Silence during one of the 21st century's most depraved hours stains our hands with the blood of innocents

Over the last few days I read The Barn, Wright Thompson's immense, thought-provoking book with the subtitle 'The murder of Emmet Till and the cradle of American racism'.

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It is a magnificent, deeply unsettling, impeccably researched tome, one which outlines how silence was vital in facilitating the horror that took place in the Mississippi Delta, the lynching of a 14-year-old child on an August night in 1955.

America's Deep South sought to rewrite history in real time, to cover up, to insist this wasn't happening.

That silence felt disturbing and appalling and unbelievable, Until the jolting realisation of my own inertia 70 years on.

Take out your phone or open the newspaper. Look again at the photo essays from Gaza. Absorb the calamity in every freezeframe. Observe the misery in every pixel, the hopelessness, despair and viciousness.

One I saw this week squats in my skull.

A panicked, dust and blood-covered parent, a limp young body in his grasp, searching for assistance. His eyes imploring, begging, unable to compute.

See how the ravages of the past two years have rewritten the maps of every face. Every son and daughter of Gaza has witnessed events nobody ever should, things that, once seen, can never be unseen.

Every minute of every day is worse than the worst nightmare we have ever known.

The only hope is that by shouting at the top of our voices to those in power we might inch toward an awakening, enable the tormented to escape the stranglehold of the dark.

At the very least, we are duty-bound to try.