The headlines scream of a dead infant in the West Bank, an Israeli bullet through a baby’s skull, and a funeral that has drawn the world’s condemnation. But let us pause before we join the chorus of outrage. For what is this but another chapter in the long, dreary chronicle of human folly?
The Westminster crowd, ever eager to parade its righteousness, now fumes and demands sanctions. Yet they forget: Rome burned while Nero fiddled, and Victorian England prided itself on civilising savages abroad while its own factories ground children into paste. The moral superiority we affect is a hollow costume, a mask for our own decadence.
We have grown soft, addicted to outrage as a substitute for action. The real tragedy is not that a child died, but that we have become a people who cannot look upon such horrors without a reflexive, meaningless howl. We are the intellectual heirs of a civilisation that once knew the difference between justice and sentiment.
Now we are simply tired, tired and angry, and that is the most dangerous combination of all.
