RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/09/in-defence-of-whataboutery/

Did you know that 652 children have starved to death in Nigeria over the past six months? Did you know that in the north-east of that benighted nation, where a jihadist insurgency is raging and international aid is running thin, a savage hunger stalks the land? Did you know that five million people there are ‘severely hungry’, and that the World Food Programme is only able to feed 1.3million of them? Don’t feel ashamed if you haven’t heard about any of this. Few have. For it has been cruelly drowned out, ruthlessly demoted down the hierarchy of human concern, by what can only be described as the unhinged Gaza infatuation of our Israelophobic elites.

I only found out about the human calamity in Nigeria last week, and in the most telling way. It was the final item on the BBC’s News at Ten. The show opened, as it does almost every night, with the latest from Gaza. There’s a serious risk of famine in Gaza, the Beeb’s reporters intoned. Some children have already perished from malnourishment, they said. Then, later, like an afterthought, came news of an actual famine in Nigeria. Of a horror that has claimed the lives of hundreds of kids, and threatens to claim the lives of thousands more. An editorial decision was made here, right? Someone somewhere in BBC HQ decided that the death of hundreds of black African children is less newsworthy than the death of scores of Palestinian children. And that should horrify us.

We need to talk about the Gaza fetish of our media elites. It is suffocating. It’s a feverish moral fixation. No instance of human suffering – not even the agonised starvation of Nigerian infants in a world full of food – can be allowed to interfere with the Palestine myopia of our supposed betters. The war in Sudan, with its tens of thousands of deaths and its millions of displaced, famished souls; even the war in Ukraine, where an average of 42 civilians are killed or wounded every day – every earthly horror has been made morally subordinate to the Gaza infatuation. Even raising those other apocalyptic injustices is a risky business. You might find yourself accused of that greatest sin in the era of Israelophobia: ‘Whataboutery.’

Well, you know what? I’m standing up for whataboutery. Whataboutery might just be the only tool we have left to counter the cultural elites’ maniacal obsession with Israel, and their savage indifference to the suffering of the rest of the human species. So, yes, what about Sudan? What about Nigeria? What about Ukraine? What about – I’ll just say it – all the pain, hunger and death that cannot in any way be blamed on the world’s only Jewish nation? What about that?

So much as mention a patch of land on this troubled planet that isn’t Gaza and instantly the West’s virtue-hoarders will wail: ‘Whataboutery!’ French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy got flak online this week after writing a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the ‘brutal, forgotten war’ in Sudan that never pricks the consciences of ‘Greta Thunberg [or] America’s campus leftists’. The flap over Lévy was born from defensiveness. They know he’s right. They know the keffiyeh-adorned poseurs of the Western university couldn’t give a solitary shit for the suffering of the Sudanese. Even though it’s ‘the most nihilistic conflict on Earth’, as Anne Applebaum reminded us this week, in which more people have been displaced than in ‘Ukraine and Gaza combined’.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/peace-never-had-a-chance/             

A year ago, a friend asked me if I would join him in Christchurch for the weekly Palestinian support protests. I declined. I pointed out that asking me to do so made it implicit that I was obliged to take a moral stand on the more than 35 conflicts going on across the world today, and to rank them in terms of importance. I also argued that those protesting the Palestinian cause, were unfamiliar with the history of Palestine, up to and including the partition of Palestine to give the Jewish people a homeland. Since then, much debate has taken place, and while we remain friends, our views on the current conflict are not reconciled.

As many as 90,000-plus people — estimates of the crowd vary widely –recently protested on the Sydney Harbour Bridge despite an appeal by NSW Police to the NSW Supreme Court. What I viewed of the protest on television were the usual Palestinian flags, but more worrying, giant pictures of the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran, a financial and ideological backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, has been and remains committed to the destruction of Israel.

Today, it was heard, both on radio and in the print media that people were comparing the Gazan conflict with the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. While the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza has become a travesty beyond words following the October 7 attacks in Israel, the comparison is quite perverse. It is insidious to argue that the deaths caused by the Nazis, which surpassed 55 million people, is in anyway comparative to the war casualties in the Gaza and the West Bank.

The history of conflict in the region, and beyond the borders of Israel and the occupied territories goes back millennia and, as in all conflicts, there is the context of historical antecedents which are often ignored, not understood, or simply not known. Take the Roman occupation, for example, or Napoleon’s failed attempt at the occupation of Palestine, or the Ottomans and Egypt’s attempt to establish a kind of satellite state in Palestine.

The region, has been hostile to the Jewish people since the Jews were expelled under Roman occupation, especially so since Islam’s conquest of the region. In 1917, the Ottomans expelled the entire population of Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa (not unlike Idi Amin’s madness in expelling all Asians from Uganda).