The defining moral line of civilization is simple: civilians are off limits.

Once that line breaks, atrocity is no longer an exception. It becomes a method.

Over the last five years, some of the worst deliberate mass killings of civilians have come at the hands of jihadist movements and regimes built on political Islam.

In Sudan, militias tied to the Rapid Support Forces slaughtered an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, largely from the Masalit community. Whole neighborhoods were emptied through organized murder.

On October 7, thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel and hunted Jewish civilians deliberately—families in their homes, young people at the Nova Music Festival, children, the elderly. Terror itself was the objective.

In Iran, the regime’s 2025–2026 crackdown on protests has left more than 6,000 civilians dead, according to rights monitors, killed for dissent against an Islamic revolutionary order.

Across Nigeria and the Sahel, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province continue village massacres, church bombings, kidnappings, and executions. Civilians are the intended victims.

These conflicts differ in geography and politics. Sudan is tribal and ethnic. Hamas is nationalist and religious. Iran is a regime. Boko Haram is insurgent.

What unites them is the same moral collapse: the civilian is no longer protected by being uninvolved. Civilian blood becomes a signal of conviction.

And here is where the West has developed its own moral blind spot.

For years, parts of the activist left have embraced an oppressor-oppressed framework so rigid that civilian status itself becomes negotiable. The first question is no longer who was killed, but who held power.

That inversion was laid bare after October 7, when elements within Democratic Socialists of America and allied activist circles framed the massacre in the language of “resistance” and “decolonization,” making slaughter politically understandable so long as it came from the “oppressed.”

The jihadist says civilians may die because ideology sanctifies it. The regime says civilians may die because dissent threatens power. The activist says civilians may die because power determines innocence.

Different justifications. Same result.

Once innocence becomes conditional, civilization becomes conditional too.

Because the moment civilians become fair game, everyone eventually becomes fair game.