Author: Charles Jacobs
Publication: The Boston Globe
Date: October 5, 2002
URL: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/278/oped/Why_Israel_and_not_Sudan_is_singled_out+.shtml
Harvard President Lawrence Summers
recently criticized those on his campus who speak in the name of human
rights but selectively censure Israel while ignoring much greater problems
in the Middle East. He described the divestment campaign against Israel
on his campus as anti-Semitic ''in effect if not intent.'' But human rights
(and media) attention is often disproportionate to the severity or urgency
of human conflicts. What determines their focus is not mainly anti-Semitism.
Nor is it the level of horror. It is the racial, religious, and cultural
character of the perpetrators, not the victims, that determines the response
of Westerners.
An instructive case is Sudan. Atrocities
there exceed every other world horror. For 10 years the blacks of South
Sudan have been victims of an onslaught that has taken more than 2 million
lives. Colin Powell calls it ''the worst human rights nightmare on the
planet.'' Yet with the important exception of the black Christian community
here, there has been a disturbingly muted reaction from well-known American
human rights champions. The media cover the deaths in Sudan only occasionally.
Do rights activists and editorialists
care more for Palestinians than for blacks? Surely not. It is the nature
of the conflict, I propose, not the level of horror, that determines the
response of Westerners.
In Khartoum, a Taliban-like Muslim
regime is waging a self-declared jihad on African Christians and followers
of tribal faiths in South Sudan. Non-Arab African Muslims are also targeted
for devastation. Two million people have been killed - more than in Bosnia,
Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Burundi combined. Tens of thousands
have been displaced, and 100,000, according to the US Committee on Refugees,
forcibly starved.
Western lack of interest is all
the more stunning as Khartoum's onslaught has rekindled the trade in black
slaves, halted (mostly) a century ago by the British abolitionists. Arab
militias storm African villages, kill the men, and enslave the women and
children. Accounts by journalists and others depict the horror. In these
pogroms, after the men are slaughtered, the women, girls, and boys are
gang raped - or they have their throats slit for resisting. The terrorized
survivors are marched northward and distributed to Arab masters, the women
to become concubines, the girls domestics, the boys goat herders.
It is hard to explain why victims
of slavery and slaughter are virtually ignored by American progressives.
How can it be that there is no storm of indignation at Amnesty International
or Human Rights Watch, which, though they rushed to Jenin to investigate
false reports of Jews massacring Arabs, care so much less about Arab-occupied
Juba, South Sudan's black capital? How can it be that they have not raised
the roof about Khartoum's black slaves? Neither has there been a concerted
effort by the press to pressure American administrations to intervene.
Nor has the socialist left spoken of liberating the slaves or protecting
black villages from pogroms, even though Wall Street helps bankroll Khartoum's
oil business, which finances the slaughter.
What is this silence about? Surely
it is not because we don't care about blacks. Progressives champion oppressed
black peoples daily. My hypothesis is this: to predict what the human rights
community (and the media) focus on, look not at the oppressed; look instead
at the party seen as the oppressor. Imagine the media coverage and the
rights groups' reaction if it were ''whites'' enslaving blacks in Sudan.
Having the ''right'' oppressor would change everything.
Alternatively, imagine the ''wrong''
oppressor: Suppose that Arabs, not Jews, shot Palestinians in revolt. In
1970 (''Black September''), Jordan murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians
in two days, yet we saw no divestment campaigns, and we wouldn't today.
This selectivity (at least in the United States, does not come from the
hatred of Jews. It is '' a human rights complex '' - and is not hard to
understand. The human rights community, composed mostly of compassionate
white people, feels a special duty to protest evil done by those who are
like ''us.''
''Not in my name'' is the worthy
response of moral people. South African whites could not be allowed to
represent ''us.'' But when we see evil done by ''others,'' we tend to shy
away. Though we claim to have a single standard for all human conduct,
we don't. We fear the charge of hypocrisy: We Westerners after all, had
slaves. We napalmed Vietnam. We live on Native American land. Who are we
to judge ''others?'' And so we don't stand for all of humanity.
The biggest victims of this complex
are not the Jews who are obsessively criticized but the victims of genocide,
enslavement, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing who are murderously
ignored: the Christian slaves of Sudan, the Muslim slaves of Mauritania,
the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt.
Seeking expiation instead of universal
justice means ignoring the sufferings of these victims of non-Western aggression
and making relatively more of the suffering of those caught in confrontation
with people like ''us.'' If the Israelis are being ''profiled'' because
they are like ''us,'' the slaves of Sudan are ignored because their masters'
behavior has nothing to do with us.
In the United States it is not predominantly
anti-Semitism that causes the human rights community to single Israel out
for criticism. It is rather our failure to apply to all nations the standards
to which we hold ourselves. The effect, as Summers correctly said, is anti-Semitic.
But it is also the abandonment of those around the world in the worst of
circumstances whose oppressions we find beside the point.
(Charles Jacobs is president of
the American Anti-Slavery Group.)
