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It is not hate speech to express solidarity or sympathy for innocent people caught up in truly awful conflict situations. That is just to be human.

To protest against indiscriminate violence disproportionally affecting women, children, the elderly and infirm has nothing whatsoever to do with supporting terrorists.

It’s exactly what we’d expect of normal people in any case other than this one. Rewind just a few months back in time, and we’d find this idea offered as the humane stance of all respectable people.

That was a different conflict with a different enemy, though. Since then, the earth has shifted beneath our feet. To express sympathies for some innocents has suddenly become an act of treachery, and for other innocents the ultimate measure of loyalty.

But why not sympathy for both? For to pick one side or another, deciding some innocents are worthy and some are not, may indeed be hate speech. Certainly it is a hateful thing.

Doubtless there are hateful people calling to madness, licensing their followers to kill and maim indiscriminately. Such people should definitely be taken to task. But those who consider all life sacred? That in itself is the march of madness.

Let the decent and good proclaim: we stand with and for all innocents caught up in these wicked games of man. We denounce the targetting of civilians in all its forms. Ours is a plea for humanity.