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’.
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Author: Ruth King
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