O Aleppo

They said they didn’t know,

Didn’t know that you were there,

400,000 perished, but they said they didn’t care.

As long as they deny, they didn’t care to know,

They left you to perish, to perish O Aleppo.

The Holocaust, what Holocaust?

We give lip service to “Never Again”.

Just look at Cambodia or Rwanda,

Or the Balkans…really Never Again?

Your graves are beneath the rubble,

Your hopes and dreams buried deep,

If you looked to the West for deliverance or salvation,

You looked to the West in vain.

For you see you have no oil, and your deaths are

No threat to us. Let the tyrants and their minions

Have you, give them the rubble and the dust.

Let them scrape your lifeless bodies from your streets,

We don’t care no we don’t –

for when we say “Never Again” what we mean

Is “Never Again” if there is something in it for us.

 You see you have no oil or other rich resource,

The fact that you are people, that matters not a bit –

That is your misfortune.

Children, women, men, whether young or old or sick,

It is simply your misfortune, and besides we didn’t know.

Did our churches cry out in protest?

Did we pray for you at all? Did our hearts break with compassion?

Did we cry out? No not at all.

For you see we didn’t know, because we didn’t want to know.

What is 400,000 people that are now buried in the dust?

“Never Again! O Aleppo! “Never Again”, we didn’t know!

Please take this as our apology, we really didn’t know!

Oh hide the mirrors in our houses, in our churches,

In our halls of government.

For if we look into those mirrors what shall we see?