I may have deceived you.
I’m going to talk a lot about Israel. But this post isn’t about Israel… It’s about what, who, and why we pay attention to things.
Without assigning blame, the situation in Gaza, specifically, and Palestine more generally, sucks. The population of about five million people is generally unhealthy, underfed, and without access to clean water, and that’s led to an ongoing situation where the life expectancy of the area is very low and half the population is under the age of 20. That, coupled with low educational attainment, no economic outlook, a general sense of boredom, and having hatred ingrained in them from birth means that it’s reasonable for the young people in Palestine to be very fucking radical.
We look at this, as outsiders looking in, and then make judgement calls from there. We have opinions of what Israel should do, or what the Palestinians should do. We can point at data and make value judgements and assign blame. We have the privilege to do this, in my case, while sitting in my underwear, drinking a rum and coke, and watching Dr. Who on Prime on my second monitor.
The world is an exceptionally large place
At any given time there’s a lot going on. We’re generally, at best, vaguely aware of things that effect us - Right now, Houthi Pirates are blocking the Bab-el-Mandeb straight off the coast of Yemen, which has diverted an amazing amount of international shipping away from that chokepoint and through the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. This has caused one of the largest mobilizations of nautical power in my lifetime, and that’s because that trek around the southern tip of Africa is tripling the cost of international shipping. You want to talk about inflation right now? Come back to me in June.
But we’re only really aware of it as much as we are, I think, because there’s an Israeli tie-in. The Houthis have glommed onto the crisis of Palestine and are being loud about it, lying by saying that they are only attacking Israeli ships although, if you think Jews run the world, maybe all those ships are Israeli ships, who knows?.
Going back to the world being an exceptionally large place with a whole lot of problems
Everyone is probably aware of Ukraine and the Russian invasion, but have you heard about the crisis of Haitian gang violence? The militants in Burkina Faso? The slow burning remnants of the South Sudanese civil war? The economic collapse of Syria? The 100 different factions feuding for the Congo? The plight of Afghan women following the takeover by the Taliban? The Drought in Ethiopia? The Famine in Somalia?
I’ve thought about this a lot over the last while, specifically thinking about two situations: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and The Chinese genocide of the Muslim Uighurs.
I don’t expect people to be familiar with the Uighurs, so as a Primer:
The Uighur plight is interesting for the parallels to the Palestinian plight. Ethnic Uighurs and ethnic Han both claim the area of Xinjiang, they’ve had what I’ll euphemistically refer to as “differences in cohabitation” for more than a hundred years. Often, when there’s a difference in opinion being settled, the Hans win because they’re-in-charge,-and-fuck-you. This has led to points in time where the Uighurs protested, often violently, to the point where the Chinese government consider them terrorists. The current arc probably starts in the ramp up to the 2008 Olympics, where the government of China started to focus on stability to keep up appearances to the influx of visitors they planned for, but the more obvious point in time to look at is the rise of Zhang Chunxian to a position in the government in charge of Chinese religious policy. Zhang’s goal, stated plainly, was to create a single state-race, to build “a copper and iron wall around terrorists”, and that this unity would be the foundation of China as a new modern superpower. By 2016, the situation had deteriorated to the point that Uighurs with passports were given a single opportunity to flee China. After that, Xinjiang province commenced a "People's War" against the "Three Evil Forces" of separatism, terrorism, and extremism. 200,000 soldiers were deployed to the area in what was called the “Civil Servant-Family Pair Up program”. By the end of 2017, mass arrests were taking place.
We in the west struggle around talks about banning burkas, China had no such hang-ups. They not only banned veils, but regulated beard length. Heck, you can’t name your child “Mohammad” in China. Around this time, foreign reporters were banned from Xinjiang province, and the “re-edcation camp” program that started before 2008 was drastically expanded.
By 2019, estimates hover around 1.8 million Uighurs had been detained. Allegations include forced sterilization, rape, torture, conversion therapy, medical experiments, and finally: forced Labor. As a spotlight was shone on the re-education camps, China shifted policy and they were wound down in favor of forced labor camps and contemporary prisons.
But outside of the camps, China was still very concerned about birth rates in Xingjian, performing regular pregnancy checks on minority women. in 2018, 80% of new IUD placements were conducted in Xingjian, despite the province accounting for less than 2% of the Chinese population. Coincidentally, I’m sure birthrates fell 40% that year. In fact, as the mother of all coincidences, the birthrates in the two largest Uighur communities in Xingjian, Kashgar and Hotan, fell by more than 80% between 2015 and 2018. And if that wasn’t enough: If despite the regular checkups, forced abortions, and sterilizations, you as a Uighur managed to have a child, policy was that “birth control violations of Uyghurs” was punishable by extrajudicial confinement.
This is what a non-violent genocide looks like. An ethnicity of 12 million people will functionally cease to exist within a century. And we did hear about this, to be clear, for a little while. But it was short lived, we have moved on, and the same people who are very vocal about the plight of Palestinians seem ideologically opposed to even thinking about Uighurs.
And this is where the Anti-Semitism accusations come from.
There’s too much in the world to focus on everything, so people not only can, but have to, prioritize. I understand why Middle Eastern Americans might focus on Israel. I understand why European Americans might focus on Ukraine. Not only are these tragic circumstances, but people have personal connections to these areas. My grandfather came to Canada from Ukraine, escaping communism. I have opinions on both Ukraine and Russia.
I don’t understand the progressive hyperfocus on Muslims in Palestine beside the myopic ignorance of Muslims in China. In almost every metric possible, the fact pattern for China’s treatment of Uighurs is worse than Israel’s. So why choose to focus there?
To be clear, explicitly: I’m not saying that the only reason is Anti-Semitism. But I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that the only country that some people choose to take personal offense at the policies of just so happens to be the one filled with Jews, particularly after some of the mask-off moments we’ve had following October 7th. There is a number, it is not zero, and it is disgusting.
But that’s not everyone, obviously.
Part of the problem is that we focus Where our Attention is Drawn. This is what I was pointing at earlier. I think the media is very much responsible for a lot of what we pay attention to. There’s every chance that we would care about all these issues very deeply if we were ever faced with them. I’m not sure. What I do know is that the media cycles for Ukraine and Israel were special - Frankly, and to beat up on an old stereotype: If the Jews do control the news, they’ve done a piss-poor job of it.
But that can’t be all of it either. I can think of two more significant factors to our attention deficits: Who we care about and Soft targets.
Who We Care About
Often, and I made this point about January 6th, we spare more of our outrage on things that have happened before, but should not have happened to those people. American riots had been festering for years by January 6th, Trumps own inauguration was rioted, buildings were burned in DC. But it wasn’t supposed to happen to those people: That’s Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, not a car lot! How dare you touch it!?! Rich, wealthy politicians are supposed to be comfortable, particularly when they’re Democrats. Similarly, wars aren’t supposed to happen in Europe, and political violence isn’t supposed to happen at a music festival. I’m not even convinced that we would be hearing so much about the Israeli operations in Gaza had we not been so attuned to the situation by October 7th. Frankly…. 30,000 civilians sounds like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket globally, and no one is holding anyone else to account on the subject of civilian deaths, regardless of scale.
Soft Targets
There’s three aspects here: Who we hate, What they can do, and if they care.
Besides being the obvious aggressor, Russia was easy to hate, particularly for Democrats. They had turned Russia into their bogeyman for years. A conservative country with a pretty shitty track record on human rights, filled with white people and on blast for the 2016 election? I honestly can’t think of a nation they’d be more predisposed to talk about. More, there’s literally no chance of retaliation. What is Russia going to do? Send someone to burn an ice fishing shack in Alaska?
Juxtapose that with Israel. Again… I’m not discounting Anti-Semitism generally, but a lot of the Jews in Israel are from Europe. They look pretty white. They’re being mean to brown people. More than that, maybe, Israel is put on a pedestal and called our ally, they are dependent, to a degree, on foreign assistance. There’s leverage there.
Juxtapose that with China. I’ve was told that it’s racist against Chinese people to even consider the possibility that Covid-19 was a lab leak as opposed to it being a cross-species transference as a result of shitty sanitation at a shitty cultural vestige. Progressives for whatever reason, aren’t willing to talk negatively about Chinese people in China (Fuck them if they get to a university). We also don’t have a lot of leverage against China… What are we going to do? Not take their money? And last… They don’t give a shit about what you think.
So do you hit the people you hate, aren’t afraid of, and might care about you hitting them, or do you hit the people you don’t have strong emotions about, can hit you back, and don’t give a shit?
I’m sure there are others.
And I would love for a progressive to just sit down and talk about it. I understand caring about the Palestinian people. I really do. I’m not so sold on the blame-game we seem to be paying, but I understand caring about people in those situations.
…But why just them?