Ilan Pappé on the lack of Jewish compassion for the suffering of Palestinians

Today I cannot understand educated American Jews or educated Christian Jews or educated Israelis who don't even feel a compassion towards the Palestinian suffering.  I don't even want to begin with justifications and so on, but I think the worst thing I meet in Israel, which really disturbs me, is the lack of compassion.  Of course you can see it now and you would say, "ok, now you should understand that [they] show no compassion by now [for] two thousand two hundred children that already were killed in Gaza because of the revenge."  But really?  In 2023, members of the democratic society cannot show compassion to 2,000 babies that were killed, whatever the context of what had happened?  I don't accept it.  

So I think there is something sick in the nation that I'm very glad that I liberated myself from this...  If we don't have this impulse of basic humanity within Israeli society, we will have to wait for its defeat from the outside, which I don't want... because I think it would be horrible and what we've seen Saturday [bombing Gaza] is just a prelude.  So I really hope that they will change from within and get a more universal perspective: what they have done and what they are doing.

~ Ilan Pappé, "Declassified Israeli Documents Reveal Dark Truths," The Majority Report, 6:00 mark, November 5, 2023

Penn Jillette on the difference between welfare and charity

It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give money to poor people is compassion.  Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion.  Voting for government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.  People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered.  If we're compassionate, we'll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right.  There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

~ Penn Jillette

Nathaniel Branden on compassion

We do not hear the term "compassionate" applied to business executives or entrepreneurs, certainly not when they are engaged in their normal work. Yet in terms of results in the measurable form of jobs created, lives enriched, communities built, living standards raised, and poverty healed, a handful of capitalists has done infinitely more for mankind than all the self-serving politicians, academics, social workers, and religionists who march under the banner of "compassion."

~ Nathaniel Branden