A recent op-ed in the New York Times reminded me of how policymakers, journalists, and activists can be selective in the injustices they pay attention to and how this selectivity can attract criticism. How useful is this criticism, and what can we learn from it?
I think criticism of such selectivity can be worthwhile and important, but this type of critique can also be used disingenuously to discredit rather than broaden efforts to address injustice. Distinguishing between helpful and harmful forms of this argument can be relevant to Consistent Life Ethic advocates and their work.
Why So Much Attention to Gaza?
In his piece “Can We Be a Little Less Selective with Our Moral Outrage?” Times columnist Bret Stephens points out that the Gaza war, which has provoked such impassioned protest on college campuses and elsewhere over the past year, is not the only severe humanitarian crisis unfolding in the world.[1] He mentions other cases of repression, war, or similar human rights violations in countries such as Venezuela, Turkey, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Iran. Stephens exhorts “morally energetic college students from Columbia to Berkeley” to direct their energies to protesting these injustices.
The selectivity Stephens describes, in which some injustices or crises provoke significantly more attention and outrage than others, is an issue that has interested me for a while. Such selectivity is real.
For example, from 2020 to 2022, Ethiopia endured a civil war as bloody as the Russia-Ukraine war and yet attracted far less media attention.[2] Sudan has been wracked by its own catastrophic civil war for more than a year now, but remedying Sudan’s agony has not become a cause célèbre in the United States.[3] Such neglect is all the more surprising given that stopping violence in Sudan was a significant concern among US activists in the early 2000s.[4]
One possible explanation for such selectivity among Americans is that because the United States is Israel’s most important supporter, with Israel being the leading recipient of US military aid, Americans have a special responsibility to stop Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.[5] This explanation is plausible up to a point, but it does not explain why other humanitarian crises for which the United States bears responsibility have not generated the same kind of protest movement as the Gaza war. Stephens’ column mentions US support for Turkey’s repressive regime as a counter example, but I think there is a more apt comparison.
For over seven years, from 2015 to 2022, a coalition of Middle Eastern countries, including two close US allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), waged a devastating war against Yemen that created a massive humanitarian crisis. According to one estimate, 377,000 people may have died as a result of the conflict.[6] US support for Saudi Arabia and the UAE during the Yemen war generated a certain amount of controversy but not a response comparable to what Israel’s war on Gaza has provoked.
Campuses did not erupt in protest over the Yemen war. The war did not become an issue in the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections. According to the Tyndall Report on network newscasts, Yemen never broke into the top 20 TV news stories of 2015-2019.[7]
To offer a crude but telling comparison of the relative amounts of media coverage these conflicts have generated, a search for “Yemen” in Gale General OneFile (a database of more than 14,000 periodicals, newspapers, and other media sources) turns up 12,560 mentions during the war’s first year, from March 2015 to February 2016. A search for “Gaza” in General OneFile turns up 77,427 mentions in the roughly 10-month period from October 2023 to the present.
The Yemen war is perhaps the most significant case of contrasting reactions to destructive US-supported wars, given how analogous it is to the Gaza war. Other cases could be highlighted, though.
To take one other example, since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the United States—not Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or some other close American ally, but the United States—has imposed sanctions and other economic penalties on Afghanistan that have contributed to that country’s severe food insecurity and related humanitarian problems.[8] American policymakers have imposed these hardships on Afghanistan while also dragging their feet on providing a safe haven in the United States for Afghan refugees.[9]
The human suffering in Afghanistan, for which the United States bears direct responsibility, would seemingly be an even more pressing issue for US citizens than suffering caused by American allies. Yet Afghanistan seems to be a low priority these days. (A General OneFile search turns up 24,805 mentions in the past year.)
Given the current situation, I would like to see at least some of the violent conflicts and humanitarian crises that are apparently such a low priority receive greater investments of attention, funding, and political will from policymakers, journalists, and activists. To that extent, I agree with Stephens’ column.
Why Not So Much Attention to Gaza?
While I recognize the value of broadening our concern for the many people beyond Gaza affected by injustice and deprivation, though, I also recognize a crucial point that needs to be made: the fact certain injustices around the world receive relatively little attention does not make the injustice of the Gaza war any less worthy of attention.
Student protestors and others who focus primarily on the plight of Palestinians in Gaza may have a relatively narrow scope of concern—but they are not wrong. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is unjust, and large numbers of people are suffering and dying as a result of it. Protestors are right to say so and to campaign against this injustice, regardless of any other crises in the world.
Does Stephens hold this view? I cannot read his mind but given the rather snide tone of his column and his past expressions of support for Israel’s policies, criticism of the campus protestors, and hawkish views generally, I suspect not.[10]
I think Stephens’ point about how little attention certain injustices receive is intended more to deflect criticism from Israel and to discredit the pro-Palestinian protestors than to call for broader human rights activism. This is the impression I also get from similar commentary I have read on the theme of how Israel is selectively targeted for criticism.[11]
When raised in this spirit, pointing out how narrowly defined certain activists’ concerns are is not a legitimate call to expand activists’ circle of concern but instead a kind of rhetorical trick. The aim is to change the subject from the suffering caused by the Israeli military to the character and motives of pro-Palestinian activists. This kind of critique of narrowly defined activism should be rejected.
Relevance for the Consistent Life Ethic
The good and bad ways in which a critique of “selectivity” can be made contain lessons for Consistent Life Ethic advocates. The Consistent Life Ethic entails defending life against a variety of threats. This broad concern for life means cultivating awareness of the many ways life is under threat in our world. As I wrote previously, “no commitment to any one issue exhausts the work that needs to be done to protect life.”[12]
For a Consistent Life Ethic advocate, activism that focuses exclusively on countering just one threat to life—whether abortion, the death penalty, war, or another threat—is a good but an incomplete response to the varied demands of defending life. In that respect, such narrowly focused activism is like activism exclusively focused on stopping the Gaza war.
The appropriate response to activism that is limited to a single threat to life or to a single crisis in the world is 1) to provide recognition and encouragement for the activists doing this good work and 2) at the same time to highlight the many other ways life needs to be defended. Reminders about the array of legitimate concerns for those committed to defending life can guard against an excessively narrow focus on a single concern and serve as encouragement to become informed about and engaged with a broader spectrum of ongoing injustices.
This approach can also avoid the cynical way calls for a “broader perspective” can be used to attack activists doing good work, as I think is the case with some commentaries on pro-Palestinian activists. Pointing out that defending life means defending it against a variety of threats should not be an occasion to condemn those defending it against just one threat. Rather, promoting a broader perspective should be an occasion to support those already doing important work to defend life from specific threats while extending an invitation to work against other threats as well.
A version of this essay originally appeared on the Consistent Life Network blog.
Notes
[1] Bret Stephens, “Can We Be a Little Less Selective With Our Moral Outrage?” New York Times, August 27, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/opinion/gaza-protests-venezuela.html.
[2] See “Overlooked Conflicts: The Grisly Toll of Ethiopia’s Civil War.” On the subject of selective concerns about injustice, see “World Out of Balance: Reflections on Selective Concern about Violent Conflicts.”
[3] See “‘The Single Largest Humanitarian Crisis on the Planet’: Sudan’s Fall into the Abyss.”
[4] See, for example, Holli Chmela, “Thousands Rally in Support of American Aid to Darfur,” New York Times, May 1, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/us/01rally.html.
[5] Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 13, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts.
[6] See “Waging Indirect War: How the United States Contributes to Yemen’s Agony,” “A People in Agony: How the United States Continues to Fuel the Yemen War,” and “Can the War Be Ended? US-Saudi Relations and the Yemen War.” See also Center for Preventive Action, “Conflict in Yemen and the Red Sea,” Council on Foreign Relations, updated October 8, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-yemen, for an overview of the war and estimate of its death toll.
[7] See the “Year in Review” summaries of top stories at the Tyndall Report, http://tyndallreport.com/.
[8] See “Help War’s Victims: End the Economic Punishment of Afghanistan” and “Lifting a Terrible Burden: The Need to End Sanctions on Afghanistan.” See also Fereshta Abbasi, “How to Engage with the Taliban, If You Have To,” Human Rights Watch, July 11, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/11/how-engage-taliban-if-you-have.
[9] See “People in Need of a Safe Haven: The Struggle to Help Afghan Refugees” and Kelsey Norman and Ana Martin Gil, “3 Years after Fall of Kabul, US Congress Has Still Not Acted to Secure Future of More Than 70,000 Afghan Evacuees in US,” The Conversation, August 14, 2024, https://theconversation.com/3-years-after-fall-of-kabul-us-congress-has-still-not-acted-to-secure-future-of-more-than-70-000-afghan-evacuees-in-us-235080.
[10] For a sample of Stephens’ views, see Bret Stephens, “Israel’s Five Wars,” New York Times, July 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/opinion/israel.html; Bret Stephens, “A Thank-You Note to the Campus Protestors,” New York Times, May 7, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/college-protests-war-israel.html; and Bret Stephens, “The World That Awaits the Next President,” New York Times, August 6, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/opinion/harris-trump-ukraine.html.
[11] Consider, for example, the stance and tone of pieces such as David Benatar, “Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism,” Quillette, July 30, 2024, https://quillette.com/2024/07/30/anti-zionism-and-antisemitism/; and Brendan O’Neill, “Why Is It Only ‘Escalation’ When Israel Retaliates?” Sp!ked, July 29, 2024, https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/29/why-is-it-only-escalation-when-israel-retaliates/; or see this February 18, 2024, tweet from Alan Dershowitz: https://x.com/AlanDersh/status/1759329006342602822.
[12] See “’Is One Life Issue More Important Than the Rest?’: A Question That Might Not Need an Answer.”
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