How can so many in the West so easily ignore genocide?
Responses to genocide are often determined by where the crime is committed, and what the victims look like. They have raised the alarm that there is a systematic campaign to entirely erase “an indigenous Darfuri group” and that the international community must stop the “genocide going on in West Darfur”. When this presumption is superimposed on the imagery of masked, gun-toting dark-skinned Palestinian men attacking innocent and unarmed light-skinned Israeli men and women – a contrasting imagery that has been central to the Western coverage of the war on Gaza – the erasure of Palestinians starts looking more like a just war, rather than a genocidal military campaign. But the main purpose of the celebrity studded “Save Darfur” campaign was not to actually “save Darfur” but to facilitate Western atonement for inaction during the genocide in Rwanda and drive attention away from the US-led coalition’s violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws in Iraq. Yet, as history’s most televised genocide continues unabated in Gaza, it seems that in the current international system there is no built-in moral commitment to saving the lives and humanity of people who don’t “look like us”.
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