Have you noticed how the war in Gaza, or rather, the “suffering women and especially children” in Gaza, are now taking up so much of the news bandwidth? Since that war started on October 7, we no longer see on the nightly news much about the war in Ukraine, though that war is still going on with as much ferocity as before, and Ukraine, for want of attention, is not getting the weapons it desperately needs. We hear intermittently about the gangs that have taken over in Haiti, but not about the five million Haitians now facing what the UN calls “acute food insecurity.” Apparently the only “acute food insecurity” that counts is that now being experienced by a quarter of the Gazan population, that is, 550,000 people, or about one-tenth the number of Haitians now food-deprived. And practically no one is reporting on Sudan, where a murderous war is being conducted by Arabs on black African Sudanese. Those Arab marauders, like the Janjaweed years ago in Darfur, are intent on seizing and “Arabizing” the lands of the black Masalit people. Right now in Sudan, far more people are enduring severe hunger than in Gaza — some 730,000 children now suffer from “severe malnutrition,” while the UN says that if huge supplies of food are not soon delivered, five million black Sudanese will endure “catastrophic hunger.” Have you seen anything about this on the evening news? No, I thought not.
The spectacle of sympathies being lavished on the people in Gaza, while even greater wretchedness and misery of people in war-torn lands elsewhere are largely ignored, is discussed here: “War Is Hell. Everywhere.” By Ben Cohen, JNS.org, March 24, 2024:
…For as much as war was hell, still is and always will be, so are some wars just and some manifestly unjust. Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is a perfect example of the former. It is just because Israel would not have launched its military operations had the murderers and rapists of Hamas not butchered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners during its Oct. 7 pogrom. It is just because Israel is fighting an enemy that has never hidden its goal of destroying the world’s only independent Jewish state. It is just because without an Israeli response of the kind that we have seen over the last few months, Hamas and its Iranian overlords would have no qualms about launching another Oct. 7, and then another, ad infinitum, until its goal was achieved.
That doesn’t mean that Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip aren’t suffering. They are—and that is a truth we can acknowledge even if we are rightly suspect [sic] about the casualty numbers churned out by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. Wishing for a ceasefire so that this bloodshed can at least be paused is a humane response to the scenes we are witnessing. But those who are calling on Israel to announce a ceasefire now—among them the same discordant voices who falsely accuse Israel of prosecuting a “genocide” in Gaza—don’t want a ceasefire in the sense that term is conventionally understood. They want Israel to unconditionally, unilaterally surrender as the first step towards its eventual elimination. Put another way, the keffiyeh-clad demonstrators clogging our streets are outraged by the sight of dead Palestinian children but have no reservations about wishing a similar fate on children in Israel.
What is especially depressing about this situation is that while this tired debate drags on—incorporating more and more antisemitic tropes as tempers fray—other, more terrible wars and conflicts around the globe are simply being ignored. We read and hear a great deal less about Ukraine these days, and when we do, it is rarely about the suffering inflicted by the invading Russians on Ukrainian civilians, including rape and the kidnapping of children, and almost always about how that war has impacted upon America’s domestic political divisions as we head towards a presidential election in November.
The same goes for Sudan, where the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group continues to inflict unimaginable horrors in its racist campaign of “Arabization” targeting the Masalit people in the west of the country—the same location as the Darfur genocide of 2005, which at the time mobilized American Jews in a nearly unprecedented campaign of political solidarity and humanitarian assistance in a conflict halfway around the world. Ditto for Haiti, where criminal gangs now roam and rule the streets, leading one top U.N. official to compare the scenes in Port-au-Prince with the apocalyptic movie “Mad Max,” though that utterance, unlike the statements of U.N. officials on Gaza’s plight, failed to spark a single demonstration or act of protest. And that’s not mentioning the wars in West Africa’s Sahel region, where military juntas face off against Islamist terrorists; or in Nigeria, where Christians are being mercilessly targeted by Islamist bandits, among them the 87 people, mainly women and children, abducted in Kaduna State last week; or in Burma/Myanmar, where the junta that seized power from a democratically elected government in a coup three years ago is stepping up its repression….
Let’s keep track of this strangely selective sympathy. Note down, as I am doing beginning today, how many times NPR and the BBC report stories about hunger in Gaza, and how many times they report on hunger in Sudan and Haiti. And do the same with the print media. By midday on March 25 I had heard eleven stories about hunger in Gaza, three about Haiti, and none about Sudan. I’ll keep score, and you do, too. And while not a week goes by without another resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, there has been not a single resolution about the ongoing genocide of black Africans by Arabs in Sudan. Why is that, I wonder.
Karen Dowden says
Excellent article. Another observation is that while UN and everyone else keeps calling for a cease fire – from Israel, why is no one demanding that Hamas release the hostages. This is blow mind double standards and quite disgusting.