https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-4-29-why-is-israel-singled-out-as-the-uniquely-hated-state
Around the U.S., and particularly at the most elite college campuses, seemingly smart and well-educated young people keep up their passionate protests in support of the Hamas rapists and murderers and against Israel and Jews generally. The claimed reason for the protests is that Israel is engaged in “apartheid” or “genocide,” or even the ultimate evil, “settler colonialism.” Yet meanwhile, the world is filled with state actors treating their own or neighboring populations in the most appalling ways, far worse than anything that Israel could remotely be accused of, without attracting anything like the passion and vitriol directed at Jews and Israel. Think North Korea, keeping its own population in permanent prison conditions, and often starving; or China, cracking down on all dissent and even confining large sub-populations (e.g., Uyghurs) in slave labor camps; or Azerbaijan, which expelled an entire Christian community of about 150,000 people just a few months ago. These examples, let alone the human rights abuses in places like Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, attract almost no interest from our passionate student demonstrators, not to mention even slight notice from the press or anyone else.
How to explain this discrepancy? In recent weeks I have seen multiple writers advance the hypothesis that this is not really about Israel specifically, but rather that Israel is just the proxy of the moment for broad hatred for the West, for capitalism, for America, and for civilization generally. That hypothesis at least offers an explanation for why all bad actors who are not of the West or of capitalism, no matter how reprehensible they may be, get a total pass. In any event, I don’t have another hypothesis that can explain that anomaly.
Consider the ongoing treatment of Christians in the Muslim world. (I might suggest considering the ongoing treatment of Jews in the Muslim world, except that Jews have been almost entirely expelled and eliminated from the Muslim world, with the result that there is no remaining “ongoing treatment” to discuss.). The treatment of Christians by Muslims in Muslim countries would be almost impossible to learn about except for the work of a single guy named Raymond Ibrahim. Ibrahim scours obscure local news sources, and also frequently interviews sources on the ground in various Muslim-majority countries, and he then puts out regular reports of the ongoing atrocities in these places.
