Sits By.” The statement urges the UN to act, rather than awaiting some result from the Addis Ababa negotiations.

One top Nuba activist explains what by now should be obvious to anyone that has followed events in Sudan for even the last two or three years. Khartoum is misleading the international community into believing that it will negotiate in good faith. The regime is avoiding any tough resolution by the UN Security Council by buying time through the Addis Ababa negotiations. At the same time that they are negotiating, NCP military operations are continuing everywhere in the Nuba Mountains. They are killing Nuba and demolishing and destroying their homes, businesses, and churches, in order to wipe them out and replace them with Islamic Arabs.

In the 1990s, the National Congress Party (NCP) government of Sudan, then known as the National Islamic Front (NIF), attempted to exterminate the black African Christians, Muslims, and followers of traditional religions in South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains. The militia came obscenely close to accomplishing its goal. Over 2.5 million people died in those regions, and over 5 million were displaced from their homes in the genocidal jihad to establish Sudan as sub-Saharan Africa’s model Arab Islamic state. Now, less than a month before South Sudan officially separates from the Islamic Republic of Sudan and becomes Africa’s 54^th nation, ethnic cleansing has begun again in the Nuba Mountains, now known by its Arab name “South Kordofan.”

Beginning on June 5, 2011, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) of the NCP and the Popular Defense Forces (PDF), an Islamic militia comprised of Misseriya Arabs known as the “Al Qaeda of Sudan,” launched an attack, a war of extermination, in the Nuba Mountains. The attack began just two hours after the NCP signed a ceasefire agreement with northern representatives of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). In his June 16 testimony before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights, Ambassador Roger Winter, former State Department special representative on Sudan, told members of Congress that “throughout South Kordofan reports of gratuitous violence by SAF and their allies are now the norm.” Winter warned that once again, “Nuba are positioned for liquidation by Khartoum forces.”

The extent of the racism demonstrated by the Arab Islamic regime is breathtaking, but seems to evoke no outrage from those who condemn racism even when it does not exist. John Ashworth, advisor to the Sudan Ecumenical Forum and long-time Sudan expert, confirms that black African Nuba are being targeted by the northern military and Arab militias. “They are being hunted down for their ethnicity,” he said. Khartoum, the north’s stronghold, is attempting to completely replace the Nuba Mountains’ Nuba people with Misseriya Arabs. Professor Eric Reeves, author of A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide, provided the following grim details to The New Republic on June 20:

Another Nuba resident of Kadugli told Agence France-Presse that he had been informed by a member of the PDF that his forces had been provided plenty of weapons and ammunition, and a standing order: “He said that they had clear instructions: just sweep away the rubbish. If you see a Nuba, just clean it up. … He told me he saw two trucks of people with their hands tied and blindfolded, driving out to where diggers were making holes for graves on the edge of town.” There have been several more reports, so far unconfirmed, of mass graves in and around Kadugli.

Unless the U.S. government and the world community intervene, Khartoum will finish what it started two decades ago. Many fear this would just be the beginning. Already there have also been egregious attacks on another one of the disputed border areas, Abyei, and Southern Blue Nile State is also vulnerable to attack. Looking at Khartoum’s past actions against the Nuba demonstrates the lengths to which this regime will go to racially cleanse these lands of those to whom the territory belongs: the black African groups.

During the so-called civil war, both Christian and Muslim Nuba men fought bravely alongside the southerners in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The SPLA was fighting to defend the people who were targeted by Khartoum, and to resist the imposition of Sharia, or Islamic law, on all of the country. Winter explains that the SPLA was “attracted by the SPLM’s vision of a ‘New Sudan’ in which people from all walks of life, regardless of race or religion, could benefit equally.” As a result of its siding with South Sudan, the Sudanese government Islamists declared the Muslims of the Nuba Mountains “apostate” and issued a fatwa against them. Since they were no longer considered Muslim, they were targets for extermination, along with the Christians.

Sunday, June 5, the National Congress Party (aka the National Islamic Front) regime began waging war in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. But even as the northern government stronghold of Khartoum brazenly is attacking the Nuba Mountains (Kordofan to the Arabs) as well as other north/south border areas, such as the oil rich region of Abyei, it also continues to violate the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that it signed with the SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) by attacking South Sudan.

In attacking the South, Khartoum is not as brazen. Thinking that, in spite of the world’s track record of indifference, someone might actually hold it accountable for such an obvious CPA violation, Khartoum is using proxy militias to do its dirty work in the South. Attacks by these proxy militias are intended to destabilize the South, which is set to become Africa’s 54th nation less than a month from now on July 9, 2011.

One such proxy group creating havoc and misery in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria State is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA is a Northern Ugandan rebel group led by the now-middle-aged madman Joseph Kony. For over twenty-five years it has been abducting children, and so brutalizing them that they become mindless killing machines. It has used these children to kill hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, and more recently, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By 2006, the LRA had abducted over 50,000 children to make child soldiers and sex slaves.

The Sudan Human Security Baseline Assessment project warns “there remains no firm evidence of Sudanese government support for the group.” Maybe no “firm” evidence, but there is little doubt that it is Khartoum using the LRA to try to create a “failed state” in South Sudan. Escaped child soldiers and other LRA abductees frequently have reported seeing Sudan Armed Forces trucks during their time in captivity. The trucks were delivering food, weapons, and uniforms to LRA commanders. And in recent days, the LRA has teamed up with the Janjaweed, the killers in Darfur, receiving training and weapons at Islamic camps that have been set up there. For although some (usually secular elites, hostile to Christianity) refer to Kony as a “Christian,” his current belief system is a combination of the demonic and Islam. A New York Times reporter, C.J. Chivers, told of the various “spirits” that take possession of Kony.

Make Way Partners, a ministry to orphans and former child soldiers, last week reported that the LRA had attacked a village near their home for children on the South Sudan/Uganda border on Wednesday, June 1. Although they could not yet confirm hard numbers after receiving the news in a June 3 phone call, they knew that many had been wounded, some had been killed, and others had been captured. And they knew the details of horrific acts that have been repeated in villages all over East Africa since Kony began taking children in 1986, to ensure himself an ever-replenished army of boys and girls, some as young as five or six years old.

According to a Make Way Partners report, in this most recent of numerous LRA attacks, the rebels gathered all the children together and started killing people right in front of their eyes. They forced the children to kill their own parents. After the slaughter, the boys had to carry large metal barrels, and the girls had to fetch water to fill the barrels. They built fires around the barrels, and while the water was heating up, the children were forced to hack up their parents and fellow children’s bodies and throw their dismembered parts in the boiling water. After some time, the children were then made to eat the flesh. In this way the LRA commanders knew that the children were so traumatized that they would do anything. They would not try to run away because there was nowhere and no one left to which to run.

One South Sudanese official from Western Equatoria confirms that Khartoum is using the LRA to destabilize South Sudan. He says that they are targeting Western Equatoria State, which borders Uganda, because it is so fertile, and has the potential to be the breadbasket for the region. If it is destabilized, it will affect the food supply of the country, as well as lessening the possibilities of profitable commercial agriculture. Khartoum’s proxy militia is also targeting it because it is a strong Christian community.

In addition, ongoing LRA attacks would have a terrible impact on the people of Western Equatoria who have always been extremely self-sufficient. Even now people are abandoning their homes and attempting to find shelter in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps. This was what happened to the Acholi people in Northern Uganda, fleeing from LRA attacks. Almost 90% of the entire population of Acholi ended up deserting their farms, living in miserable IDP camps where they were still not adequately protected from LRA attacks.

The Equatorians do not want to be dependent on NGOs and the U.N. for their existence. At present they are trying to provide their own security with “arrow boys,” young men armed with nothing but homemade bows and arrows who protect against the well-armed LRA. They want the government to supply them with real arms, but there is little chance of that taking place if only for the reason that the Government of South Sudan is well aware that it is under scrutiny by the global community, and it is always held to a higher standard than the Islamists in Khartoum.

What is really needed to help the people of Western Equatoria State as Khartoum wages its proxy war against them via the LRA is the full implementation of U.S. law found in the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act” of 2010. In this legislation, which was heartily supported on both sides of the aisle, Congress required the U.S. government to develop a regional strategy supporting multilateral efforts to stop the LRA. The president was to report on the creation of that strategy within six months of the act’s passage.

In November 2010, the Obama administration presented its strategy. The four major objectives were: protect civilians, apprehend Kony and senior commanders, promote the defection and disarmament of LRA fighters (remember these were abducted children), and increase humanitarian access to the region. But according to the young activists of The Resolve, an advocacy organization working to end Kony’s reign of terror in East Africa and help rebuild the affected communities, the administration’s performance has been poor. Resolve recently published a report card, giving President Obama a B, two Cs, and two Ds for the implementation of the strategy.

In days in which the Republicans are striving to bring fiscal sanity to the United States and to cut the budget, this act may seem doomed. But many of the most fiscally conservative members of Congress are supporters, understanding that in addition to any moral imperative to act, our own security and the security of East Africa are intertwined more than most people think. Ending Khartoum’s proxy war on South Sudan would cost far less than our continual bombing of Libya, or our largess to President Mubarak’s successors in Egypt, or our unending jizya to the Palestinian Authority. And in this case, we actually would know that in helping the people of South Sudan we were helping true friends and allies in the fight for secular democracy and religious freedom.

Faith J. H. McDonnell directs The Institute on Religion and Democracy’s Religious Liberty Program and Church Alliance for a New Sudan, and is the author of Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children (Chosen Books, 2007).

“It’s time to speak out against hate,” declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a video introducing the State Department’s new “campaign to stop bigotry.” Created by the Obama administration’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Farah Pandith, and Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, 2011 Hours Against Hate will “promote respect across lines of culture, religion, tradition, class, and gender.” (All 23 current classifications of gender? Just wondering.) The campaign was launched at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, February 17, 2011.

At the OSCE, Pandith raised legitimate concerns about the defacing of mosques and of Jewish tombs, schools, synagogues, and kosher shops. But she also said that the “latest trends show growing movements that target ‘the other’ – be they immigrants, or religious and ethnic minorities, in the name of protecting the identity and ‘purity’ of their nation.” By 2011 Hours Against Hate standards, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s declaration that multiculturalism has failed is a dangerous targeting of “the other.” Pandith also noted that “permissibility of anti-Muslim speech is growing.” Really? A host of individuals facing charges, paying fines, and hiding from death threats would be surprised to hear this. But then it seems permissible to target “the other” of “the other.”

“Hate is hate, no matter who the target is,” 2011 Hours Against Hate intones. But some targets of hatred appear to be more equal than others. Perhaps because some leftist elites never got over their assumption that Christians are the persecutors, not the persecuted, they have difficulty speaking out against hatred aimed at those whom the mainstream media sees as hate-mongers.

On April 29, 2011, the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) co-sponsored a 2011 Hours Against Hate event. Hosted by George Washington University, the event was billed as a “Town Hall Discussion on U.S. efforts to combat discrimination and hatred against Jews, Muslims, and others.” Hopefully, the 100 million-plus Christians experiencing persecution around the world today, along with Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’i, etc., are included in “and others.” The IRF office should be reminded that advocates for persecuted Christians played a major role in its creation, along with the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Both were mandates of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).

Though outspoken in their denouncement of hurtful language, the folks at Foggy Bottom have been silent about the massacre of hundreds of Christians in Kaduna State, and several other states in northern Nigeria that took place after Nigeria’s federal elections last month. Angry that Christian President Goodluck Jonathan defeated Muslim candidate Muhammadu Buhari, Islamists in the Shariah-ruled north began rioting on Monday, April 18, 2011, after preliminary results of the April 16 election were announced. Soon newspapers featured grisly photos of charred bodies lining the streets. Hundreds of churches were burned and thousands of Christian-owned businesses destroyed, according to the Christian human rights group, Open Doors. And International Christian Concern reported that the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress was still “discovering more details of massacres that have been carried out in the hinterland.” Upwards of 40,000 Christians have been displaced in the past few weeks.

In its comments about the situation in Nigeria, the U.S. State Department disregarded the religious aspect of the post-election mayhem. Secretary of State Clinton’s April 19 statement on the elections (available in Arabic as well as English) “deplored violence,” but ignored the targeting of Christians. Clinton congratulated Goodluck Jonathan for winning Nigeria’s presidential election, and applauded “the people of Nigeria for their enthusiastic and orderly participation.” She did caution that the process was “far from perfect,” though, and called on the country’s Independent National Electoral Commission “to transparently review and take appropriate and transparent action on all allegations of “under-age” voters, violence and intimidation, ballot stuffing, and inordinately high turnout in some areas of the country.”

On Tuesday, April 12, 2011, an impassioned Senator Jim Inhofe waited for Senator Chuck Schumer to finish his latest harangue on the federal budget. Inhofe then took the floor to speak about the Ivory Coast, where Islamist Alassane Ouattara has taken control with the aid of a United Nations resolution and French military forces. Inhofe is known for his expertise on the continent within the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he serves as the second ranking member. But even more so, he is known for his love for Africa.

“I’m going to be offensive,”  the Republican from Oklahoma warned. He advised that he would offend not only the Ouattara regime, but the United Nations, France, and the U.S. State Department. All of these have sided with Ouattara, even as his supporters slaughter Ivory Coast Christians in a manner eerily reminiscent of the slaughter perpetrated by Kenya’s Odinga, another Islamist supported by the Obama administration. Inhofe was committing this particular offense for the fifth time in a few weeks. He reminded his fellow senators that in the days leading to the assault on Abidjan he had said that “this was going to happen” and that he had warned the UN and the State Department “that they would have blood on their hands.”

Previously, in an April 7 press statement, Inhofe countered a French Embassy “fact sheet” defending their military intervention in Abidjan as “designed to neutralize the heavy weapons used against civilian populations and UN personnel.” But Inhofe said that in the densely populated city of Abidjan, “the collateral damage caused by the attacks…has caused hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties.” He also expressed his concern for the hundreds of young supporters of President Gbagbo that had formed a human shield around the presidential palace, saying, “No one knows how many of these youths have been killed by UN and French forces.”

In his Senate floor speech, Inhofe revealed that he could not get the State Department to tell him how many innocent civilians had been killed by the French gunfire that “peppered the entire town” of Abidjan. Nor would the State Department condemn the use of “so-called peacekeeping forces that have caused countless deaths.” He read a statement from Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, who said he “was not pleased with the way the international community…had thrown its weight behind Alassane Ouattara” and that there should have been an investigation into election rigging. He also quoted the president of the African Union, Dr. Bingu Wa Mutharika, President of Malawi, who said that “Africa must manage its own affairs.”

Senator Inhofe displayed enlarged photos on an easel as he spoke. He showed Abidjan in flames. He showed Ouattara’s roving death squads, which, he said, have been “disappearing” supporters of Gbagbo. Such was definitely the case in the western Ivory Coast town of Duekoue, where a massacre of as many as 1000 pro-Gbagbo supporters, mostly Christians, took place between March 27 and 30. Even Human Rights Watch agreed with the senator about this, saying that “forces loyal to Ivory Coast’s democratically elected president have killed hundreds of civilians, raped his rival’s supporters and burned villages during an offensive to try to put Alassane Ouattara in office.”

One survivor, Philomene Houe, told the Associated Press that the first to be killed were the men and young boys, but that on Tuesday, March 29, “they started killing everyone.” She said that the Ouattara forces killed mothers and children, including shooting a young neighbor and her 6-month-old baby, and the elderly. By Wednesday, Houe said that Ouattara’s troops were using machetes. “They were slitting people’s throats, anyone — men, women, children,” she said.

At one of the latest stops on his ongoing national speaking tour, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, most widely known for his work with the proposed “Ground Zero Mosque,” visited UNC Chapel Hill. Speaking at the biennial Weil Lecture on American Citizenship, held in Hill Hall on Wednesday night, March 16, 2011, Rauf addressed “Unfinished Dreams: America, Religion and Citizenship.”

The dreams of the Cordoba Initiative-founder will not be finished until he has promoted Shariah in every major university in the United States. On the 17^th, Rauf spoke at Duke. In a few days time, he heads to Yale, where he will surely be embraced with open arms by the same intellectual elites who bared their naked dhimmi souls in a letter entitled naively, “Loving God and Neighbor Together.” This was a response to a letter issued by 138 Muslim scholars, including Imam Rauf, known as “A Common Word Between Us and You.”

Rauf received $20,000 plus expenses for speaking at Chapel Hill. Such honoraria should help make up for any penalties and lost revenue from the Union City tenements of which Rauf is a “slumlord,” in the words of the city’s mayor, Brian Stack. The Kuwait-born, thrice-wed Rauf is in great demand as the star of “moderate Islam.”

In his tailored suits and close-trimmed beard, Feisal Rauf poses quite an alternative to London rabble-rousing lawyer/jihadist, Anjem Choudary. To Americans, avid Shariah promoter Choudary, with traditional Islamic clothing and scruffy beard, is mostly a disturbing oddity. It is doubtful that an evening with Choudary would bring in the numbers of academics, Christian and Jewish leaders, and other devotees that have gathered reverently at the feet of the genteel Rauf.

Choudary’s demonstrations feature angry young British Muslims with signs that declare such sentiments as “British Soldiers Burn in Hell,” “Behead Those Who Insult Islam,” and the always popular “Jesus Will Destroy the Cross and Follow the Quran.” (When Islamists or their fellow travelers gush that “Jesus is even in the Quran!” they don’t tell you that he is there as a prophet of Islam, ready to do his part for the last and final jihad.)

At a 2008 meeting opposing the toughening of British anti-terrorism laws, Choudary raged, “As Muslims, we will not submit to any man-made law, any government, or any prime minister – Bush or Brown. . . We submit to Allah.” In the same speech he urged, “It is our religious obligation to prepare ourselves both physically and mentally and rise up against Muslim oppression and take what is rightfully ours. . . Jihad is a duty and a struggle and an obligation that lies upon the shoulders of us all. We will not rest until the flag of Allah and the flag of Islam is raised above 10 Downing Street.” When a burka-clad woman protested that Islam was about peace, Choudary responded that “Islam is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of submission. We need to submit to the will of Allah.” As many have said, at least he’s honest.

The radical Muslim leader, who receives government subsidies familiarly known as “the dole,” may have never had any intention of coming to Washington when he made the announcement that he would bring his campaign for Shariah to American shores. He may have just wanted to alert the faithful to a future goal and/or gin up more publicity for himself. Even a columnist in the leftist British newspaper The Guardian referred to Choudary as an “agent provocateur and master of the publicity stunt.” She added that the Department of Homeland Security “would have to be several sandwiches short of a picnic to let this guy in.”

In July 2002, I received an email from my friend Shahbaz Bhatti, the president of the Christian Liberation Front in Pakistan. He had just convened a meeting of all of Pakistan’s oppressed minorities in order to work more successfully for their human rights and religious freedom. The Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmedis, Baha’is, and others from all the provinces of Pakistan formed the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) and elected Bhatti as the chairman. “Dear Sister Faith,” he addressed me in his usual style as a fellow Christian, “Pakistan’s opinion makers were noting that the religious minorities of Pakistan had made history by forming an alliance for the first time in Pakistan’s history, which would empower them ‘to resolve contentious issues which have been confronting them for decades.’” He was upbeat and hopeful when I replied to his email to congratulate him. I wish I had sent him more emails over the years.

Nine years later, Wednesday morning, March 2, 2011, I received word of my friend’s brutal slaying by jihadist proponents of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. He was 42. Bhatti, a Catholic who became Pakistan’s Minister for Minorities in 2008, was the only Christian government minister in the country. Amid numerous death threats, he had been working for years to overturn the draconian blasphemy laws in the country’s Criminal Code. The cowardly gunmen ambushed him just outside his mother’s home in Islamabad and riddled his car with bullets, according to reports. Reports also indicate that the gunmen appeared to know Bhatti’s movements and to know that he was without security that morning. He had not been given a bullet-proof vehicle by the government, although he requested one.

Bhatti had battled tirelessly defending the rights of the minority peoples of Pakistan. He was a voice for the marginalized, such as the 4% of Pakistan’s population that are Christians, who are deprived of education, and whose only jobs are sweeping the dung off the streets, cleaning sewers, living in a brickyard building bricks, or other such work. He was an advocate for Pakistani Christian parents whose daughters have been abducted, raped, and forced to marry their Muslim rapists, and for those children’s Muslim employees have decided it is easier to murder them than to pay them.

But in his battle to reform his country’s blasphemy laws, Bhatti was not only an advocate for all of Pakistan’s non-Muslim ethnic groups, but for Muslim victims of the laws as well. In fact, the blasphemy laws have been used as a weapon against Muslims more frequently than against Christians and other minorities. Their application has been capricious, vindictive, and irrational. They are used as a weapon to settle personal arguments and business and land disputes. The laws, a component of the Shariah, make any perceived insult of Mohammed, the Koran, or Islam itself, a crime punishable by death. The accusation against an enemy is enough. Then the burden of proof is on them to defend themselves, amid the chaos of a half-crazed mob already screaming for their blood.

Evangelical Christians in Iran “have crafted a movement in the name of Christianity” in the same way that members of the Taliban “have inserted themselves into Islam like…parasite[s],” Tehran governor, Morteza Tamaddon recently declared. Tamaddon praised the arrest of over 70 Iranian Christians and vowed to identify and arrest more Christians, whom he labeled “deviant” and “corrupt,” according to a January 7 press statement from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

Elam, a ministry to the church in Iran, reported that armed, plain-clothed security forces broke into the homes of sleeping Christians from the evangelical house church and Armenian Christian communities early on the morning of December 26. Eleven of the twenty-five Christians known to be arrested were released after days of intense interrogation. The other fourteen remain in prison and have not been heard from since the arrest, although no official charges have been brought against them. Elam also reported that these Christians are probably being held in Interrogation Block 209 in the basement of Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. This is the common practice for dealing with Christians under arrest, according to Iranian sources. Reports of as many as 60 further arrests have also come from Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Urumieh. These Christian prisoners join others such as Pastor Vahik Abrahamian and his wife Sonia Keshish-Avanesian, and Arash Kermanjani and his wife Arezo Teymouri, who were arrested in September.

Long before the rest of the world began to get insomnia thinking about a “nuclear Iran,” Christians in the Islamic Republic were losing more than just sleep. For decades, Iranian Christians have lost their human rights, their freedom, and their lives. In the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s, Christian persecution in Iran was directed at the Anglican Church. In the 1990’s the Islamic regime targeted the broader church, murdering many top Christian leaders in an attempt to destroy Christianity in Iran. The danger continues today. Iranian Christians are persecuted, discriminated against, arrested, and even killed. But the Iranian church continues to grow, and reports surface of spiritual revival going on in Iran’s underground churches.

Soon after the Islamic Revolution, the Anglican Church in Iran was specifically targeted because so many Anglicans were converts from Islam. The Episcopal Church USA of the same era and other western expressions of Anglicanism, such as the Church of England, were enamored by religious pluralism. Evangelism was viewed with embarrassment or even hostility. But Anglicans in Iran welcomed Muslims who wanted to know Jesus. For this the church paid a high price.

The first post-Islamic Revolution martyrs were Anglicans. Islamists cut the throat of the Reverend Arastoo Sayyah, a Muslim convert, in his own office in Shiraz, southwest Iran, on February 19, 1979. In October of that same year, the Rt. Reverend Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, also a Muslim convert, and his wife, Margaret, miraculously survived an assassination attempt in their own bedroom. Dehqani-Tafti, the first Persian Anglican bishop in Iran, was forced into exile for the last ten years of his episcopate after the attack. But in May of 1980, the Dehqani-Taftis’ twenty-four year old son, Bahram, was shot to death on the street in Tehran. Bishop Dehqani-Tafti believed that the Islamic Revolution felt threatened because the Christians were building “a Persian church,” and “a strong and intelligent Christianity” complemented an authentic Persian culture more than Islam. Church property was confiscated, and other clergy, both Persian and British, were arrested and imprisoned. Many more of the Iranian clergy and church members were killed for their faith, and Anglican and other Christian churches in Iran were forced to go underground.

The Iranian regime attempted to intimidate and suppress the church, but persecution produced the opposite effect. Whereas before the Islamic Revolution there were only some 200-300 Iranian converts from Islam, by 1992 Iranian Christians International (ICI) reported that there were 13,300 Iranian converts from Islam around the world, with 6,700 living right in Iran.

As the church grew in the 1990’s, the regime began a concerted effort to eliminate all of the church’s top evangelical Christian leaders. Most were targeted by a death squad, widely believed to be operating on behalf of the official government, even to the level of the President, according to the analysis of testimony received by Middle East Concern, a human rights organization. Time in March 1994 reported that the decisions “to assassinate opponents at home or abroad” were made by “The Supreme National Security Council” chaired by the then President of Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Islamic law (Shari’a) became a weapon to eliminate influential Christians. One of Iran’s key evangelical leaders, Pastor Hossein Soodmand, was killed, not by a death squad, but through execution. In December 1990, Soodmand, 55, was sentenced to death in a Shari’a court in Mashad, northern Iran, charged with apostasy and with operating a Christian bookstore and an illegal church. He had converted from Islam in 1964 and had been an evangelist and Assemblies of God minister for twenty-four years.

Soodmand’s fellow pastors pleaded for clemency with the Dayro-E-Tasalamat (an Ombudsman/Muslim cleric whose title means “he who hears the cries of the oppressed”).

But it became increasingly clear that the Islamists in Iran were more interested in oppressing Christians than in hearing their cries. At the insistence of the Ombudsman, Pastor Soodmand was hanged on December 3, 1990 in Mashad, which in Farsi means “place of martyrdom.” He left behind a wife who going blind, and four children.

In late 1993, another pastor, Mehdi Dibaj, was sentenced to death for apostasy. Dibaj was born to a wealthy, influential Muslim family, but became a Christian as a teenager. An Assemblies of God minister, he was imprisoned for more than nine years for his faith. During those years he was beaten, subjected to “mock executions,” and spent two full years in solitary confinement in a tiny, unlit cell. In addition, his wife had been forced to divorce him and marry a Muslim.