The title is struck through on purpose. Selective compassion is not a value we hold; it is the thing this program exists to strike out.
In much of Western public life, compassion is rationed by the identity of the perpetrator. When the party held responsible is a Western government or a Western ally, the victims fill the campuses, the marches, and the front pages. When the party responsible is an authoritarian regime, an armed faction, or a movement that enjoys political sympathy, the same suffering - often a far larger toll - draws a hedged paragraph, or nothing. The dead are weighed by who killed them rather than by the fact that they are dead.
The cases
- Darfur. In Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces and allied Arab militias - the successors of the Janjaweed - have killed non-Arab Darfuris in numbers that defy comprehension. The UN counts more than 150,000 dead across the war since 2023; some former officials put it far higher. It is the largest displacement crisis on record, with more than eleven million driven from their homes, and the siege and fall of El Fasher in late 2025 produced mass killing visible from orbit. By the assessment of mainstream analysts, the rate of killing has at times run an order of magnitude above Gaza's - and has drawn a small fraction of the protest, coverage, and institutional response.
- Iran. When Iranians rose after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the state's own forces shot them in the streets. A UN fact-finding mission found her death unlawful and documented security forces firing on protesters; rights groups count more than five hundred killed, some twenty-two thousand detained, and over fourteen hundred executions in the two years that followed. The Western response was real but thin and short-lived - and the regime itself routinely deflects scrutiny by pointing to Gaza.
- Palestinians killed by Hamas. Hamas has, across its years governing Gaza, rounded up and publicly executed Palestinians it labels collaborators or opponents - including a wave of more than thirty killings in late 2025 that the UN human rights office flagged as unlawful and that Palestinian human rights bodies condemned. The victims are Palestinian; the killers are not a designated villain; and the marches that fill Western squares for Palestinian suffering have little to say when the hand that kills is Palestinian.
These victims have one thing in common: no one with influence in the West gains by mourning them, and no one loses by ignoring them.
The objection we take seriously
The strongest defence of the asymmetry is leverage. People protest what their own governments fund or enable, the argument runs, because that is where their voice can change an outcome; a citizen in London has more purchase on British arms policy than on the Rapid Support Forces or the Iranian judiciary.
There is something to this, and we do not dismiss it. But it does not account for the scale of the gap, and it does not account for the silence turning, at times, into justification - Western voices explaining away Hamas's executions, or unable to name a higher-rate killing as what it is while naming a lower-rate one instantly. Leverage explains where people lobby. It does not explain whose deaths they are willing to see. A principle that mourns the victim only when the killer is convenient is not a principle; it is a preference wearing the clothes of one.
How the program works
Selective Compassion is a documentation and advocacy program.
- Documentation. Recording the toll of the conflicts and crackdowns that the selective gaze passes over, with sources, and setting them beside the attention they receive - so the asymmetry is visible rather than merely felt.
- Platform. Carrying on Meridian 21 the accounts of victims whose killers are not fashionable to name.
- Engagement. Putting that record to the media, the campuses, and the public who set the terms of attention.
Where we stand
Libera Mondo is strictly non-partisan and apolitical, and this program is not a ranking of victims or a claim that any group's suffering counts for less. The opposite: it holds that a victim's worth does not depend on the identity of the perpetrator, and that the test of a conscience is whether it can mourn the dead it has no political reason to mourn. The people killed in Gaza are owed that recognition. So are the people killed in Darfur, in Iran, and by Hamas. We apply one standard. We let the record make the case.
A voice for the forgotten.