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human rights
When the Cruelty Is the Point, What Is Left? Radical Empathy
Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent. We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives.
Mar 08, 2026
We always knew that humans could be monsters. We knew about Nazi Germany. We knew about the European slave trade, and about Jim Crow and its ritual lynchings. We knew about Europe’s genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and about the cruelty of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and across the world. We knew about the genocidal wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.
But we also knew about the other end of the spectrum: the people in Europe who hid escaping Jews in their attics. The abolitionists, the Underground Railroad. The nonviolent movement in India that freed millions from British colonization. The pacifists who went to prison in refusal to kill. The Suffragettes; the labor movement; the civil rights movement; South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement; the liberation movements in South America, Africa, and Asia; the Western anti-war movements that finally brought the horrific US-sponsored wars in Southeast Asia to an end.
Somehow, we (or perhaps I should just say I) saw these opposing forces as continuous struggles, continuous choices, continuous needs to resist, build alternatives, create community, connect. A flux with, more or less, equal chances of success if we just kept going. Somehow, we also held a common belief, especially following the traumas of World War II, that there were universal human values, that we as ‘humanity’ could name them and subscribe to them, and that they could protect us from the evils that haunted our world. This seemed to give us space to act for the good, the just, the value of the universality of human rights.
Today, I’m not so sure of that.
There is no time to waste, no neutral space "in the middle." Clearly, in our own innocence, we have not taken seriously enough the depraved power of greed and cruelty, nor understood how far evil has reached. They have grabbed it all… almost.
Like so many others, I am unable to ignore the news about the latest horrific war, launched by the US and Israel against Iran, also unable to ignore the Epstein files and the revelations of the systemic corruption, the evil—no other word for it—that is built into the structures of power that rule not only the US, but the entire "Western" world and all that it dominates, while pretending to represent "democracy" and "human rights."
And the direct connection of these forces to the most evil, or at least the most visibly evil, disaster of our current period: the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And the connection of that genocide with the global arms trade, the US-UK-EU-Israel weapons and surveillance deals. The establishment of concentration camps in Albania for refugees seeking safety in Europe, the cyber-technology that identifies desperate people at the EU border in Eastern Europe by the warmth of their bodies, and sics Frontex attack dogs on them.
"The cruelty is the point." I’ve read this so many times about Israel’s policies and practices toward Palestinians, so extreme in Gaza, only slightly less so in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Children shot in the head, chest, genitals—target practice for Israel Defense Forces soldiers. TikTok videos making fun of Palestinian mothers grieving for their murdered babies. Israeli soldiers blowing up hospitals, universities, schools, refugee camps, and then sharing this online as if they are party jokes. Even a so-called "humanitarian aid program," luring starving people with food, and then shooting them as they desperately scrounge for a pack of flour or rice.
"The cruelty is the point."
And now the back story is revealed: Epstein’s circle of powerful white men, linked to child trafficking, rape, torture of the most defenseless, the most innocent, the least resilient. Meanwhile, these men run the most powerful countries in the world, lead the international banking establishment, steal resources from the citizenry, protect each other, trade off deals, influence, and wealth: "the Epstein class," as it is now being called. Within this cabal of evildoers are the so-called "trans-humanists," wishing to leverage their power to give themselves eternal life—while meanwhile calling for the killing of "all the poor people."
Look at them.
Blank, empty eyes. Stiff bodies. Angry faces. Immature, not as innocent children, but as confused, grown-up boys who never learned the most important lessons, who think they’re powerful because they have a lot of money. People who have understood nothing of the essence of life, people who have probably never held a baby in their arms, never grown a garden or helped a neighbor, never walked through a forest in wonder. Rich kids with simple, underdeveloped spirits, lured by superficial values and massive monetary wealth, now imagining their own eternal longevity. Men coming from loveless backgrounds, who, in our societies dominated by competition, individualism, and greed, have come to own the Earth’s resources and rule our world. (Mostly white) men, compensating for their own moral voids with fantasies of unlimited power, fueled by cruelty.
It is easy to trace the origins of this evil: oppressive medieval Christianity, white European supremacy, patriarchy built on the violent domination of women, greed and vacuous cruelty. Domination through violence and fear of violence.
The cruelty is the point.
Well, guess what. There are other forces alive in today’s world. Decades of resistance to domination and colonialism, the learnings of movements across the Global South, the freedom that Western hegemony for a few decades inadvertently released on its majority population, and access through social media to some of the reality of the actual horrors perpetrated in our names have together led to a worldwide awakening to fundamental injustices, and a worldwide longing for a livable, connected, survivable future.
How to capture this reality, how to describe the alternative to the evil cruelty that so dominates the stories of our time?
Let’s consider the idea of Radical Empathy, which, I believe, is our only hope.
What is Radical Empathy? We know these two words but, together, what do they mean?
Empathy is the ability to feel what the other feels, not the "sympathy" of feeling sorry for someone, but the ability to identify with the feelings of the other, to engage with those feelings as one’s own. To connect with other people, with other living beings, to connect with the planet and all life on it. Perhaps we can describe empathy as a mix of compassion, identification, and solidarity.
And radical means going to the roots, going all the way to the source. Radical has often been interpreted simply as extreme, but that does not do the concept justice. Radical means rooted, grounded, solid, strong.
Combine these two, and see here a powerful concept to help us resist the cruelty and evil now dominating our airwaves, threatening the future of all human and other life on our beautiful planet, threatening the planet itself.
Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent. We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives. Stand in solidarity with all who resist oppression and the violence of power and greed.
We must hold and nurture our sense of humor: not joke telling, but the ability to see oneself in perspective, gently; the ability to use our creativity and the power of the unexpected to flip the story, turn reality around and move it in another direction. We must have the courage to stand up to unjust power, take the risks, and accept the consequences.
And we artists must nurture artistic bravery, using the power of the arts to tell truth, to build community, to turn our capacity for Radical Empathy into a force for good.
There is no time to waste, no neutral space "in the middle." Clearly, in our own innocence, we have not taken seriously enough the depraved power of greed and cruelty, nor understood how far evil has reached. They have grabbed it all… almost.
What they do not yet control: our spirits, our creativity, our ability to defy cruelty, to invent and reinvent Radical Empathy. And, thank you life, they do not control the youth of our world, who increasingly stand bravely against the organized cruelty of today’s powerful.
There is no guarantee that Radical Empathy will prevail, that the powers of connection, compassion, and love will be able to carry us to a place of repair, redress, reconnection, rebuilding, for all who have suffered from the unlimited cruelty of our time. There is no guarantee that our children and our grandchildren will grow and thrive in a world of compassion and connection.
But even if we do not succeed to turn the global tide, we will still be living our best possible lives as changemakers, planting seeds of change, creating islands of survival.
I remember, reading Joanna Macy, her admonition to embrace your grief. Look straight at the horrors, acknowledge the dangers, the threats to our world, the destruction, the cruelty.
And then look beyond, choose, and move together.
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165 Massacred Schoolgirls in Iran — and the Silence That Exposes the West’s Moral Selectivity
These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead.
Mar 07, 2026
In an era when images can circle the globe in seconds and newsrooms claim to uphold universal humanitarian principles; one might expect the killing of 165 schoolgirls inside a primary school to dominate international headlines. One would expect emergency debates, moral outrage, and relentless coverage. Yet in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab—where Israeli-American strikes obliterated classrooms filled with children—the world’s most influential media institutions have responded with something far more revealing than condemnation: they have responded with silence.
These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead. In seconds, that ordinary school day turned into a massacre. Desks became splintered wreckage, classrooms collapsed into dust, and rows of coffins replaced rows of pupils.
Yet the names of these girls—165 lives extinguished before they truly began—barely entered the global conversation.
This omission is not the product of oversight. It reflects something far more structural: the hierarchy of victims that governs much of the contemporary information order. In theory, modern Western media institutions present themselves as defenders of human rights and guardians of moral accountability. In practice, their editorial priorities often mirror geopolitical interests with striking precision.
When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.
When tragedies reinforce established narratives about adversarial states, they are amplified, dramatized, and transformed into global moral spectacles. But when tragedies expose the human cost of the military actions carried out by Western powers or their closest allies, they are quietly displaced from the front page—if they appear at all.
The massacre in Minab illustrates this logic with devastating clarity.
The deaths of 165 Iranian schoolgirls do not fit comfortably within the dominant geopolitical storyline that portrays Israel and its strategic partners as defenders of stability and order in a turbulent region. Acknowledging such an atrocity would inevitably raise difficult questions: about the legality of strikes on civilian infrastructure, about the ethics of military escalation, and about the widening humanitarian toll of ongoing Israeli-American attacks across the region.
It is therefore far easier to look away.
But Minab is not an isolated tragedy. Across Lebanon, relentless bombardments have repeatedly struck civilian neighborhoods, reducing homes and streets to rubble. Across Palestine, entire communities have endured cycles of destruction that claim the lives of children whose only battlefield was the ground beneath their feet. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have all entered the expanding geography of devastation.
These events do not occur in a vacuum. They form part of a broader pattern in which military power operates alongside narrative power. Missiles shape the physical battlefield, while selective reporting shapes the battlefield of perception.
What emerges is not merely a media bias but a form of narrative engineering. Certain victims are elevated as symbols of universal suffering, while others—often far more numerous—are rendered invisible. Compassion itself becomes curated, distributed unevenly according to political convenience.
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection. The credibility of humanitarian discourse depends on consistency. When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.
The girls of Minab deserved the same recognition afforded to any victims of violence anywhere in the world. They deserved to have their stories told, their lives acknowledged, and their deaths confronted with the seriousness such an atrocity demands.
Instead, they encountered a second form of erasure.
First came the missiles that ended their lives. Then came the silence that followed.
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection.
In the contemporary information age, propaganda rarely announces itself openly. It often operates through absence—through the stories that never reach the front page, the victims whose names remain unspoken, and the tragedies that disappear before the world has time to notice.
The massacre in Minab therefore stands as more than a local catastrophe. It exposes a deeper crisis in the global information order—one in which the value of human life appears disturbingly contingent on political context.
And if the deaths of 165 schoolgirls in their classrooms fail to trigger universal outrage, the question is no longer about geopolitics alone.
It becomes a question about the credibility of the moral system that claims to defend humanity itself.
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Children Paying Heaviest Price as Half a Million People Flee Israeli Bombing of Lebanon
UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk warned of violations of "international humanitarian law" by Israel, "in particular when it comes to issues around forced transfer."
Mar 06, 2026
As the broader war unleashed in the Middle East this week by the joint attack on Iran by Israel and US forces continued to escalate and intensify on Friday, advocates for children warn that young people caught in the middle of the fighting are paying the highest price for the war of choice launched by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
More than half a million people have fled their homes in southern Lebanon as Israel unleashed a deadly barrage of bombings overnight and into Friday, adding to a death toll estimated to be more than 130 people this week and following a mass evacuation order by the Israeli government on Thursday amid a wider regional war backed by the US military.
US bombing of Iran also intensified overnight following threats by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday that "we have just begun."
From Lebanon to Iran this week, since Trump launched an unprovoked attack on Iran over the weekend, UNICEF estimates that over 190 children have been killed across the Middle East in the escalated fighting. "This includes 181 children in Iran, seven in Lebanon, three in Israel, and one child in Kuwait," said the group.
Israeli forces bombed numerous towns and areas around Beirut on Friday, according to dispatches from the Lebanese National News Agency (NNA), targeting the towns of Al-Majadel, Al-Duwayr, Buday, and others.
The United Nations human rights office warned Friday that Israel's "blanket displacement orders" and bombardment of Beirut and its outlying suburbs was delivering "more misery to civilians" in those areas, including children and their families.
"In all, hundreds of thousands have now been affected by these Israeli displacement orders," said the OHCHR in a statement. "Their breadth makes them very difficult for the population to comply with and therefore brings into question their effectiveness, a requirement under international humanitarian law, and risks amounting to prohibited forced displacement."
UN human rights chief Volker Türk on Friday denounced Israel's large -scale evacuation orders, saying, “These blanket, massive displacement orders we are talking here about hundreds and thousands of people. This raises serious concern under international humanitarian law, and in particular when it comes to issues around forced transfer."
In a Thursday statement, Save the Children called for the warring parties, as well as the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—to deploy every diplomatic tool at their disposal to bring "an end to hostilities" and guarantee "adherence to international humanitarian law to protect the physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing of children across the region."
Save the Children's Latifa Mattar said that children living in these nations across the region "had no say in this conflict and yet, they are paying the price. Children are now living in fear. We are hearing of children too scared to sleep, families sheltering indoors, and schools shuttered at a time when children need routine and safety most."
“We are calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities," added Mattar. "Every hour of continued conflict is another hour a child spends in fear. The international community must act now—deploy every diplomatic tool available to end the conflict, demand compliance with international humanitarian law, and ensure that children are protected. Upholding the laws of war is an obligation, not a choice. There must be a return to good-faith diplomacy before the harm to this generation becomes irreversible."
Al-Jazeera correspondent Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, warned that the humanitarian crisis in the city and surrounding areas is rapidly worsening, with people seeking shelter on nearly every street corner.
"There aren’t enough schools to shelter the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to flee their homes after Israel’s forced displacement threat for Beirut’s southern suburbs [Thursday],” Khodr reported. “People are telling us: ‘We are not animals; we are human beings, our children are cold.'”
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