There was another number I couldn't get to settle when I started looking at it yesterday.
Try to follow along for a moment.
Iran's regime killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in a few weeks at the start of the year. Not in a war. Not in chaos. But systematically, street by street, while the Western European world looked the other way.
The strange thing is not that it happened. Because the Iranian theocracy has carried out this kind of murderous manoeuvre ever since it slaughtered the left wing - also in the tens of thousands - that helped it to power back in 1979.
No, the strange thing is how quiet it was.
There were no demonstrations through European capitals, filled with young impassioned university students, no occupied universities, no left wing you would otherwise imagine were the most furious about the betrayal of their comrades - no celebrities who suddenly found their moral voice and pumped out videos in an endless stream.
You could perhaps call it an exception. Brush it aside and say - Well yes, it's also far away. There's a lot to worry about here.
But then you look at Congo, where the wars have cost over five million people their lives - the deadliest conflict the world has seen since World War II - and find the same silence.
Then you turn and look at Sudan, where mass rape, famine and ethnic cleansing are rolling right now, and find the same silence. Again.
Yemen, Syria, Nigeria - Christians and civilians erased in the tens of thousands, and still the same absence of everything we otherwise call conscience.
So the silence is not a gap in the pattern. The silence IS the pattern.
Because there exists one conflict where the outrage never sleeps. One conflict with permanent demonstrations, permanent headlines, permanent moral state of emergency.
The one where the Jewish state is involved.
This is not a feeling. It can be counted. In 2023 the UN General Assembly passed fourteen condemnations of Israel - and seven of the rest of the world. Combined.
Sudan got zero.
And then you stand with the question the entire pattern points to. If the compassion were genuine, why does it need a particular opponent to wake up?
What we see is not humanism. It is a moral hierarchy that determines whose dead count, and whose dead are background noise.
And notice what almost no one says out loud -
In most of those conflicts both the executioners and the dead are Muslims. Iranian demonstrators. Sudanese families. Yemeni children. So if the outrage really were about Muslim lives, the streets would have been on fire long ago. But Muslim dead apparently only count when Israel can be held responsible. So it's not solidarity with Muslims either. It only resembles it.
Genuine care for human life does not need Jews in the picture to be activated.
If your outrage only shows up when it can be directed at Israel, it was never about the victims.
All lives matter. The Jewish ones too. The Christian ones too.
And an outrage that only wakes when it can catch sight of a Jew has an older name than humanism.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Sunday.
