RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/09/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’.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/peace-never-had-a-chance/             

A year ago, a friend asked me if I would join him in Christchurch for the weekly Palestinian support protests. I declined. I pointed out that asking me to do so made it implicit that I was obliged to take a moral stand on the more than 35 conflicts going on across the world today, and to rank them in terms of importance. I also argued that those protesting the Palestinian cause, were unfamiliar with the history of Palestine, up to and including the partition of Palestine to give the Jewish people a homeland. Since then, much debate has taken place, and while we remain friends, our views on the current conflict are not reconciled.

As many as 90,000-plus people — estimates of the crowd vary widely –recently protested on the Sydney Harbour Bridge despite an appeal by NSW Police to the NSW Supreme Court. What I viewed of the protest on television were the usual Palestinian flags, but more worrying, giant pictures of the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran, a financial and ideological backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, has been and remains committed to the destruction of Israel.

Today, it was heard, both on radio and in the print media that people were comparing the Gazan conflict with the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. While the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza has become a travesty beyond words following the October 7 attacks in Israel, the comparison is quite perverse. It is insidious to argue that the deaths caused by the Nazis, which surpassed 55 million people, is in anyway comparative to the war casualties in the Gaza and the West Bank.

The history of conflict in the region, and beyond the borders of Israel and the occupied territories goes back millennia and, as in all conflicts, there is the context of historical antecedents which are often ignored, not understood, or simply not known. Take the Roman occupation, for example, or Napoleon’s failed attempt at the occupation of Palestine, or the Ottomans and Egypt’s attempt to establish a kind of satellite state in Palestine.

The region, has been hostile to the Jewish people since the Jews were expelled under Roman occupation, especially so since Islam’s conquest of the region. In 1917, the Ottomans expelled the entire population of Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa (not unlike Idi Amin’s madness in expelling all Asians from Uganda).

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2025/08/07/hamas-understands-the-myopia-and-moral-imbecility-of-the-west-n4942499

Just a few weeks ago, it was widely thought that Israel and the terrorist group Hamas were nearing a deal to end the war in Gaza. In that deal, Hamas leadership would agree to go into exile, Israeli hostages would be freed from their hellish captivity and surrounding Arab nations could help fund the rebuilding of a more peaceful Gaza Strip.

That, at least, was the hope.

And then it all fell apart.

It fell apart for one simple reason: Hamas understands the West far better than the West understands Hamas. Hamas understands that if it forces the suffering of its own people, if it maximizes and even falsifies media coverage of that suffering, then the West will rehabilitate Hamas and grant it its demands. Hamas understands that Westerners are utterly ignorant to the true evil of Hamas, their willingness to multiply the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis alike, to starve their own citizens as well as Israeli hostages, to sacrifice Palestinian children by placing them in the line of fire, all for the cameras; Hamas understands that myopic and self-centered Westerners will simply project their own biases and values onto Hamas, thus granting them unearned innocence and sympathy; Hamas understands that the media would facilitate all of this, elevating a false oppressor/oppressed narrative above the truth.

And so it has gone. Over the past three weeks, international institutions like the United Nations, which has become a front group for Hamas, began announcing that mass starvation was affecting the Strip. Instead of then facilitating the entry of aid, the U.N. refused to allow in any aid accompanied by the Israeli military, specifically so that Hamas could loot it. Meanwhile, the media began blasting out pictures of starving Gazan children — many of whom were not suffering from malnutrition in the main, but from genetic diseases; the German newspapers Bild and Suddeutsche Zeitung reported this week that the media featured manipulated and staged photos from Palestinian photographers.

As a result, last week, the U.K., France and Canada, in an effort to demonstrate their supposed moral rectitude and to placate their large radical Muslim minorities, announced that they would forthwith support the creation of a Palestinian state. That announcement immediately scuttled the impending deal between Israel and Hamas, giving Hamas what it wanted on a silver platter. This conclusion was openly touted by Hamas official Ghazi Hamad, who bragged, “The initiative by several countries to recognize a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/what-i-saw-in-gaza/

Andrew Fox – former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society – returns to The Brendan O’Neill Show. Andrew and Brendan discuss the real reasons Gazans are going hungry, why Hamas’s casualty figures can’t be trusted and how the rush to recognise a Palestinian state is only prolonging the war.

https://quillette.com/2025/08/08/why-recognise-palestine-now/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter

Most of the world’s nations now recognise a Palestinian state. In May 2024, the ranks of those nations were swelled by Spain, Ireland, and Norway. Under Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, respectively, the French and British governments have now signalled their commitment to joining them in September. As conditions deteriorate in Gaza, one British government minister has even said that the UK should recognise the state of Palestine “while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise.”

Palestine is usually said to comprise Gaza and parts of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. But in the real world, the West Bank enclave is ruled by Fatah, what remains of the Gaza Strip is still nominally ruled by Hamas, and East Jerusalem is not the capital of anything. With the two mutually hostile Palestinian parties locked in a frozen conflict, there is no prospect that either will hand over control to the other. And neither Hamas nor Fatah can be considered democratically legitimate because neither has held elections in decades.

So, what does it mean to recognise a physically discontinuous, politically divided polity as a single state? And why have no conditions for recognition been placed upon Hamas—a detail that has led some British commentators to see the promise of recognition as a reward for the pogrom of 7 October 2023?

I. History

The international expectation is that a Palestinian state will be established within borders “based upon” the 1949 armistice lines that existed on 4 June 1967, the day before the Six Day War. But no Palestinian state existed before that war. Indeed, no Palestinian state existed even before Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence. 

Until 1918, “Palestine” was a province of the Ottoman Empire: an impoverished backwater, ruled from Constantinople hundreds of miles away. And like most parts of the Ottoman Empire, it was inhabited by multiple ethnic groups. Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire—which had picked the wrong side in the First World War—the territory was temporarily administered by the British under the name of “Mandatory Palestine.”

Throughout this period of British administration, there was substantial immigration from elsewhere in the Middle East. Many of the new arrivals were Jews, a persecuted minority in the Arab world, which had learnt (like many persecuted peoples of the day) to dream of national self-determination. Some Arabs wanted to make peace with the Jews, but the dominant force in Arab politics was Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem and a Jew-hating Nazi collaborator.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/un-admits-95-of-its-gaza-aid-trucks-were-intercepted/

Over the past few weeks, the UN, the EU, the media and Hamas banded together to demand that aid deliveries shift back from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to the United Nations.

The campaign played out with Hamas kidnapping, torturing and killing employees of the U.S. aid group, while the media spread false claims that Israel was using GHF distribution sites as ‘death traps’ for killing Gazans, and world leaders demanded that the UN be put back in charge of aid.

Back when the UN had been in charge it had faked its own famine by refusing to deliver food and letting it pile up instead. Since then the UN’s food aid has kept on piling up even while GHF, an American Christian aid group, has managed to deliver millions of meals to Gaza residents, despite being smeared by the media as “controversial” for feeding those whom the UN wouldn’t.

Whom was the UN actually delivering aid to back when it even bothered trying to deliver it?

The UNOPS ‘Mechanism for Gaza’ revealed that of the around 2,600 aid trucks entering Gaza, only 300 made it to their destination. 2,310 trucks or 88% of them were ‘intercepted’.

Much of the ‘aid’ being brought in by the UN and its allies, including the UN’s WFP, UNICEF, the International Red Cross, the International Medical Corps and the World Central Kitchen, whose founder Jose Andres, has been constantly attacking Israel in the media, was ‘intercepted’.

Cindy McCain’s UN World Food Programme (WFP), which has been front and center in the media, crying for more money and denouncing Trump and Israel, only successfully delivered 1,864 pallets of aid since May while losing 29,673 pallets or 93% of it to “interceptions”.

The UN’s WFP recently claimed that it has run out of food stocks and needs $265 million for just the next 6 months to feed Gaza. Where did its food stocks go? Certainly not to aid stations.