The moral compass of our age can be measured not only by the wars that rage and the bombs that fall but also by the silences that follow. It is not the violence alone that defines the world we live in but the way that violence is narrated, the way victims are counted, and the way mourning is distributed. In this global distribution of empathy, the Western media has become the architect of a hierarchy of suffering, where some deaths are made into global tragedies and others are quietly absorbed into the statistics of war. This is not simply a question of coverage, it is about the manufacture of moral hierarchies, a census of human lives where the value of a body depends on geography, religion, and political convenience.

We saw this most recently in the spectacle of global mourning for Charlie Kirk, the conservative American commentator whose sudden death was met with headlines, tributes, and hours of media programming. Whatever one thinks of his politics, which were openly hostile to Muslims and immigrants—his life and death were treated as matters of universal concern. Compare this to Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who called for help from beneath the rubble of her family’s car in Gaza, only to be silenced forever when the rescuers who came for her were themselves killed. Hind’s desperate voice should have shaken the world, but outside of Arab media, her name passed in silence, her story buried in the avalanche of “tragic but complicated” reports that have become the template for covering Palestinian suffering.

This contrast is not incidental; it reveals the structure of Western media. Judith Butler, in her writings on war and mourning, argues that not all lives are “grievable” in the same way. Some are already framed as losses before they die, while others must first prove their innocence to even deserve mention. Hind Rajab’s death was not presented as the death of an innocent child but as one more regrettable detail in Israel’s “war on Hamas.” Charlie Kirk’s death, however, needed no justification, no defence of his humanity—it was simply understood that his life mattered.

The selective outrage has older roots. After the attacks of September 11, the faces of the American dead were shown for weeks, their names repeated in........

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