But when we went to Ramallah to film a segment for tonight's episode of Vice Guide to Everything, we found that while the wall has inspired international condemnation and maybe even stopped suicide bombings, it sure hasn't kept people from stealing cars in Israel and driving them straight through armed checkpoints to chop shops in the West Bank.
But the rollbacks inspired virtually unanimous condemnation from environmentalists, from state attorneys general up and down the Eastern seaboard and from James Jeffords, whose Senate committee will consider "Clear Skies" if and when it arrives on Capitol Hill.
The International Association of Game and Fish Commissioners protested the "slaughtering of elk by hired killers" rather than by sportsmen, and schoolchildren from across the country were inspired to write letters of condemnation.
In one clip, featured in a video report from London's Telegraph, a man surrounded by the bodies of children asked, "What was their crime, Bashar?" The extreme brutality of the killings, and the images of massacred children, inspired fierce protests in Syria and condemnation from around the world.
It's a common refrain, the usual condemnation of a brutal act by Islamists inspired by religious ideology, by their own admission, and the flat out refusal by well meaning liberals to even consider that such brutality could be inspired by religion.
Che's denunciations of the Soviets made him popular among intellectuals and artists of the Western European left who had lost faith in the Soviet Union, while his condemnation of imperialism and call to revolution inspired young radical students in the United States, who were impatient for societal change.
Eight years later, just as details of Leopold's genocidal regime began to become public, Conrad's experiences there inspired him to write Heart of Darkness, as powerful a condemnation of imperialism as has ever been written, and still a deeply unsettling read more than a century on.
Trump's puzzling engagement with the Khans not only inspired an unusually pointed rebuke from Clinton on Sunday, it also sparked broad condemnation from many Republicans.
