“Rescue those being led away to death;
hold back those staggering toward slaughter.
If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who guards your life know it?
Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?”—Proverbs 24:11-12, NIV
The sage in Proverbs 24:11-12 warns us to deliver those being taken away to death, and that we cannot protest, “We did not know!” God sees the hearts, he warns, and will judge us as we deserve.
As smoke billowed from the furnaces of extermination camps, perhaps many Germans genuinely did not know what was being burned. But Hitler had already declared his plans for the Jewish people before coming to power. After the murder of one-third of the world’s Jewish population and concurrent genocide against Roma people and others, the world cried, “Never again.”
The Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s had reason to believe they would get away with genocide. After all, previous mass murderers maintained impunity so long as they remained politically powerful. Germans had massacred and driven to their deaths tens of thousands (as many as 100,000) of Namibians in the twentieth century’s first decade. In 1915 and the years following, Ottomans killed and drove to their deaths perhaps a million Armenians; today Turkey is one of the only nations to deny this genocide (just as some in Japan have refused to admit the brutal rape of Nanjing). This is not even mentioning eighteenth- and nineteenth-century atrocities such as the transatlantic and Arab slave trades, genocide against Native American communities, and the like.
Some insisted that the world must never again allow such atrocities, and some (not least many Jews) have worked actively to speak against them. For the most part, however, international protestations reek of hypocrisy. More than four decades ago, a friend of mine informed a major media correspondent about genocide in Cambodia, of which my friend had learned through missionary friends. “That’s not going on, or we would know,” the journalist insisted confidently, in my presence. My friend had photographs, but the journalist didn’t believe him—at least not in time to do anything practical about it.
After 9/11, U.S. media rightly focused on the tragic event that claimed over 3000 lives and terrified the nation. But ironically, I was already anxious over another jihad which began a few days earlier in northern Nigeria. In the year following 9/11, because of mercenaries killing civilians in the name of jihad, over 3000 Nigerians died in Plateau State, a place where I had lived for some four months. Perhaps 100,000 more people were at least temporarily displaced, many homes burned, and much of the next year’s harvest destroyed; the state’s main economic center was also burned to the ground. Some of my colleagues informed me of minister friends of theirs who were targeted and hacked to pieces. With very few exceptions (Christianity Today being a notable one), media in the U.S. offered barely a peep. I pleaded with someone to cover it, but the report a contact conveyed from a sympathetic but apparently powerless news anchor was, “If it doesn’t address U.S. fuel prices, the U.S. economy or U.S. security, we can’t cover it. Viewers aren’t interested.”
That should hardly surprise us: while we rightly emphasized over 3000 people murdered in cold blood on 9/11, our media rarely commented on the fact that globally, in the preceding decades, ten times that many children were dying daily from malnutrition and preventable diseases.
The 1993 Rwanda genocide took much of the western world by surprise, but not people in Central Africa. Shortly after the Rwandan genocide of 1993, armies shifted to neighboring countries, destabilizing the entire region. (As Christians, we cannot dismiss what happened there as irrelevant to us: most of the people in this area belong to churches, many of them evangelicals.) When our media belatedly reported the death of half a million Rwandans, leaders vowed never to let it happen again—all the while ignoring that it had never stopped.
A news magazine to which I subscribed at the time gave U.S. news plus the antics of Hollywood figures, but an estimated three million people had died from war in the Congo region before the newsmagazine gave it even half a page. Had 1 percent of that many deaths occurred in a largely white nation (or a nation more central to the U.S. economy), it would have been front-page news. (It rightly was so in the case of Kosovo.) What can we call that but racism? And what can we call such outlets’ lamentations of racism but hypocrisy?
Because of coltan and other valued minerals in the region, fighting continued, until some five million deaths, both by direct violence and by malnutrition and disease among the displaced, made it the deadliest global conflict since World War II. My friend Médine wrote me a desperate plea for prayer before war destroyed her town in the smaller Congo. She holds a Ph.D. from Paris, but she and her family nearly died from disease, surviving as refugees in the forest for 18 months (the story told in our book Impossible Love). Most of the children from her home neighborhood died. Médine and I now married, but she could have become one of the faceless statistics.
African and European media did a better job reporting war in the larger Congo, but until Nightline courageously aired the news they barely registered in the U.S. media. One of my wife’s brothers witnessed helicopters associated with the French oil company ELF attack civilian villages; though international courts and media have since reported it, no one in the U.S. would have believed my wife at the time.
After that the world witnessed genocide in Darfur in the Sudan, by ISIS against Yazidis and others, and so forth. Jihadist groups continue genocidal campaigns in northern Nigeria and northern Mozambique, among other places. We could add repression of Uighurs, Myanmar’s renewed military regime, persecution of minority religions in North Korea and other states, and the list goes on. Many countries that recognize such crimes simply engage in hand-wringing. “Never again,” the world cries, while murder continues relatively unabated.
The Bible warns against both individual and corporate sin. On the corporate level, sin and selfishness are reflected as racism and nationalism (the supremacy of “my” group versus others’). Shackled by such national self-interest, our nation is not likely to find the political will to work for justice without prophetic voices exposing the needs. (I do not mean agendas of the left or the right. I mean standing with God for justice, whether justice for unborn Americans or for hungry children in East Africa.)
Western politicians are moved by public outcries, and public outcries are generated by media exposure. Meanwhile, U.S. media must compete in a consumer market; consumer ratings determine which networks stay in business. This sometimes comes down to us getting to hear what the media think we want to hear. Which brings us back to the question: What do we want to hear?
Do we have Christ’s heart for the world? Do we want to know the needs in underreported areas? If so, by letters to editors, letters to sponsors, and other means already available to us we need to let the media and others know that we do care. In the final analysis, Proverbs is right: we cannot tell God that we did not know—only that we did not want to know.
–an earlier version was published in the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer (2003), and Prism, the magazine for Christians for Social Action (in 2004). Genocides have continued since then.
