Why Does 'Never Again' Keep Happening Again?

Why Does 'Never Again' Keep Happening Again?


Genocide is the systematic and deliberate attempt to extinguish a race, ethnic group, social group or religion.

After the most well documented and systematic act of genocide in recorded history, the so-called final solution to the Jewish problem perpetrated by the death cult known as the Third Reich, the surviving Jewish people adopted the motto, “Never again.” They had been the target of countless pogroms throughout history and this was their vow, this is their pledge to themselves: “Never again!”

This seems to have been ratified by the victors of World War Two at the Nuremburg Trials where they convicted anyone they could find who was even remotely responsible and convicted them of crimes against humanity. It has been ratified over and over again since by war crime trials before the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Never again! As a world we have all affirmed it. Genocide is a crime against humanity and it cannot, it will not be tolerated, and yet never again keeps happening again.

Recently we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps by allied forces in WWII. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder wherever they happened to be world leaders once again joined together to pledge, “Never again!”

Yet here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave at a recent commemoration of an earlier act of genocide by the Ottoman Turks against the Armenians during World War One our Mr. O wouldn’t use the word genocide for fear of angering the Turks. This is like not saying Holocaust for fear of offending those hyper-sensitive Schicklgrubers.

Even left-leaning CNN reporter Jake Tapper noted, “For the sixth year in a row, President Barack Obama has broken his promise to the Armenian community, made when seeking their votes as a senator and a presidential candidate, to use the word ‘genocide’ to describe the massacre of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.”

In an even stronger condemnation Armenian National Committee of America executive director Aram Hamparian said, “It’s a sad spectacle to see our President, who came into office having promised to recognize the Armenian Genocide, reduced to enforcing a foreign government’s gag-rule on what our country can say about a genocide so very thoroughly documented in our own nation’s archives.” Mr. Hamparian continued, “We remain profoundly disappointed that he has, once again, retreated from his own promises and fallen short of the principled stand taken by previous presidents.”

Perhaps it is this politically correct mindset on the part of our leaders that allows these great crimes to continue. It often seems that no one has the courage to say anything until after the fact. Even when our 24-hour news cycle provides facts, pictures and even pleas from the victims in the midst of a long and gruesome train of genocidal atrocities.

According to history.com the Rwandan Genocide:

“From April to July 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Begun by extreme Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with staggering speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and many more displaced from their homes. The RPF victory created 2 million more refugees (mainly Hutus) from Rwanda, exacerbating what had already become a full-blown humanitarian crisis.”
The left-leaning and usually dependable disseminator and supporter of government policies, PBS, had this to say about America’s response to the Rwandan Genocide: “From the very start, the United States resisted intervention in Rwanda because of national interests, higher priorities, and domestic and bureaucratic politics. Moreover, during the three months of killing, the U.S. blocked several opportunities, short of intervention, that could have diminished the slaughter.”

According to Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, “There was only one major editorial in The New York Times, one major editorial in the Washington Post for the entire duration of this genocide. These editorials were editorials that lamented the carnage, that used the word ‘genocide’ even to describe the carnage, but that never dared to suggest that the United States be involved in stopping it.” We stood by and did nothing when never again happened again.

Today there is a massive multi-country genocide against Christians in the Mideast being perpetrated by fanatic followers of the religion of peace and once again America says nothing.

Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Editor for Breitbart, said recently, “[T]he West has done much to stand up for Muslims in the past two decades. Whether it was to save the Muslims in Bosnia or the Albanians, Kosovars, and Muslims in Serbia, it is now time for a humanitarian operation to save the remaining Christians in Iraq. It is time for the American people and our representatives to do something for our co-religionists remaining in the Middle East.”

According to Fox News, “Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city and was once the home of Iraq’s most vulnerable and persistent Christian community, tracing their lineage nearly to the time of Christ. Now there are no Christians left. All of this happened under the watchful eye of West, and while you’d hope that the humanitarian threat alone would have motivated the West to act, you would be certain that Mosul’s strategic importance would do so. Neither proved true.”

Fox News also comments, “The examples of Western inaction are unending. At present, as many as 300 Assyrian Christians remain in captivity having been kidnapped two weeks ago as ISIS assaulted ten Assyrian, Christian villages along the Khabour River in Syria. That assault was conducted by a group of ISIS fighters traveling in a convoy of more than 40 clearly marked ISIS vehicles directly toward these vulnerable, Christian villages. How is it possible that Western satellites didn’t spot a forty-car ISIS convoy in route to unarmed Christian villages in Syria, and if it was spotted how is that it wasn’t destroyed?”

The recently displaced archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, said, “People in the West say ‘they don’t know.’ How can you not know? You either support ISIS or you must have turned off all the satellites. I am sorry to say this, but my pain is big.”

Recently Breitbart’s National Security Editor and one of the world’s leading experts on asymmetric warfare, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, on Breitbart News Saturday, hosted by Editor in Chief Alex Marlow on Sirius XM Patriot Radio, also said, “When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003, there were at least 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Over the last ten years, significantly in the last few months with the emergence of ISIS, that figure has dropped to about 400,000. In a region where Christians predate Muslims by centuries, over one million Christians have been killed or have had to flee because of jihadi persecution, while America is basically standing by and watching.”

According to Catholic Online, “A massive humanitarian crisis is developing as the newly-formed Islamic State which spans Syria and Iraq, consolidates power. True to their militant, fundamentalist Islamic charter, the state has ordered Christians to convert or die and given them a deadline by which to flee. Those choosing to leave are not allowed any possessions.”

For Christians in the region, they face extermination. Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, head of the Catholic Church in Iraq, has called for “all who have a living conscience in Iraq and all the world to aid the victims of the Islamic State. The next step for Christians in Mosul appears to be genocide.”

Bishop Yousif Habash, a prominent Iraqi human rights activist living in the United States, has called upon the West to step in and prevent the pending genocide. He pointed out that the West stepped in to stop genocides of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, so he believes they can also prevent genocide in Iraq. However, any involvement there will require a substantial military commitment and so far President Obama has appeared entirely unwilling to commit that kind of force.

Robert Fisk of the Independent catalogs some of the other locations and instances of this inhuman attack upon Christians throughout the Muslim world: the enslavement of Christian women in Iraq, Christian children sold as slaves, the burning of Mosul’s ancient churches or the destruction of the great Armenian church of Deir el-Zour that commemorated the genocide of its people in 1915, the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls, the latest massacre in Kenya where the numbers of Christian dead and the cruelty of their sectarian killers is of epic, Hollywood proportions.

In the face of all this evidence and all this carnage nothing is done.

Yet every time some poor misunderstood Muslim yells Allah Akbar, climbs up on a table and commits an act of workplace violence, or they set off a bomb at a marathon, or they massacre people for publishing cartoons we are immediately and constantly reminded that the most important thing is to make sure we don’t express our Islamophobia by profiling the young Muslim men who commit all these random acts of mayhem. Heaven forbid we admit that the source of terrorism and this latest round of genocide are identifiable.

While millions die, are displaced, persecuted, raped and tortured, while the latest round of genocide shows that crimes against humanity are occurring right before our eyes, America does nothing, as never again happens again.


By Robert R. Owens

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2015. Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com. Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens. Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens.