"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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