𝑻𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑾𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔𝒏’𝒕 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕

Paywalled piece from today's Daily Telegraph.

Some people only get turned on when they hear the aphrodisiac words "Israel" and "Jews". And the rest of the world can go to hell.

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐮𝐝𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠

by Jake Wallis Simons

This is what a genocide looks like. The city was encircled by an earthen wall, trapping 250,000 people inside. Women, children, the elderly. With the siege complete, the dull drone of bombers heralded a relentless aerial bombardment before the troops moved in through the smoke with blood in their nostrils.

“We have witnessed many of our relatives being massacred,” one man told reporters after managing to flee from the hellscape. “They were gathered in one place and killed. Now we have no idea what has happened to those who are still alive.”

While the UN rights chief, Volker Türk, warned impotently of “ethnically-motivated violations and atrocities”, grisly footage emerged on social media.

There were scenes of summary executions, with civilians forced to sit on the ground before being gunned down at point-blank range. Dozens of corpses could be seen sprawled around burnt-out vehicles.

Information remains scant, however, and fears are growing that the suffering is already far worse than has been reported. The head of the World Health Organisation condemned attacks on the only hospital still partly operational. “According to reports, a nurse lost her life, and three other health workers were injured,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. The press syndicate expressed “deep concern for the safety of journalists”.

The death toll from the fighting has risen to at least 150,000 by conservative estimates, and according to some reports hundreds of thousands of children are thought to have succumbed to malnutrition. In January, the United States officially declared the conflict a genocide.

This bloodbath dwarfs Gaza in scale and contrasts with it starkly in terms of intent. No humanitarian corridors. No leaflets to warn innocents to flee. No provision of aid. Not even the pretence of drawing a distinction between civilians and combatants. Moreover, as I have explored before in these pages, the most cursory of glances at the UN’s flawed workings reveals that the Gaza conflict was a war, not a genocide. Yet where is the outrage?

I’m being a little facetious. Nobody would be gullible enough to expect the Free Palestine mob to suddenly take to the streets with placards demanding an end to the genocide in el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, Sudan. Nobody imagined that there would be chants of “death, death to the RSF”. We know by now that the selective empathy of the Gaza crowd is the servant of a cynical agenda.

In truth, however, if you were going to wish death on anybody, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) would surely be up there. The bastard child of the feared Janjaweed militias has a well-deserved reputation for the most depraved war crimes – including rape and ethnic massacres.

A society that had not been saturated with Israelophobic propaganda would surely show far more concern. After all, Darfur has suffered a true genocide before, in the early Noughties, which claimed up to 300,000 lives. It is officially commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day. So much for Never Again.

In a recent, searing satirical sketch by the Israeli comedy team Eretz Nehederet, an actor plays Greta Thunberg aboard her flotilla, receiving news of the ceasefire in Gaza. “How dare they?” she pouts. “What am I supposed to do with the boat? Start fishing?”

When a comrade suggests protesting the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria instead, Thunberg is enthusiastic… until she discoves that Israel had nothing to do with it. She also snubs the idea of going back to environmental activism. “Global warming? What are we, 12?”

It’s true what they say: no Jews, no news. From one point of view, it is human nature to be preoccupied with relatable conflicts. When I was a foreign reporter, I was often dispatched to cover atrocities – the gruesome 2019 Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka come to mind – with clear instructions to concentrate on the Western, and ideally British, victims.

It might not be noble but things have always gone that way. The brilliantly-titled book by the iconic foreign correspondent Edward Behr, Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English?, was published back in 1975. That is how the media works, largely because that is how people work.

But human nature is insufficient to explain the swivel-eyed frenzy over Gaza, which rages on despite the ceasefire. After two years of wall-to-wall coverage of the conflict, much of it laughably biased, many ordinary folk suffer from compassion fatigue. We have reached a point where a fake genocide has stifled our sympathies for a real one.

Meanwhile, the activists march on against a war that has ended and a genocide that never existed. What is their true agenda? Forget Sudan. Never mind Israel. To find out, ask them for their feelings about Britain and the West.