In rush to vilify Israel, Sudan’s crisis goes MIA
At that time, in late May, 25 million people in Sudan were “acutely food insecure”, while 650,000 – “the highest anywhere in the world” – suffered from “catastrophic levels of hunger”. Since then, conditions have worsened, with the incidence of “catastrophic levels of hunger” increasing by some 10 per cent.
The disaster’s immediate cause is a struggle between forces mainly backed by Egypt and a rebel group backed mainly by the UAE. But plunging that struggle into unrestrained savagery is the determination of Sudan’s Arabs to exterminate the country’s Masalit minority, who have been expelled from their homelands and herded into refugee camps.
Neither of the warring sides has shown any regard for civilians. Tens of thousands of children have died of starvation since the beginning of the year, as combatants pillage aid and prevent its delivery. Adding to the horror, there is irrefutable evidence of children as young as one being sexually abused before being slaughtered.
Following the release of that evidence, Benny Morris, the “revisionist” historian Israel’s critics love to cite (when it suits them), has described rape as an integral part of “the Arab way of war”.
The reality, he goes on to say, is that the atrocities in Sudan “tell us something many in the West don’t want to hear about the behavioural norms of Arab combatants in wartime”.
One thing is certain: they won’t hear about them on the ABC, which has consistently ignored the rapidly deteriorating situation in Sudan.
The figures are stark: a search of material added to the ABC website in the last month does not find a single hit for “Sudan” and just one for “Darfur”. But it does find 5750 hits for “Gaza” and 3380 for “famine and Gaza”.
Why then, despite claims that “all lives matter”, are some tragedies so much worthier of our attention and compassion than others, whose sheer scale is vastly greater?
It is, of course, true that our resources of attention and compassion are limited. David Hume was right when he wrote, centuries ago, that “We sympathise more with persons contiguous to us, than with persons remote from us: with our acquaintance, than with strangers: with our countrymen, than with foreigners” – and many more Australians have connections to the Middle East than to Sudan.
But while that factor and others are at work, the unmitigated focus on Gaza is scarcely neutral. To begin with, by hiding the facts “many in the West don’t want to hear about the behavioural norms of Arab combatants in wartime” it obscures a central element of the conflict’s ongoing context.
Even more importantly, the focus on Gaza is accompanied by a singular emphasis on Israel, which the ABC mentions some 10 times more frequently than Hamas – an imbalance equally apparent in statements by government ministers, whose ritualistic references to Hamas (such as its calls to voluntarily disarm) are entirely disconnected from reality.
Israel’s conduct cannot and should not be exempt from even searing criticism. But constantly repeated, the imbalance in emphasis absolves Hamas of its responsibilities, encouraging a simplistic, one-sided narrative in which Israel is the sole actor.
The result is to fuel a dynamic of demonisation whose characteristics have been extensively analysed since the work done by Lewis Coser, an eminent American sociologist who was a refugee from Nazism, in the early 1950s.
Thus, an unrelenting focus on a single party – in this case, Israel – makes it the lightning rod of attention and of the attribution of moral responsibility. As that happens, a symbolic moral boundary is drawn between the active “transgressor” and its allegedly passive “victims”, crystallising a distinction between virtue and vice. Finally, by framing the “transgressors” as evil, the newly drawn moral boundary places the “transgressors” outside the public’s “span of sympathy”, fracturing social bonds, preventing rational discussion and shredding any obligations of civility.
But more than just drawing moral boundaries is needed to convert condemnation into escalating confrontation.
Rather, mobilisers, intent on furthering the demonisation, must transform condemnation into outrage by using “scripts” that heighten the perception of evil – a process exemplified in the literature by the New Left’s equating of the US’s conduct in Vietnam with that of Nazi Germany.
As the outrage those scripts provoke foment mass protests, repeatedly participating in public displays of hatred cements the commitment of the weakly involved and incites hardcore activists to push the boundaries ever further.
Even worse, those displays of hatred normalise violence against the out-group, who – precisely because they are singled out for attack – are increasingly viewed by bystanders as “not quite like us” and hence not “meriting the sympathy we would extend to ‘our kind’ ”.
Meanwhile, with the lunacy of the fringe entering the mainstream, anyone even indirectly related to the out-group “becomes viewed as polluted” unless they can prove their innocence by denouncing their former friends and associates. As they are anathemised, they lose the right to hold their own opinions and to the equal and effective protection of the laws.
Coser, writing late in life, feared that the changes in communications technology that were creating a “global village” would bring more, and more rapid, demonisation rather than less.
As we were bombarded by images of dreadful events, he argued, the demonisers’ ready scripts would allow us to escape the burden of coping with moral complexity. Moreover, with everything occurring in full public gaze, the pressures to conform would increase, raising the cost of refusing to join the baying pack. Large conurbations favour anonymity; as history grimly shows, it takes a village to burn a witch – and no village mobilises witch hunters more venomous than the online village in which we live.
Little wonder that process has unfolded time and again in recent years. But its current reach and ferocity are truly unprecedented. That is largely because the “villain” takes more tangible form than in previous episodes: radical environmentalists may despise “climate deniers” but there are not well-defined, readily identifiable, communities of “climate deniers” for them to attack. Now the haters have a target: the Jews.
The transposition is hardly accidental. Not only is there a natural link between Israel and Australia’s Jewish community; the demonisation of Israel rekindles ancient prejudices in some and unleashes the deeply ingrained hatreds of others. As all the vices anti-Semites have always associated with Jews – vindictiveness, arrogance, demonic power and global reach – are heaped on to Israel, “Israel” has become little more than a signifier for “Jew”.
When, after attacks on synagogues, restaurants and individuals, the National Gallery of Victoria is targeted, in torrents of punitive hysteria, because the Gandel family, which is Jewish, has generously endowed it, who can possibly deny that the vilest forms of anti-Semitism are at work?
And who could reasonably deny that a relentless focus on Israel, and on its responsibility alone, has added unstoppable momentum to the hostility and encouraged the unabashed expression of blatant anti-Semitism?
An ugly abyss has opened up. It is, in the end, not only the Jews it will swallow. It is our moral bearings and, with them, our way of life.
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Young mothers should not be a human shield for rorts
On the very same day the ABC reported a UN statement calling Gaza the “hungriest place on Earth”, the World Food Program, which is the UN agency with central responsibility for preventing famines, warned that the situation in Sudan was veering into the “world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history”.