Song of the slaughtered innocents
Tune: The Week Before Easter (Scottish traditional)
In Armenian Cilicia in Nineteen-O-nine
When the Ottoman soldiers came into the town
They killed twenty-thousand and the slaughter began:
In a decade two million were murdered.
In the town of Amritsar in Nineteen-nineteen
The crowds were protesting at what they had seen
The Tommies were told to fire like a machine
And three hundred and seventy nine died there.
It was in the Ukraine in the year 'Forty-two
The Nazis had pledged to wipe out every Jew
In the Babi Yar canyon they honoured their vow
So thirty-three thousand lay dead there.
It was in Hiroshima, at the end of the war,
When the Japanese said they could struggle no more
Many thousands were dead when they added the score
And thousands more from radiation.
It was in Palestine, the year Forty-eight,
When one hundred and twenty souls met with their fate
Shot down by the Stern Gang and the terror was great
So the refugees fled for the borders.
One Birmingham Sunday in Alabama state
As the children ran to the church early and late
The bombers had laid their plans well in their hate
And they blew up the church on a Sunday.
In Bosnia too in the year Ninety-five
Eight thousand were killed and so few left alive
The UN troops saw no chance they could survive
While the whole world looked on and did nothing.
In Yugoslavia the bombs fell like rain
For seventy-eight days again and again
Five hundred civilians were murdered in vain
And they said it was humanitarian.
In New York in September Two-thousand-and-one
The World Center towers they came crashing down
Three thousand were killed and fire fighters were slain
While the G-men and spies were left helpless.
In Sabra, and Cana and throughout the West Bank,
In Jenin and Nablus the bulldozer and tank
Cover up the dead bodies whose drying blood stank
And the mothers and orphans are crying.
How many more horrors must our people endure?
While the death toll is rising the protests are fewer.
Before the world wakes and it cries out no more!
No more shall the innocent suffer!
