Witnessing Inaction

"The present Western policy of playing down genocide and hoping it will peter out has proved to be bankrupt practically as well as morally. Granted, there are no neat solutions in Darfur. But ignoring brutality has only magnified it, and it's just shameful to pretend not to notice the terrified villagers here, huddling with their children each night and wondering when they are going to be massacred." - Nicholas Kristof, columnist, writing from the Chad-Sudan border of increasing violence by Sudanese militias in the region, including cross-border raids against villagers in Chad.
Source: The New York Times

"It is a very tricky thing to dramatize because you have to get into how the government rationalizes inaction and how they sort of stiff-arm the horror and sort of pooh-pooh any real action as something that would be naïve. We are not as a country too naïve to establish democracy in Iraq, but apparently we are too naïve to put an end to babies being thrown into fires." - Bradley Whitford on writing an episode of the West Wing about the genocide in Darfur. The transript is from a podcast Whitford did for "Bearing Witness for Darfur: Can We Prevent Genocide in the Sudan?" an off-shoot of Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.