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’.

The Sudanese have been reduced to begging the world for its attention. As I noted on spiked in April, Sudanese migrants in the UK felt compelled to set up a group called London for Sudan to plead with the media to ‘take notice of the conflict’. Please, they cried, do not minimise ‘the significance’ of our people’s pain. How long before Nigerians in the UK, and maybe even Ukrainians, feel the need to protest against our Gaza-sick establishment? No doubt they’d be damned as whataboutists, too. How dare you intrude on our perfect moral theatre of Israelophobia with something as trifling as your people’s suffering?

Brilliantly, some non-Europeans are rising up against Gaza myopia. Luai Ahmed, the Yemeni-born writer who lives in Sweden, has directly confronted the UN on its Israelophobic mania. In a speech at the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year, he asked: ‘What about Yemen?’ Half a million souls have perished there these past 10 years, he said. Yemen suffered one of the worst famines of the modern era in the wake of the Saudi-Yemen war. ‘Why does no one care when half a million Yemenis die?’, he demanded. You can envisage the moral preeners of the keffiyeh classes clubbing together to denounce this pesky Yemeni for his crime of whataboutery, for polluting their self-serving ‘Gaza genocide’ narrative with the inconvenient fact that there have been worse wars this very decade.

Even history must now bow to the Gaza delirium. Britain’s independent MP Zarah Sultana tweeted this week about the 80th anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima. That was a ‘crime against humanity’ that ‘killed tens of thousands in an instant’, she said. Then, like a Pavlov’s dog of Palestinianism, she said ‘We also remember Gaza’, where Israel has dropped ‘five times the power of the atomic bomb’ that was launched over Hiroshima. ‘[This] is genocide’, she cried.

This is a kind of madness, isn’t it? Yes, with hilarious unwittingness Sultana actually made Israel’s case for it: that Israel has apparently dropped more firepower on Gaza over two years than America did on Hiroshima in a split second, and yet the casualities in Gaza are fewer than in Hiroshima, rather proves that this is not a genocide but a war on Hamas. But there’s a moral frenzy here, too. There is a class of people who think of nothing but Gaza. It colonises their every waking moment. It brutally blocks out all other political concerns, domestic and international. It casts its shadow over the present, the past and that starving child in Nigeria. Every human being, alive or dead, now finds his pain measured against Gaza. Ninety thousand human beings burnt to a crisp in Hiroshima? Okay, but what about Gaza? This isn’t activism – it’s hysteria.

I know what they say: it’s because our own governments support Israel that we are angrier about the Gaza conflict than any other. Bollocks. Our governments supported the Saudis too, yet I don’t remember you bawling in the streets every Saturday for the dead of Yemen. Our governments, via the aid industry, are catastrophically failing Nigeria and Sudan, yet you raise not one word. More to the point, the BBC – not to mention CNN, AP and the rest – are meant to be neutral news-collectors, not anti-government leftists. So why are they infected with the malarial Gaza fetish that ails the left and the cultural establishment?

Something else is going on. And we all know it. We all know that hating Israel has become the key source of moral virtue for the influential of the West. We all know Gaza is the issue through which high political society distinguishes itself from ‘the unenlightened’. And we all know that the consequence of this fetishisation of Palestine to the end of boosting the moral fortunes of time-rich, virtue-hungry Westerners is that black Africans and the Slavic victims of Russian imperialism are callously cast aside. That’s my charge: your swirling, one-eyed Israelophobia has nurtured a collective culture of abject indifference to our suffering cousins in Africa and elsewhere. So, tell me – what about them?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy