The Problem With Selective Empathy

All violent, radical ideologies are similar in certain ways

Here are three scenarios:

1. A 20-year-old Arab Muslim man in a Paris banlieue beset by poverty and high unemployment falls in with a radical jihadist crowd, both online and off, and travels to Syria to join the burgeoning ISIS caliphate there. He is eventually filmed decapitating a Western journalist kidnapped by the group.

2. A black boy in the most imp…