Friday, December 8, 2006

Darfur: "Not On My Watch" Wrote Bush - Let's Hold Him to It

The following comes from a book review in the journal of the Hoover Institution, about as right-wing a think-tank as they come:

"Last fall, after the Atlantic Monthly excerpted [Sandra] Power’s chapter on Rwanda [in a book called “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide], a National Security Council aide sent a memo to President Bush summarizing her argument and detailing the Clinton administration’s reluctance to act. President Bush’s four-word response to this failure to stop genocide, which he jotted in the memo’s margins, could not have been clearer: “not on my watch.”

Would that Dubya's actions kept pace with his margin scribblings.

The Save Darfur Campaign is calling for a "Weekend of Prayer for Darfur" this weekend.

Please check out their website with an eye toward doing whatever you can do to get the president to be a man of his word.

Why is confronting genocide in the vital interests of the United States?

Here I defer to the German theologian Martin Niemoller, who wrote of the Holocaust:

In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me—and by that time no one was left to speak up.

1 comment:

imaginaryconversations said...

Whew, you scared the shit out of me with the beginning of this post.