Dear Mr. Custer,

Congrats on your tour de force demolishing my argument that nobody should care about genocides that kill only 0.01 percent of the population or less.

You force me to admit that if a genocidal soldier killed one of my own loved ones, I myself would get only moderate comfort from the statistic that this corresponded to an American death rate of only 0.000000333 % (1 out of 300 million).

Your argument is so skillful, let’s not get pedantic that my article never made the “only” argument; it actually said that the .01 percent statistic is also “of no comfort to Africans today who are victims of still much too frequent horrors; bless anyone who can stop the horrors or help the victims.”

I was foolishly hoping the .01 percent number might induce the casual reader to re-examine his belief that the typical African family consists of a wife-beating alcoholic male and starving refugee females raped by child soldiers, soon after massacred by the janjaweed just before they would have died of AIDS anyway.