A victim of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria. Photo: Screenshot.

When I visited Rwanda last month, I was preceded by President Clinton who arrived the day before. Clinton is a regular visitor to Rwanda and his Clinton Global Initiative does excellent humanitarian work in the central African nation. There is a reason the former President cares so deeply and sincerely about the Rwandan people.

When he was President in 1994, Clinton refused to even meet with his senior staff to discuss the genocide that broke out on April 6th and would become the fastest slaughter of human life in recorded history, with one million deaths in just three months.

Four years later, he came to Rwanda to offer an apology: “The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of the responsibility for this tragedy . . . We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”

The genocide was all coordinated from a single radio station. A single bombing run against the RTLM Hutu Power radio transmitting antenna might have made it impossible for the Hutus to coordinate their genocide.

But, as Phillip Gourevitch explains in his definitive account of the Rwandan genocide, “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will Be Killed with Our Families,” the UN Security Council, with the Clinton Administration’s blessing, ordered the UN force under Dallaire reduced by ninety percent to a skeleton staff of 270 troops who would powerlessly witness the slaughter to come.

The United States was asked to fire a single missile that would have destroyed the transmitter. The Clinton Administration refused because it was spooked by the events of Black Hawk Down that had transpired a few months earlier, in October 1993. But that one missile could have largely prevented a mass atrocity that claimed the lives of nearly one million people.

In two weeks time – on September 29, during UN week – our organization, This World: The Jewish Values Network, will host a public discussion between President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Professor Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate, on the subject of genocide, sponsored by Sheldon Adelson and Michael Steinhardt. It’s a timely conversation not only because of the impending twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, but especially because of the international community’s failure to punish Bashar Assad for slaughtering children in Syria.

Despite the eight genocides perpetrated in the twentieth century, and the universal cries of ‘Never Again,’ it seems that the world can still not summon the resolve to bring massive retaliation against those who gas innocent civilians.

From the outset of the Syrian civil war, when Bashar Assad turned on his people and started murdering them in the tens of thousands, President Obama had a moral obligation to travel to the UN and announce that the United States would seek an indictment against President Assad as a war criminal, guilty of crimes against humanity. Instead, two years of atrocities were accompanied by little American condemnation.

Next, Obama’s hesitations brought Russia into the mix. Putin has vetoed every Security Council measure intended to hold Assad accountable and is the principle reason why Assad has not had criminal charges brought against him at the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Next, we had Putin lecturing Americans about values in The New York Times and how America’s belief in its own exceptionalism was elitist and dangerous. Little did the Russian dictator understand that it’s not Americans who are exceptional, but their values. We value life, we hate autocracy, we are sickened by mass murder, and we dedicate our national strength toward protecting the weak. If Putin were to embrace, rather than trample, on these values, then he too would be exceptional.

If a man shoots up a school here in the United States, but subsequently agrees to have law enforcement confiscate all his weapons, is he then not punished? Will no one pay a price for the children who were murdered in Damascus?

Mr. President: Stop dithering. Children are dying. The ancient Rabbis said that ‘in a place where there are no men stand up and become one.’ Britain won’t punish Assad and Russia is out to protect him. It’s time for you to stand up and lead. The world is watching.

Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” is the international best-selling author of 29 books and will shortly publish “Kosher Lust.” Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley. For tickets to the Kagame-Wiesel event go here .