“What worries me is not the scream of the evil ones. It’s the silence of the good.” (Martin Luther King

“What worries me is not the scream of the evil ones. It’s the silence of the good.” (Martin Luther King) This phrase, attributed to Martin Luther King, came to mind in relation to and in the context of Israel's war against the Palestinian people, on this day in which in Portugal “a holiday of Catholic origin is celebrated – the day of the body of God – perhaps it is the moment for a serious reflection on what has disturbed us in some way, the indignant criticism of the slogan “From the River to the Sea” as being a chant in demonstrations defending the disappearance of Israel, at the same time that Israel is in fact destroying Palestine, massacring children, in one word, genocide. It's not chants, it's hunger, thirst, mutilations, burns, people buried alive, murders, bombs, destruction of houses, museums, libraries, universities, schools, tents, etc. This is what politicians cannot hide from us! In fact, we live in a society where the silence of the innocent strengthens the marginality of the guilty. Another surprising inversion is to call radicals or extremists those who speak out against genocide, against an abominable massacre of children. The images that have been reaching us for months, and not just the latest unbearable images of the attack on the refugee camp in Rafah, are those of thousands of children with burned, decapitated bodies, images so monstrous that they would not even be possible in the most violent gore films. Anyone who reacts to these images and screams for this horror to stop is not a radical or extremist person, they are a human person, who is on the right side of History. It is the radicalism of those who remain silent in the face of this monstrosity that should concern us. We think that neutrality, silence is the moderate attitude towards the world's problems, and, however, silence has dramatic consequences. Silence, explains Ervin Staub, an expert in the psychology of genocide, in the article “The Psychology of Bystanders, Perpetrators and Heroic Helpers” (1993), “emboldens perpetrators, who often interpret silence as support for their policies.” When it comes to genocide and the massacre of children, there are no innocent silences! Silence destroys our consciousness. Who is out there calling for resistance to silence? Whoever goes around takes away our ability to reflect. Just look around…. And we don’t want, as Camilo Castelo Branco said, “silence to be a confession.”