GENEVA, July 12 - The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch urged United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to urgently speak out against the African-backed bid by Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court, for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Last week, the U.S. failed to get the council to pass a condemnation of what it said was a Syrian candidacy for 2014.

The NGO UN Watch also called on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the EU’s Catherine Ashton to denounce and fight against Sudan’s candidacy.

“Electing Sudan to the U.N. body mandated to promote and protect human rights worldwide is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

UN Watch already heads an international campaign of MPs and human rights groups opposing the candidacies of Venezuela and Pakistan.

Several years ago, a trend started of African refugees crossing the Egyptian border from Sinai into Israel to seek asylum from the atrocities in Darfur. What started out as a small number of men, women and children fleeing from the machetes of the Janjaweed and violent fundamentalists toseek a better life elsewhere, turned into an organized industry of human trafficking. In return for huge sums of money, sometimes entire life savings paid to Bedouin “guides,” these refugees are promised to betransported from Sudan , Eritrea , and other African countries through Egypt and the Sinai desert, into the safe haven of Israel.

We increasingly hear horror stories of the atrocities these refugees suffer on their way to freedom. They are subject to, and victims of extortion, rape, murder, and even organ theft, their bodies left to rot in the desert. Then, if lucky, after surviving this gruesome experience whose prize is freedom, when only a barbed wire fence separates them from Israel and their goal, they must go through the final death run and try to evade the bullets of the Egyptian soldiers stationed along the border.

Egypt’s soldiers are ordered to shoot to kill anyone trying to cross the border OUT of Egypt and into Israel. It’s an almost nightly event.

For those who finally get across the border, the first people they encounter are Israeli soldiers, people like me and those in my unit, who are tasked with a primary mission of defending the lives of the Israeli people. On one side of the border soldiers shoot to kill. On the other side, they know they will be treated with more respect than in any of the countries they crossed to get to this point.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C. in 1996, Farrakhan was asked about reports of slavery in Sudan. According to the New York Times, he challenged them: “If slavery exists, go … to Sudan, and come back and tell the American people what you found.” The Baltimore Sun sent two reporters to Sudan. They found and liberated slaves and published a special four-page insert in the paper’s weekend edition. Farrakhan refused their request for an interview and pretty much went radio silent on slavery issues until fairly recently.

Farrakhan has always said that slavery in Sudan and Mauritania was a Zionist lie. Last week, South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, demanded the liberation of 30,000 slaves still held by Arabs in the North. Minister Farrakhan, South Sudan is not a Jewish nation. You met with South Sudanese leaders in the spring of 1994. They begged you for support, and to help free the slaves. They wrote that you told them, “When it comes to a choice between religion or the dignity of the black man I will choose my skin.” You betrayed them. Why?

Why has Farrakhan decided in recent days that he can safely replay his “Jews were the slavers” card? I believe that the anti-Israel/anti-Semitic climate on California’s campuses emboldened him to regurgitate the attack. UC President Mark Yudof condemned Farrakhan’s message but defended his rights to free speech. I wonder what Mr. Yudof would do if a Ku Klux Klan speaker asked for the same rights and a platform on his free-speech campus.

Meanwhile, I encourage the student body to visit our website at www.iabolish.org to learn about the plight of modern day slaves, especially those in Sudan and Mauritania, where political correctness and fear have blocked human rights activists — who should be the slaves’ most vociferous champions — from taking moral action to set them free.

Entitled “In Israel, No Welcome Mat For African Migrants,” the Dec. 30 piece focuses almost entirely on criticism of Israeli policy. The broadcast opens with a reference to the migrants’ long and costly trek before reporter Sheera Frankel coolly introduces the antagonist: “Israel, however, is far from laying down the welcoming mat.”

NPR’s Sheera Frenkel: The last step [of an Israeli politician’s plan] is the repatriation of refugees who are already in Israel. A step Israel took - for the first time - earlier this month when it removed 150 South Sudanese who agreed to leave voluntarily in exchange for some pocket money and a flight home in time to vote in the upcoming referendum on the region’s independence.

Olivier, however, questions just how voluntary their removal was.

Congolese migrant Oscar Olivier: They’ve been pushed into corner. They’ve been put in the situation where that one was the only solution to them.

It is not clear why NPR chose Olivier to be its authoritative source on the Sudanese repatriation while neglecting to expose listeners to officials familiar with the case, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Israel who has made clear the “removal” was indeed voluntary. A Dec. 14 Associated Press story about the 150 migrants notes:

The Sudanese left willingly, according to officials.

“We are aware that people expressed interest to go back,” said William Tall, an official from the UN refugee agency. “I can confirm that no coercion was involved in their going back.”

Hundreds of African refugees have been released from captivity in the Sinai Peninsula and allowed to cross from Egypt into Israel, shortly after a CNN documentary aired detailing the horrendous conditions the migrants face.

The report, “Death in the Desert,” which was first broadcast on CNN International on November 5, showed evidence that African refugees, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, were being held captive by Bedouin human traffickers in Sinai, who try to extort massive sums of money from the refugees’ families for their release.

While in captivity the refugees are enslaved, many of the women raped and some even killed. The CNN crew even found evidence that some victims had organs extracted, a practice known as organ harvesting, and were later found dead in the desert.

Shortly after the documentary aired, more than 600 African refugees were released in Sinai, says Hamdi al Azzazy, an activist for the New Generation Foundation for Human Rights who has worked for years in the region, fighting to improve the plight of the African refugees.

His account was backed up by a press release from the EveryOne Group, an Italian non-governmental organization, which has also been raising public awareness about the refugees.

It said that after the CNN documentary aired “many chief-traffickers were afraid of being pursued by the authorities and on Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 decided to release most of the groups of refugees they were holding prisoner.”

The Sinai Desert is a vast and lawless area where the Egyptian state has virtually no presence and it is nearly impossible to fully verify the accounts.

CNN has contacted a chief of the Sawarka Bedouin tribe. Some rogue members of this tribe have been implicated in the imprisonment of African refugees and in the organ harvesting scheme.

The chief, who has asked not to be named said: “I heard the Sawarka’s members involved in this dirty business released more than 600 Africans without them having to pay the ransoms and sent them to the Israeli border due to pressure from the intelligence service, including hundreds who were freed from the house of the assassinated dealer in Nekhel. He has been selling their organs and they found lots of weapons.”

Simon Deng, a former South Sudanese slave in Islamist Northern Sudan, gave the following speech at Durban Watch Conference in New York on Sept. 22nd.

He passionately refuted the malicious ‘Zionism is Racism’ canard and pointed out that it is the Arab Islamists who have engaged in the ethnic cleansing of millions of Sudanese, both Muslim and Christian.  He further notes that Israel is the ultimate destination of Sudanese refugees, not Egypt -who has attacked and oppressed them.

Simon Deng at Stand With Israel Event, UN 9-22-11

What follows is Simon Deng’s prepared remarks  before the Durban Watch Conference:

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-Israelismeven 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.

Simon Deng, a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, is an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist. Simon Deng has this piece in the Jewish Advocate.
“Disappearance of Bishop Tutu
Late last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Boston’s Old South Church at a conference on “Israel Apartheid.” Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.
The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families – even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa. …
Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud. …
Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?
Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela’s freedom, we Africans – all over Africa – joined in. Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.
Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans – I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.
So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?”

What I find most disheartening about the Darfur crisis is that the facts are so clear. There’s no torturous debate here about “two sides of the story.” Like a passionate American politician once said: “The government of Sudan has pursued a policy of genocide in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have been killed in Darfur, and the killing continues to this very day.”

That passionate politician was candidate Barack Obama in 2008.

Three years and thousands of killings later, the tragedy continues. Where is Obama now? Sure, I know — he can’t tackle every crisis that comes along. But if the president can harp about the plight of the Palestinians — by far the most coddled victim group in history — why can’t he harp about a cause where 400,000 innocents have been slaughtered? If the “killing continues to this very day,” doesn’t that make the Darfurian cause at least as “urgent” as the Palestinian cause?

And where are all those human rights activists who’ve made a fetish out of bashing Israel but can’t seem to get agitated at the notion of murderous African dictators drowning their people in misery?

Are Darfurian victims not “cool” enough because they don’t throw rocks or look like Che Guevara? Are the bad guys not bad enough because they’re not Jews or Israelis?

Imagine being one of those African victims and watching the international news one night. Imagine how it must feel to see that your genocide is being virtually ignored, while the Palestinian cause has become the darling mission of the world and a media and U.N. obsession.

How can you not conclude that Darfurian blood is cheap?

How can one ever call that “progressive”?