Why? In 1983, at the height of apartheid, with millions of white South Africans silent witnesses to unspeakable atrocities, I asked my dad why they wouldn’t let Mandela out of prison if that would stop the killing all around us. I was fifteen. My dad told me I would be better off to keep my mouth shut, that I could go to prison myself for speaking out against the government. A year ago, I visited Berlin and went on a Third Reich bike tour through the city, fascinated as I have always been by how the world allowed a maniac like Hitler to achieve the power he did. As the tour guide told us of life in Berlin and Europe (and the rest of the world) at the time, while hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the Holocaust awaited their fate, I asked why the world didn’t cry out at the obvious injustice, and how it could be that despite the atrocities committed, the world continued to function and have dinner parties and fashion shows while hundreds of thousands of families were being displaced and forcibly removed from their homes, and millions killed, only because they were Jewish. In response to my question, the tour guide asked me what I did to stop the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Rwanda in the mid-nineties when more than a million Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu majority, when the women were raped and mimed before being killed in front of their children. What did I do? What did I say? Nothing. Not a thing. I passively followed the genocide on TV news, and did or said nothing. And three months later, a million people were dead. And I am deeply ashamed that I kept my mouth shut. This is the reason Ross Levin why I speak out now about the atrocity of the Israeli military bombing a school yesterday afternoon filled with terrified, innocent Palestinian civilians who neither support Hamas nor are they military, killing a dozen people. I understand full well I am not exactly endearing myself to the masses right now, but I feel that posting sunsets and what I had for lunch are less important at the moment. I do not claim to have the answers, and as I have said before, of course I know there is much more to this than I can possibly have knowledge of. But I know the difference between right and wrong. I felt it when I was sixteen and I am feeling it again now, at forty-six. That’s why.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:37:03 +0000
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