The laughter in Maher’s studio was telling. It revealed a desensitised audience that could chuckle at the invocation of dead children because those children belonged to the wrong geography. Substitute “Ukrainian baby” or “Israeli baby”, and the same crass joke would have drawn gasps, not laughter. The double standard is the moral disease of our age: empathy rationed by passport.

this double standard is so telling it should be clear to all, but we willfully ignore it like the article says.