Every night, the news flickers across my screen, a parade of tragedies reduced to numbers and soundbites. Gaza burns, its streets choked with rubble and grief, thousands dead under Israeli bombs. Iran mourns too, its people struck down in the chaos of escalating strikes. Yet the world’s voice is strangely muted, a whisper where a scream should be. But when Iran’s missiles streak toward Israel, claiming far fewer lives, the headlines roar with horror, and leaders amplify their outrage. I sit in my quiet room, heart heavy, trying to unravel this knot of hypocrisy. Why do some deaths ripple across the globe while others sink like stones in a silent pond?
All deaths are tragedies – each a stolen breath, a story cut short. A child in Gaza, a scientist in Tehran, a grandparent in Tel Aviv – they all bleed the same red, grieve with the same raw ache. Yet the world’s sorrow seems to come with a ledger, tallying lives by borders and agendas. I scroll through X, where voices cry out: 103 Palestinians killed in Gaza, no outrage, one post laments. Another notes Iran’s “precise” strikes sparing Israeli civilians, while Israel’s bombs in Iran claim 220, including 20 children. The numbers blur, but the pattern is sharp – Gaza and Iran’s dead are footnotes, while Israel’s spark global alarm. Why this imbalance? My mind churns, searching for answers that don’t come.
Is it politics, where allies dictate empathy? Israel, a Western darling, gets tears; Gaza and Iran, often vilified, get shrugs. Or is it the media, framing one side’s pain as urgent, the other as collateral? Perhaps it’s exhaustion – decades of conflict dulling the world’s heart to certain losses. I think of a post I saw: “Palestinian life is considered worthless.” It stings because it feels true, yet I refuse to believe it should be. Every soul carries the same weight, doesn’t it? My distress grows, not just for the deaths, but for a world that picks and chooses its grief.
I want to scream that all lives matter equally, that no mother’s anguished cry should be louder than another’s. But the world’s selective mourning tells a different story – one of power, bias, and forgotten humanity. I’m left with questions, not answers, and a gnawing ache for a fairness that feels out of reach. Maybe that’s the point: to feel this discomfort, to let it fuel a demand for change. For now, I hold all the dead in my heart – Gaza, Iran, Israel – and mourn them equally, hoping one day the world’s tears will fall without borders.
Also by Michael Taylor:
A Tale of Two Responses: Trump’s Inaction on January 6 vs. California Overreach
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Facing each day is sad, bitter, for death, ignorance, wilfulness, obsessive drives still fuel the sickening news. All of us deserve some polite recognition and a place in life, with opportunity, peace, safety. But, wilful stupidity finds its hosts and leaders, better armed than were neanderthals and huns, continue to argue and fight for an imagined triumphal supremacy. I’ve just heard of Trumpian cuts to the Voice of America. As a teen, I listened entranced to the old 31 meter band shortwave, and heard sublime jazz, which shaped my life and career, for jazz is inclusive, international, friendly, creative, warm of spirit. Our world should reflect such values. It does not.
With the hate directed at Islam, the guilt imposed on us for the holocaust, the labelling of dissenters as antisemitic, and labelling the unwanted, the despised as terrorists, effectively dehumanising those who dare to speak out against the holocaust being carried out against the Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank and East Jerusalem we are DISCOURAGED to grieve the lives lost …. except of course those Israeli lives lost.
To think that poor Netanyahu’s son’s wedding has had to be cancelled because of the Iranian rockets attacking Israel, how very sad!!!!! No mention that those rockets are arriving because of Oh, Guess who started the bombardment, non other than the distraught father who has had to cancel his son’s wedding.
But of course Iran might someday soon have had the ability to produce nuclear weapons, which Israel already has… but don’t tell anyone, so the attack on Iran was totally justified…. and perhaps can even lead to regime change, not the first rallying cry, but wouldn’t that be good for the Iranian people? How did that work in Iraq? Oh, the power vacuum created by the US war on Saddam Hussien was filled by ISIS…. mmmm, more terrorists.
In the branding of people as terrorists or some other disparaging term dehumanises them, and devalues them,
In the Gaza/West Bank conflict since 7 October 2023, the ration of lives lost is now more than 50:1. That is 50 Palestinian lives for each Israeli life.
Injured, closer to 100:1
Forced displacement figures are hard to determine with the constant moving of the people in Gaza as new attacks are planned.
Imprisoned with out charge, and here we can count the hostages taken on 7 October, over 1000:1
The others we don’t really need to know about are the victims of the over the border forays Israel conducts into Lebanon and Syria. History repeats, and repeats, and repeats, the number of fatalities are not known, they are not published, but the displacement of Jews living near the border is highlighted.
And this has been going on since 1948, the Nakba, but was foreshadowed with the rise of Zionism and the Balfour declaration of 1917 where there was no mention of Palestinians existing, Israel was in effect Terra Nulius, an unpopulated land, just like Australia was.
How can we grieve for a people whose very existence has been denied for so long.
Sorry, this is a bit of a rant, but it is so very distressing.
Great article Michael,thank you.
Meanwhile we wait for our newly elected Labor government to find the spirit to face ALL our challenges with honesty and courage.The status quo will NOT suffice’
Optimism is in short supply.