Strangled Context

That we pay more attention to (and some of us care more about) the deaths of the Bibas boys than countless civilian victims of the war(s) in the Middle East is not an expression of 'semitic supremacy' as some have ludicrously and chauvinistically suggested, but an example of one of the key ethical distinctions which underpins the values which our civilisation operates by (or at least likes to think it does).

During WWII the Germans killed many thousands of British non-cambatants, a good number of them women and children, but Brits — rightly — remain far more disturbed about the purposeful and systematic slaughter of whole communities by the Nazis, in both eastern and western Europe. 

 

The relative numbers involved are irrelevant. That is why the introduction to Thames TV's The World at War made this point above all others, focusing on the victims in one small village in Normandy, not the thousands of French civilians who died during that battle or others, from varying degrees of carelessness and callousness on both sides.

​Depending on context, one death in a movie can horrify us far more than say Arnie mowing down an entire Central American army in Commando.

When making these ethical / existential judgments, none of which can ever be absolute, we always have to contextualise.

And, as we can see today, the bad guys will sometimes be working extra hard to blur or bedim the context...to constantly throw in metrics of false equivalence or the kind of simple statistical one-upmanship that is never welcome when we are trying to dissect complex moral issues.