Selective outrage

Today Bret Stephens makes an interesting observation.

Now type the words “Palestine” and “genocide” into Google. When I did so Monday, I got 1,630,000 results. Next, substitute “Chechnya” for “Palestine.” The number is 245,000. Taking the Google results as a crude measure of global outrage, that means the outrage over the Palestinian situation was 6.6 times greater than over the Chechen one. Yet Chechen fatalities were anywhere between 13 to 133 times greater.

Final calculation: With an “outrage” ratio of 6.6 to one, but a proportional kill ratio of one to 13 (at the very low end), it turns out that every Palestinian death receives somewhere in the order of 28 times the attention of every Chechen death. Remember that in both cases we’re mainly talking about Muslims being killed by non-Muslims.

At the end, Stephens offers a hypothesis:

I have a hypothesis. Maybe the world attends to Palestinian grievances but not Chechen ones for the sole reason that Palestinians are, uniquely, the perceived victims of the Jewish state. That is, when they are not being victimized by other Palestinians. Or being expelled en masse from Kuwait. Or being excluded from the labor force in Lebanon. Things you probably didn’t know about, either. As for the Chechens, too bad for their cause that no Jew will ever likely become president of Russia.

His hypothesis is actually implicit, but it is a testimony to the effectiveness of the Arab campaign to delegtimize Israel. The Arab lobby has effectively changed the focus of the Middle East to Israel’s “occupation” instead of the Arab refusal to accept Israel or terrorism. One other factor to be considered is the feeling that the Arab-Israeli conflict could be solved if only we could push each side so far. Part of the reason that so little pressure is exerted on the Arab side is because of the feelings of sympathy for the Palestinians. Another reason is that there’s a feeling that Israel is susceptible to pressure for compromise, but not the Palestinians.

Richard Cohen makes a related point in Hamas’s Bloody Hands. Working off a surprisingly harsh report from Human Rights Watch, Cohen observes:

The information about the shootings is taken from a report issued yesterday by Human Rights Watch. It says that “Hamas security forces or masked gunmen believed to be with Hamas” executed 18 people, most of whom were accused of collaborating with Israel, sparing the expense and bother of a trial. Others were shot, maimed or beaten, not for allegedly collaborating with the enemy — or, as is often the case, having a house or woman that a snitch covets — but for belonging to the opposition political party, Fatah.

Many of these murders and assaults took place during Israel’s recent pummeling of Gaza. Yet, as Human Rights Watch goes to some pains to document, at no time did Hamas’s security forces lose control of Gaza, so the murders and maimings were not a consequence of chaos but of government policy. Whatever the case, the murders, shootings and beatings continued even after the hostilities ended. Since then, at least 14 more people have been executed extrajudicially, which is to say murdered. Some were also tortured.

Unlike Cohen, I don’t think that this quite renders Human Rights Watch immune for its criticisms of Israel. And I’d also disagree with Cohen on his criticisms of Israel, still he’s mostly on target here:

You can only imagine what would happen if Israel dealt with its internal political enemies or dissenters in such a fashion. Last month, for instance, Israel got a heap of criticism and abuse when it was reported in the Israeli media that some Gaza civilians had been unjustifiably shot by Israeli soldiers. The report was widely cited, not just for its shocking allegations but also because it was supposedly indicative of the sort of place Israel has become. The government said the allegations were based on hearsay. We shall see.

I really don’t think that there’s anything left to see about those allegations as the man who publicized them is backing off.

I don’t know if the protest of Ahmadinejad’s speech is an indication that there are limits in the Western world to the invective that they’ll tolerate towards Israel. But for now, it seems that some people are noticing the outrageous bias directed towards Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.