As Israel drags the whole of the Middle East into its war, and the genocidal campaign in Gaza grows even more brutal, these arguments have migrated to liberals in the West. For Israel’s desperate defenders, pointing to other unspeakably awful situations – first among them the war in Sudan – becomes an irresistible last resort.
Chief among them is the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, who deployed the same tactic of deflection in a recent article headlined, “Sudan is the world’s gravest humanitarian disaster - but almost nobody cares.”
Freedland, once described by the New York Times as a “leading British liberal Zionist”, waded into a topic he had never written about by asserting that the war in Sudan, now almost 18-months-old, is barely covered by the media and that “activists and progressives” are not interested in it.
Freedland concludes that the “crude ‘anti colonialism’” of the left has seen it divide the world into “goodies and baddies”, meaning that it is confused when it comes to Sudan and stridently partisan when it comes to Israel-Palestine, which he sees as a clash of “two just causes”.
It’s hard not to discern a certain amount of projection at work in these accusations. But for those of us in the West, the issue to take up with our governments is not active complicity, as it is with Israel, but confused inaction.
Saudi Arabia especially gets a lot of free passes because of western liberals’ laser focus on Israel and unwillingness to criticize any Islamic country due to a fear of being labeled as Islamophobic despite these countries being the most illiberal places on Earth. Saudi has a lot to answer for with their genocide in Yemen and sypport for various terror groups and we, the United States sell them a metric fuck ton of weapons and military equipment. We also do not have them on our list of state sponsors of terrorism like we do Iran, Sudan, Syria, and of all places, Cuba.
China and Myanmar also don’t get enough flak for their abuse of the Uighur and Rohingya ethnic groups respectively.
And of course everyone has forgotten about how the Taliban now rule Afghanistan and are inching closer day by day to being recognized a legitimate sovereign state despite literally being a terrorist organization that deprives its own citizens of basic rights every day. But the funny thing to me is that Saudi does a lot of the same shit but the west looks the other way because they have money. I mean it was considered a major reform in their society a couple years back when women were first allowed to drive cars at all.
Yes clearly western popular media is so afraid of being islamophobic. It’s not that it’s concerned about being labeled antisemitic at all. The good folks at ADL, AIPAC and the us government are truly careful about their treatment of the palestinian genocide and do their fullest not to cover up or even at times boast about israeli war crimes. I think that in case of saudis its laughable to argue that the lack of critique stems from being afraid of appearing islamophobic. We are manufacturing the genocide in yemen and palestine. Concerning china are you kidding? All the articles criticizing china are either south china see or uyghurs. Everything else is of the format: some chinese success, major threat for us good folks(in case we didnt know to be chauvinist before)