Whose Lives Matter?

When refugees die on Europe's borders, the West wants to act, but when Assad rains barrel bombs on Homs, no one cares.

The world has no shortage of victims of terrible tragedies these days. Death tolls are rising in places from Syria to Sudan and some 60 million people have been displaced from their homes worldwide. But which of these people will get widespread support and sympathy and which will be ignored or neglected? A photograph of a single drowned Syrian child riveted the world's attention on the humanitarian crisis unfolding there, and the beheading of two American journalists by the Islamic State forced a reluctant president to pay more attention to the problem than he initially intended. Yet few people in the United States spend much time thinking about hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who lost their lives as a consequence of the U.S. invasion, just as most of the world ignored the frightful human consequences of the long Congo War(s). Human suffering may still be a depressingly constant feature of our politics, but sometimes these tragedies bring forth an outpouring of sympathy, money, and armed intervention; at other times the world turns its back....

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