Hand-waving at evil

In the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was raped and stabbed to death mere steps away from her apartment building in New York City. The case is famous because her cries for help were heard by many of her neighbors, who did little to help. One man is said to have shouted "let that girl alone" out his window, causing the attacker to flee for a moment. But when no one actually came outside to Genovese's aid, the murderer returned and raped her as she lay dying.

When it comes to combatting evil on a grand scale, we like to think we are not like Genovese's neighbors, yelling out the window but not doing much more. Following the Holocaust, the civilized world said "never again" to genocide. However, as Samantha Power (the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) has observed, "never again" has become "again and again" against the Rwandan Hutus, Bosnia Muslims, and the Iraqi Kurds.