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The Price of Silence is to be a Willing Accomplice

by Zahir Ebrahim

Response to 'The Price Someone Has to Pay'

“All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets”.

-- Vanilla or Chocolate, icing on the Devil's Cake “We Think the Price Is Worth It”

LESLIE STAHL: We have heard that half a million children have died [in Iraq due to sanctions]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.

Here is the contrite retraction:

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary Albright–the question I have always wanted to ask’ do you regret having said, when asked do you think the price was worth it-–

MADELINE ALBRIGHT: I have said 5,000 times that I regret it. It was a stupid statement. I never should have made it and if everybody else that has ever made a statement they regret, would stand up, there would be a lot of people standing. I have many, many times said it and I wish that people would report that I have said it. I wrote it in my book that it was a stupid statement.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it laid the ground work for later being able to target Iraq and make it more acceptable on the part of the Bush administration?

MADELINE ALBRIGHT: What? You’ve got to be kidding.

Right! Again – it's not murder “to the sound of trumpets”. I think by these standards, Adolph Eichmann might have been let go – except that the victims had become the victors. The only standard of retribution that was actually established at Nuremberg!

Thank you dear DW editor for digging out the picture of the dead Afghan baby – I would also like a name to go with it:



One cannot tell the difference between her, and the tens of thousands others in Iraq and Palestine. Visit only one of the Holocaust Museums: the Palestinians:



The unforgivable crime being, it isn’t something that happened in the last century, and for which the distinguished Director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, and member of CPD, still daily issues the curse:

“I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent, and Creation itself, Creation and those who perverted and distorted it. I feel like screaming, howling like a madman so that that world, the world of the murderers, might know it will never be forgiven.” (Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate)

In this crime which is happening as we speak before our very eyes, the perpetrators as well as the spectating bystanders, are guilty, each by a measure, which the victims suffering under the jackboots of the New Nazis, in either case don’t forgive.

Can God of the Muslims?

“For each (such person) there are (angels) in succession, before and behind him: they guard him by command of Allah. Verily never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves (with their own souls). But when (once) Allah willeth a people’s punishment, there can be no turning it back, nor will they find, besides Him any to protect.” (Qur'an 13:11)

Are we to escape such a punishment, duly apportioned by respective measure of course, for our own inaction? For a laziness that remains incomprehensible? For our making excuses of “Allah Chala Raha Hey” - god is running the world?

And when we only come to the aid of the beleaguered for fear of our own chastisement, rather than an innate empathy for the fellow man as a categorical and moral imperative, what does that tell about us?

When Solon, the well known of the seven prominent lawgivers of Athens, a full millennium before the advent of the Prophet of Islam, was asked

'which city he thought was well-governed, he said: “That city where those who have not been injured take up the cause of one who has, and prosecute the case as earnestly as if the wrong had been done to themselves.” Accordingly, he allowed anyone to take up the cause of a poor man who had been injured.'

The condemnation for our being largely “indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent” cannot be more unequivocal, more timeless, more universal.

The price of our silence is to be a willing accomplice in the murder of children.

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