"If “mass killings of its own people” constitutes a “crime against humanity” and “mass” in Syria means over a thousand people killed, surely the killing of over a thousand in Egypt must also constitute a serious crime against humanity! But that kind of rational calculation could only occur if there were one ethical standard for all states and an equal value placed on human life."

"Politics is defined in moral terms: it consists of a new war of an axis of good against an axis of evil. By an astonishing paradox, at the very moment when some countries are throwing themselves into a moral crusade against their demonized enemies and appropriating the vocabulary and symbolism of humanitarianism, nongovernmental organizations are distancing themselves while nevertheless casting their discourse in the same rhetorical mold. This remarkable mimetism — which operates in both directions — should nevertheless not lead one into a form of relativism that would set warmongers and humanitarians on the same level. The fact that the rhetoric is reproduced does not mean that the politics are equivalent. While it may be fallacious to reduce the war makers to a consistently barbaric “necropolitics” and humanitarians to a purely altruistic “biopolitics,” it is much more interesting to compare them in terms of the politics of life they effectively engender [...] Thus, within the humanitarian arena itself hierarchies of humanity are passively established but rarely identified for what they are — politics of life that at moments of crisis, result in the formation of two groups, those whose status protects their sacred character and those whom the institutions may sacrifice against their will." - Didier Fassin, Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life

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"The moral profit of the qualification 'humanitarian' is such that it may be used extensively and sometimes cynically to justify any sort of action, including paradoxically the use of the armed force. Who could be against the noble goal of saving lives? As political scientist and former UN consultant Thomas Weiss affirms, "humanity and the sanctity of life is the only genuine first order principle of intervention. The protection of the right to life, broadly interpreted, belongs to the category of obligations who's respect is in the interest of all states. Others, including the sacred trio of neutrality, impartiality and consent, as well as legalistic interpretations of the desirability about UN approval are second order principles." Following this line it is easy to see how the international order can be shaken by interruption of humanitarian reason as a supreme argument. The representation of the world that logically derives from this affirmation relies on the tripartite division between those who take lives, those whose lives are endangered and those who save lives. The military, the victims and the humanitarians."

Didier Fassin - Critique of Humanitarian Reason