The Problem of Selective Concern about Injustice
by John Whitehead
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 some aspects of criticizing such selectivity are worthwhile and important, but it’s a type of critique that 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?” 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. 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. 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.
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. This explanation is plausible up to a point, but it doesn’t explain why other humanitarian crises for which the United States bears responsibility haven’t generated the same kind of protest movement as the Gaza War. Stephen’s 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, waged a devastating war against Yemen that created a massive humanitarian crisis. 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.
To offer a crude but telling comparison of the relative amounts of media coverage these conflicts generate, 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-support 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 itself—has imposed sanctions and other economic penalties on Afghanistan that have contributed to that country’s severe food insecurity and related humanitarian problems. American policymakers have imposed these hardships on Afghanistan while also dragging their feet on providing a haven in the United States for Afghan refugees.
The human suffering in Afghanistan, for which the United States bears direct responsibility, would seemingly be an even more pressing issue 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 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.
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.
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 stands for 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.”
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’s 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 to time 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.
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For more of our posts on recent wars, see:
This is an excellent analysis. I am reminded too of the U.S. blind eye towards Rwanda in the 1990’s.
Related to these observations, I often think of national strategic interest as a primary reason for the unequal attention paid to crises in different parts of the world. Events that don’t have direct implications for US geopolitical, military and/or economic interests tend to be underreported by US news outlets, which means there’s less public awareness and thus less outrage, even if they include atrocities that are no less morally outrageous.
In that vein, I do see reporting on Afghanistan from time to time that seems to carry the implication of “look how much worse off they are without our military occupation.” I’m always uncomfortable with such reporting because it seems clear that the current Taliban rule is indeed a brutal one, and the reporting on it generally doesn’t leave much room for imagining better alternatives outside of militarism.
As I think about it, the political cynic in me wonders if the degree of public awareness of different situations is proportional to the degree to which they are exploitable as vehicles for policy agendas, especially militaristic ones (which have become increasingly bipartisan).