Stop Redirecting. Just Sit With It.

On the exhausting habit of answering atrocity with atrocity, and why "but what about..." is not a rebuttal, it's a retreat.

I posted about the US military shooting down an Iranian civilian aircraft — a school trip — killing upward of 181 people, most of them girls between the ages of 7-12. I posted because it happened. I posted because it was denied. I posted because the silence that follows denial is its own kind of atrocity.

I also posted it, because in the light of everything that has been exposed lately, with the corruption in the US government, I feel that it is important to stay on this pulse: to keep tracking it and naming it. Particularly, as someone who lives in the West and is continually exposed to this covert gaslighting.

What came back in the comments section was something I’ve come to recognise with a kind of weary dread. People insisting it was the Iranian regime. Doubling down. Demanding sources. Performing scepticism with the confidence of people who had already decided on the outcome.

And then, when it was proven, when the evidence was undeniable — crickets. No corrections. No apologies. Just a quiet shuffling away, as if the argument had never happened. As if those 181 people had never happened.

Silence after being proven wrong is not neutrality. It’s a choice. It tells us exactly where the investment was.

And then came a different kind of comment. Someone pivoting: “but what about the time the Iranian regime shot down 200 of their own people?”

And I felt something I can only describe as a deep, slow exhaustion.

Here is what I want to say clearly: two events can both be atrocities. The Iranian regime has done terrible things. The US military has done terrible things. These facts do not cancel each other out. They are not in competition. They do not require us to choose a side before we’re permitted to grieve.

But that’s not what the “but what about” move is actually doing. It is not expanding the conversation. It is not saying, “let’s hold multiple powers accountable at once.” It is a deflection. A trapdoor. A way of escaping the discomfort of sitting with one specific, documented, undeniable thing.

The “what about” commentary is not moral complexity. Moral complexity would look like: “Yes, and here’s another example of the same pattern of impunity.” Whataboutism looks like: “But look over there” — spoken at the exact moment accountability comes near.

There is something particularly painful about watching it happen in real time. You share a story about real people, about real children who were killed and within moments, the thread has become an argument about which government is worse, which death toll is more legitimate, which grief is permitted to take up space.

The children are gone from the conversation. That is the point. That is always the point.

I am asking for something that sounds simple but apparently isn’t: can we just sit with one thing? Can we let one event be real, be wrong, be worth naming and without immediately reaching for the escape hatch of “but they did this too”?

Accountability is not a zero-sum resource. Holding the US responsible for 181 deaths does not mean declaring Iran beyond criticism. It does not mean you have chosen a team. It means you looked at something that happened, and you refused to look away.

That’s all. That’s the whole ask here.

Grief is not a debate. Accountability is not a contest. And 181 people deserve more than being used as a deflection device in someone else’s culture war.

These two events — whatever comparison anyone wants to draw — are not mutually exclusive. One does not erase the other. One does not make the other acceptable, or smaller, or less worthy of our attention.

Learn to hold more than one truth. Learn to stay in the room when it’s uncomfortable. Learn to say, “yes, that happened, and it was wrong” — without the escape clause, without the redirect, without the need to immediately balance the moral ledger in a way that lets you off the hook.

Just sit with it. That’s where accountability actually begins.

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