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There was a grimly prophetic ring to Jamal Khashoggi’s final newspaper column published this week. The Saudi journalist whose killing has created a storm of protest referred to a fellow-writer imprisoned for comments which displeased his country’s rulers. ‘Such actions,’ he wrote, ‘no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community.’ Instead, they ‘may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence.’ Well, the indignation has been loud, for sure, with an embarrassing string of high profile withdrawals from the glittering global event designed to showcase the nation’s modernisation: the movers and shakers now have more pressing engagements. But how soon before the condemnation is ‘quickly followed by silence’? Multi-million pound deals, with their promise of jobs and influence and profit, can have a powerfully quietening effect. How do you balance their allure against the need for people to be allowed the basic right to speak truth to power? Will anything change? Whether they wander out of a desert in cloaks of camel hair and present themselves to a ruler in person, or publish tracts, or newspapers, or web blogs, prophets are rarely welcome. ‘They tell the prophets to keep quiet,’ wrote Isaiah in the Old Testament, ‘They say, “Tell us what we want to hear. Let us keep our illusions”’ (and today they might add, ‘our contracts’). Martin Luther King’s observation can haunt us: ‘In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.’ What value our initial indignation at a wrong if we don’t go on speaking up? It’s never, of course, the responsibility of people who’ve been on the receiving end of abuse, but of those who know and choose to say nothing. The discomforting issue faces the entertainment world, business, education, the aid sector, religious organisations and parliament itself. And all of us, I suppose, know far more than we’d like on all kinds of injustice which might make us want to scream in fury - from oppression, hunger and disease across the world, to the poverty and inequity which diminish many lives in our own communities. The need can overwhelm us. I’ve long been helped by the words of the Methodist preacher and broadcaster Colin Morris, who died earlier this year: He said: ‘….Being finite and fitfully loving humans, we can only really feel for a few…Only God can love them all. The most we can do is to take hold of the near edge of one of these great issues and seek to act at some cost to ourselves.’ For me, then, the question is always: who represents the edge of need nearest to us? And how should we go on speaking for them?