I just saw Hotel Rwanda.

I simply don’t have words to express how it affected me. If you care about justice, or about peace, or about Africa, or, indeed, about your fellow human behing, you need to see this movie.

I remember so clearly the day that the airplane was shot down, killing the president of Rwanda, and the days of horror that followed during which the information was hard to come by, and the US government was spouting content-free nonsense about “acts of genocide”, but it was clear that we, the people of the United States of America, didn’t care any more about the people of Rwanda than we care about the dogs being destroyed down at the humane society.

And yet, after that atrocity, we then allowed the same thing to happen again in the Sudan, while more than one of my friends said to me, why do we have any responsibility to those people? They’re not Americans, after all.

And, what’s perhaps worse is that while history will look back and say that the Nazi holocaust was a monstrous thing, it will look back to 1994 and remember OJ Simpson. Rwanda? What’s that?