Comment by TacticalCoder
5 hours ago
And there are many other legitimate questions: where are the celebrities speaking up to defend the cause of the iranian protesters? Where are the students in western universities protesting against what the iranian regime did? Where's the International Court of Justice's condemnation of iranian politicians? Where's the flotilla led by Greta Thumberg in support of the iranian people?
There are, IMO, very grave and very serious double standards at play here because I don't think we're going to see any of those.
The biggest difference is "our" role in it. For western countries, the economic and diplomatic relations with e.g. Israel is a lot stronger than with Iran. It makes much more sense to speak up if you feel your country or one of their allies does something you disagree with.
That is only pragmatic, right? Speaking up might actually change things by putting these relations at stake. For Iran, there might not be much left to do from a western perspective except military involvement. Starting another war is not something a Greta led flotilla might want to do.
I think this is something that a lot of supporters of the Gaza protests tell themselves, but I am not sure that it's actually true. The US and other Western countries sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and have extensive economic ties to that country. Saudi Arabia recently engaged in a bombing campaign in Yemen that looked very similar to Israel's campaign in Gaza. And yet there were no protests. Also, you can influence your country's policies towards another country whether or not the two countries are allies. Years ago, there was a mass protest movement in the west against the genocide in Darfur for example. Nobody said "we don't have a lot of economic or diplomatic ties to Sudan so there's no point in protesting".
I think the real reason has to do with 1) there was an existing, organized pro-Palestinian movement that had experience protesting; 2) many organizations on the left saw the Israel-Gaza conflict as fitting very nicely into their larger anti-imperialist ideology in a way that other conflicts don't; 3) everyone more-or-less knows where Israel is on the map and has some familiarity with it; 4) there were a lot of really shocking images and video from Gaza
Fair enough, I did not know that. Maybe add to your list of reasons that attention is divided over so many conflicts nowadays. Probably there have been conflicts all the time, but with Ukraine, Greenland, Minnesota, Gaza and Venezuela getting a lot of attention it feels like a lot. Note that I don't think the conflicts are remotely comparable with each other, but they each take up a lot of mindspace at least for me.
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The last few years has made me extremely cynical. I am beginning to think we don't see the protests because the bad guys are brown and Muslim, and people in those circles are not allowed to criticise brown Muslims. I've seen a weak defense that "our government isn't funding this," but our governments aren't funding the Sudanese Civil War in which 150,000 have died to date, and there is still radio silence in those same circles.
Sorry, I don't understand your last argument.
You are criticising protesters who claim to not talk about the Iranian exactions because their government is not funding it, by pointing out that they are not protesting against the Sudanese Civil War either? I may have misunderstood but their government is probably also not funding that war so it's consistent isn't it?
If you look at some of the most active groups in the pro-Palestinian left, like the PSL in the United States, you'll see that they have a very long history of praising horrific, oppressive regimes (even North Korea!) that oppose the United States, and dismissing accusations of crimes against humanity when perpetrated by those regimes. The PSL is a minuscule political party, but they're highly involved in organizing these protests.
Basically no one is allowed to protest own government complicity in anything, especially not Palestinian kinda look like genocide situation, unless they protest literally every single atrocity everywhere.
Any sane person knows we shouldn't take any of the protestors seriously (they're all hypocrites, the lack of protests over this is proves it). Both Gaza and this are obviously tragedies but they only care about one
I cant believe Greta as a platform in 2026; people are dumb i guess