Why doesn’t anyone care about the Sudanese?

OPINION:

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There are countless conflicts throughout the world. While many are relatively modest in terms of worldwide impact or actual victims, some involve extreme violence and have been ongoing for generations. Various levels of attention are given to these conflicts in a peculiar kind of perverse hierarchy of indignation ascribed by self-selected influencers who seem to impose their priorities on the rest of us. Frequently, the attention given to a conflict is inversely proportional to the actual violence and loss of life generated by the conflict.

For example, a particular level of media attention—in this case, a low level—is being given to a war that has arisen from the efforts of a group seeking to seize control of territory they claim to be theirs and eliminate a government that the fighters consider usurpers. This conflict, which has been simmering for years, would seemingly deserve our undivided attention to have the world community and its international institutions bring this state of unremitting conflict to a prompt end.

Involving a territorial and ethnic struggle that appears to be intractable, this particular off-and-on war has cost thousands of lives, mostly civilians, including many women and children. It gives the impression that it may never end. The randomness of the horrific acts of violence confuses those who are not directly affected by the conflict. Some participants’ seeming irrational anger makes it difficult for Western minds to fully understand the nature of the conflict, its duration, insolubility, and worldwide impact.

The description of this existential struggle makes it appear as though I am referring to the war being waged against the State of Israel by a ring of Islamist groups “marionetted” by the mullahs in Iran. But I am not.

No, the war in question is located in the south and on the continent of Africa, which is Africa’s second-largest nation by physical size. The nation involved is Sudan. With over 50 million inhabitants, this nation’s population far overshadows the relatively minuscule population of Israel, even when it is cumulated with all of those individuals who consider themselves Palestinians – and, yes, even when we include the generations of individuals who, having never set foot in the area they claim to be from, are nonetheless included in the definition of Palestinian refugees.

The clear difference in the dimensions of these conflicts would strongly suggest that the world’s attention should be focused on the brutal fratricidal conflict in Sudan. But that is assuredly not the case. Neither the major powers, the United States, China, the European Union, and others, nor the principal media purveyors, such as CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, have taken much of an interest in the brutal Sudanese civil war.

As we stand poised to witness a likely recurrence of the left-wing violence on college campuses and in our urban areas protesting against the very existence of Israel and vilifying its supporters, we will undoubtedly also be witness to a complete absence of concern for the people of color who are being massacred in Sudan. Of course, most of the perpetrators and victims in Sudan are Muslims, and they are, self-evidently, virtually all people of color.

Those who would declaim their anger and resentment against the West at the perception of the slightest form of anti-Muslim or anti-Black prejudice in Israel or the United States do not seem to care in the least that Muslims are slaughtering Black people in far greater numbers in Sudan than those who are dying in Gaza. There are few cries of indignation or calls for boycotts against Muslim-majority nations, such as Iran and the Emirates, which are supplying arms to the combatants in Sudan, making it possible for the terrible conflict to continue and for the countless civilian victims it is engendering.

As Israel, not an artificial creation of European nations like Sudan and like so many other African nations, but rather the emanation of the Jewish people’s desire to return to its original homeland, struggles to survive an onslaught of barbarism, the so-called pro-Palestinian mob is oblivious to, or more likely willfully disinterested in, the desperate conflict in Sudan. The slaughter of thousands of Sudanese is of no real interest to the sanctimonious purveyors of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda.

Barely five years after our nation was wracked by riots fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement, the massacres by starvation and outright violence of Black people in Sudan have been relegated to insignificance. At the same time, anger at Jews has become the order of the day.

Hypocrisy can have its place as an aspirational form of expression in certain circumstances, but this racist hypocrisy has no place in a purportedly civilized world. The double-edged sword of this hypocrisy both deprives an entire people, namely the Sudanese, of their right to life and falsely ascribes evil to actual victims, namely the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world. And, it is the silence of the leadership of the world’s major nations, with the witting and unwitting complicity of the mainstream media, that must be acknowledged as the principal instruments promoting both components of this hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy and antisemitism have taken many forms over the course of the past millennia. But it could have been expected that after the Holocaust, the West’s most barbaric action in recorded history, the conscience of the West would have been sufficiently awakened to inoculate us against both. However, the failure to protect African Blacks, even as Israelis and Jews are ceaselessly castigated for protecting themselves against barbaric acts, suggests that, sadly, we in the West have learned very little.

• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, DC office of a national law firm. He is the author of Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution, published by HUC Press.