If not us, who? If not now, when?

Haaretz : Prof. Irwin Cotler is a member of the Canadian Parliament and critic for human rights, and is a former justice minister and attorney general of Canada.

For the enduring lesson of history is that the genocide of European Jewry occurred not only because of the ideology of hatred, but also because of crimes of indifference and inaction. Indeed, we have witnessed in our own days an appalling indifference and inaction, which took us down the road to the unspeakable - the genocide in Rwanda. Unspeakable, because this genocide was preventable. No one can say that we did not know. We knew and we did not act. We know what is happening in Darfur and we have yet to act. The moral injunction of 'never again' has become 'yet again' - again and again. We know that: More than 450,000 Darfuris have died in this genocide by attrition. The media have been repeating for two years now the mantra that 200,000 have died - but the recent evidence of 450,000 dead is comprehensive and compelling. More importantly, this is not a matter of abstract statistics; behind every statistic is a human being with a name, a family and an identity.