Parenting & Family Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing something politicians often avoid because it costs them: he equalizes the moral ledger. By leading with “for decades,” he widens the frame beyond any single flare-up, refusing the comforting fiction that today’s casualties are uniquely inevitable or uniquely justified. The sentence is built like a slow drumbeat - “violence,” “multitude,” “innocent,” “civilian,” “victims” - piling up descriptors until the listener is boxed into empathy before any policy argument even begins.

The real move is the pairing: “Arab and Israeli.” In Washington, the Middle East is frequently narrated through alliances, proxies, and talking points; Conyers switches the unit of analysis to bodies. Naming “men, women and children” signals an insistence on human consequences over strategic abstractions, and it also preempts the usual rhetorical escape hatch: if the dead are civilians, you can’t comfortably file them under “combatants” and move on.

Subtextually, this is a rebuke to selective grief. The line implies that public outrage and congressional urgency tend to be unevenly distributed, and that this imbalance fuels a cycle where violence is normalized for some populations and scandalous for others. Conyers isn’t offering a tidy solution here; he’s establishing a baseline ethical symmetry as a prerequisite for any serious debate. It’s less a plea for neutrality than a demand for consistency: if innocence matters, it has to matter across identity lines, not just within the boundaries of a favored narrative.