Today is the Amnesty Internationals Day of Action for Darfur, which coincides with United Nations Day.

Here’s the deal:

Earlier this year, with your help, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) agreed to send 26,000 AU/UN peacekeepers into Sudan to help bring peace to a war torn region. A well-trained, fully-resourced peacekeeping force will bring much-needed stability and security to a land of over 2 million displaced people. However, at this point, support is only a promise, not a guarantee.

It falls to us to ensure that the UNSC fully implements their plan of action in order to bring peace to Darfur. Without swift action, civilians will continue to be pawns in violent war games. The killing, rape and abduction will not stop until order is restored and accountability enforced.

Remember to sign the Global Petition for Darfur by October 24th and your signatures will help send the message to the White House that the violence in Darfur will not be tolerated.

Thank you to the over 466,000 people who have already signed the petition, including the members of the 400,000 Faces for Darfur Facebook group.

These videos speak for themselves.

Now, if for some reason you have no clue what I’m talking about¹ you should check these links:

The Save Darfur Coalition

Amnesty International: Crisis in Darfur

Darfur: An Unforgetable Hell on Earth

Coalition for Darur

Sudan Watch

Darfur: A Genocide We can Stop

Here are ways that you can take action:

Sign the Global Petition to End the Violence in Dafur

Write to the White House and put pressure on them to step up and help stop this atrocity.

Contact your Congressperson and let them know how you feel about their neglect.

We must remember the great words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

and

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people

To sit back and ignore this crisis because “it’s not happening here” does a grave injustice to the cause of anti-oppression work. If we allow the U.S. government and ourselves to sit back and ignore this crisis, we might as well sit back and ignore the crises that happen here as well. As long as oppression and hate and genocide are allowed anywhere in the world, it will be allowed and justified at home.

But on the other hand, I feel that I also must remind that it is often easier to stand against oppression that isn’t happening in your own back yard. It’s a two-way street, with a cul-de-sac up the road and one of those three-way intersections a half a mile away where you have to take a left exit to go where you want. It ain’t always easy. Stand up against world-wide oppression, but don’t think that gives you a pass to ignore what is going on in your own neighborhood. You will be tired. You might also find yourself confused at times. But you won’t be nearly as tired and confused as those slaves were after an 18-hour day in the fields.

So, stand up against the genocide in Darfur right now not because it makes you feel good or like you’ve done your good deed for today, but because you hate the worldwide subjugation of women, the continued denigration of people of color in the U.S. and across the world, the notion that “gay=stupid,” the idea that to be disabled is to be inferior, the idea that transsexuals are abominations, the idea that Jews are only in it for the money, the idea that “your” religion is better than “their” religion and so you have the right to kill “them” off, that the U.S. equals “god’s plan for the world.”

I could go on and on, but I hope you get my point:

It won’t work like that.

1. and I must say if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should be very ashamed of yourself [↩]