April 24th is the 94th Anniversary of The Armenian Genocide. On this day we honor those who perished in the first genocide of the 20th century. The numbers are so huge and the events so long ago that it is increasingly hard to put a face to such suffering -that...

April 7th 1994 was the day the Rwandan genocide officially began. Over the following 100 days over 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutus were murdered in the swiftest bloodbath in the history of genocide. Yet as one survivor recently explained to me: "if they had had gas chambers none of...

It was a surprise to hear Governor Palin so vehemently declare "Never again" during last night's debate and instantly realize that she was neither referencing the Holocaust (despite her protestations of support for Israel), nor the genocide in Darfur (despite her protestations of support for divestment from Sudan), but Wall...

There hasn't been enough coverage in the news and on blogs about what is going on right now, as I write this, in Zimbabwe. Suffice it to say that some of the most egregious assaults to human rights, political rights and principles of civil society and democracy are occurring there...

Hoping that Obama's win in South Carolina and the Kennedy endorsement would put some air between him and the Dynamic Duo I took the risk of checking the online bookie sites for a reality check. These are gentlemen who not unlike the pollsters make a living from being right at...

I just received a cold call to raise money for the campaigns of congressional Democrats. A young man named Donald started to read from a prepared script, I listened for a few moments until he explained that the legislation the Democrats wanted to pass through the House would "make things...

Four years into the conflict in Darfur, when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, they have. It's been a bad few weeks in one of the world's most troubled zones: the Sudan/Chad border. Consider these developments:

- Inside Sudan the government has been attacking established camps of internally displaced...

Darfur Peace talks, hosted by the ever more fascinating Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, are slated to begin Sunday. Bizarrely Gaddafi characterized the four-year-old genocide as " a conflict over a camel." However the talks are in jeopardy before they begin.

Last week the government of Sudan actually shelled one...

As the administration is asking Congress for an additional $190 billion for the Iraq war, why should we listen to a lone voice? The email I have just received from an Iraqi friend, S, who was working for a U.S. aid agency in Iraq was particularly haunting to me because...

August 8th, 2007. The countdown has begun. A year from today the Beijing Olympics will open. No doubt amid hoopla, fanfare, dangerous smog levels and with or without their celebrated artistic advisor Steven Spielberg. These games will be tainted with blood unless the Chinese Government moves swiftly to reverse the...

When Ishmael M. crossed the Sinai desert with his wife and four children and paid a smuggler to get them into Israel, he hardly expected to be addressing an audience of film-goers at The Jerusalem Film Festival 8 days later.

When our film The Devil Came On Horseback was invited...

Two seemingly unrelated events got me thinking this week: Jack Kevorkian's release from jail and the firing of David Rubenstein as Executive Director of The Save Darfur Coalition.

Does advocacy in America just pay lip service to free speech and democracy or can it really achieve change? Is it fated...

Earlier today President Bush made a long-anticipated announcement of new sanctions against Sudan in an effort to staunch the slow death of Darfur. He declared "For too long the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in the bombing, murder and rape...

Not On Our Watch, co-authored by actor Don Cheadle and Africa expert John Prendergast is a sugarcoated pill for those wishing to understand the genocide in Darfur. It is also a call to collective responsibility. Part diary,...

In his most recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof argues that what is needed to galvanize President Bush and the public to do something about the genocide in Darfur is a suffering puppy.

Kristof referenced a number of scientific studies that explore how and why decent...

The film I have been working on since I first visited Darfur in March 2005, The Devil Came on Horseback, has its New York Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival today.

This should be cause for celebration, but how can we celebrate when the genocide it chronicles still rages?...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon opened the exhibition 'Lessons From Rwanda' at the UN HQ in New York last night. In his speech he made two significant announcements about the UN's policy on genocide but failed to mention the elephant in the room.

"Lessons From Rwanda' was created by The...

A few weeks ago I went into the gourmet food store Eli's Manhattan and bought what I imagined were the most expensive pigs in blankets in the whole world -- Eli Zabar's own signature ones at $.99 apiece. That was until last night when I went to an Obama for...

Austin, TX.-- Something good came out of the Texas Capitol yesterday: a unanimous vote cleared the proposed Darfur Divestment Bill (# 247) through the senate committee stage. As Rep. Corbin Van Arsdale, (R-Tomball) explained, it was a signal to the world that even Republicans in the President's conservative home state...

Four years into the conflict, the US State Department yesterday called the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan "the world's worst human rights abuse of 2006". As if that were not bad enough, we wake up today to learn that 2 African Union peacekeepers assigned to keep a non-existent...